Should I be worried?

P's really letting us know what's what, these days. The other night, we were eating some unidentifiable vegetable from the CSA, and trying to figure out if we had cooked it wrong or whether it just wasn't a particularly yummy vegetable, and he looked up from his plate to chime in:
"This food smells like downtown Brooklyn."
Yup. Palate of an epicure, that one.

Also, he's ahead of the curve on his teenage rebellion/attitude. If we tell him to do something, (say, leave his shoes on when he wants to take them off) and he disagrees and we explain, ever so patiently, that we're about to go back outside and he should really leave them on cause otherwise he'll just have to put them back on as soon as he gets them off and that would be extra work for him, really, and then it would take us longer to get where we're going, he just says, ever so nonchalantly: "Whatevah." And takes them off.

Local food

So, as some of you know, we're way into local food networks, these days. We're CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) members, so every week we go to a nearby community garden and pick up a bunch of fruits and vegetables that are grown at a farm in upstate NY. Which is awesome, and it's nice to know that we're eating more locally, and seasonally, and organically. But sometimes it means we get way too much of, say, swiss chard, and we don't necessarily eat all of it. So this year, instead of letting it go bad and then feeding it to our worm bin (wanna ask about that? it's a whole 'nother can of... oh never mind, it was a bad pun), we decided we were going to be more organized. I took an online class on food storage and preservation, and we bought a few books on the subject, and voila. If you come over to our little Brooklyn apartment nowadays, you might have to deal with swiss chard leaves hanging up to dry in the hallway (once they're dry, you can store them in an airtight container and use them in soup), or cabbage lacto-fermenting into sauerkraut in our pickling crock, or grape juice fermenting into wine... Ok, so we don't get grapes from the CSA, but it's part of the same effort. Do it yourself, can it yourself, cook it yourself. Come on by, there's plenty of sauerkraut for all. You don't have to tread out the grapes, though, we already did that.

Summer stuff

We went to Queens to see the dragon boat festival - and our good friends Caroline and Ali, who live way too far north for our taste. Queens is ayight, though. Pretty sunsets. And where else could you watch a live dumpling-eating contest? 66 dumplings in 2 minutes. Phenomenal.

UN

Nonni and Poppi came to town, and we walked around UN headquarters for a while. It's a really cool old building (or rather buildings), and it probably won't be around much longer in its current form: there's a grand plan to modernize it, to bring it up to current code. It hasn't been renovated since it was first built, so it probably needs it pretty badly, but I'll be sorry to see some of it go (and probably replaced with some functional but aesthetically appalling modern structure).













In order: tapestry-portraits of all the Secretaries-General; P-rock and Poppi in the seldom-used Trusteeship Council chamber; P-rock in the visitor's lobby; resting our feet in the hall outside the Security Council; P-rock in an exhibit on the rainforest - this piece was a short movie projected onto white gravel; the General Assembly hall; a (totally incorrect) sign outside the Security Council - note that they locked the door with a bicycle lock - hmm, maybe they SHOULD renovate, just a teeny bit; Nonni and Poppi give a (very serious) press conference outside the Security Council chamber; inside the Security Council chamber - that table in the middle is where I get to sit sometimes; P-rock takes a turn being Secretary-General.