you better watch out, you better not whine

Merry Christmas from our pack to yours.

in case you missed autumn where you are

Jen, I'm looking at you.

mister bridgett

I told him he should wear hoodies under his winter coat more often. Because mwrowrr!

autumn in brooklyn

Late afternoon, Sunset Park

happy friday

From Tiresias, the bling pig keychain.

birthdaze

Beth and I started with French Martinis at the apartment before going downstairs with a massive cake in hand and failing utterly to get the black car company to actually send us a car. We improvised and arrived at La Vuelta nearly on time, and handed off the cake to the kitchen before joining Heather and Shiv and wine on the patio. People trickled in with hugs and birthday wishes and when we had a good quorum, we took over the banquet of tables inside spread out for 26 people.

Dinner was glasses of sangria and steak and plaintain chips and I think everyone had a wonderful time and I know I did. I bothered everyone with my flash and my shiny new 1GB card that Stuart tucked into my birthday purse of goodies, along with earrings and funny books and music and flowers and things. I wore my purse to birthday dinner, complementing my birthday-gift-to-myself shirt from Banana Republic and mom's pearls.

Really, it couldn't have been a more perfect way to usher in 26. So I spent yesterday detoxing from all the fun and sangria, wandering around downtown and cozying up at Border's with a stack of books on teaching and literacy and young children in classrooms.

I also sat in City Hall Park and watched a couple with very disparate families celebrate their marriage at the clerk's office - they stood in front of the fountain with an endless rotation of family portraits and rose petals thrown at them. The groom's family were European and tall and thin and fashionable, the bride's was American and the opposite. It was strange, seeing the sister-of-the-groom surrounded by the male contingent of her new in-laws, simply because she was that caliber of stunning that just naturally attracts male attention.

I also saw what I gleaned was a well-to-do Lebanese family being interviewed by a young Spanish docu-journalist. When I told Stuart all these stories over lunch, he told me that I've got write more because my observational story-telling is like a pressure valve that just sprouts a little leak along the seam when I'm not putting the habit to paper. I'd never noticed this about myself, but he swears it to be true.

The first day of September ended by going out with Stuart's coworkers after a big deadline and having a drink at Ulysses, and getting an incredibly early night's sleep. Hurrah for the final days of summer. Bring on the fall.

on the waterfront

We traveled light, with just a camera and a notebook and keys and wallets in my little messenger bag. We took the subway down to QB Plaza and walked west along Queens Plaza South and then down 11th street and over to Vernon Blvd.

I took pictures of a strange abandoned building and we kept going down Vernon amidst shuttered warehouses and factories with names like "Scapucci and Sons" and "All Windows, Inc" until we started seeing signs of life, like churches and schools.

Vernon quickly became this pretty neighborhood-y stretch of road with shops and bakeries and even an abandoned old Knights of Columbus storefront. We walked down to see the old Pepsi-Cola sign, we had delicious espresso at Brasil Coffee House (now with real Brasilians!) and decided to grab a bite to eat. Cafe Henri just presented itself, right there at 50th avenue and Vernon, and it didn't disappoint. I had a delicious croque messieur and a much needed coca-cola glacee.

We started back up Vernon and had a sundowner at the LIC Bar which I'll be lobbying to revisit on lazy Queens afternoons this summer. We walked all the way home, flagging so much at the end that I was getting a little loopy. And hey, we even found where they've been keeping the 18th century these days!

As always, we asked for adventure of Queens - and Queens, she did not disappoint.

Kiss

My sister and her long-time boyfriend got married in front of a Justice of the Peace a week ago, and it was an honor to be there and photograph it for her. I've known George since as long as I can remember, and Tania for longer, and they met through our family - my brother, to be exact. Of all the photos I took of them, though, this one strikes me as the most romantic. Have a safe and happy weekend, and love your people.

the english seaside

This may well be one of my favourite pictures from everything I've uploaded to the vacation flickr set. It was a windy day that Tuesday on the beach, and we flew kites and drank tea and watched the children stubbornly building sandcastles. It was perfect. Thanks, England.

Wednesday's bag

To amuse you, on a day where I'm too busy to do it myself, I present, "The Contents of My Purse", or, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love This Meme." Click the picture to get flickriffic notes on each item.

London Town

Blackfriars Bridge, late 1980's.

London, I love you thiiiiis much. And by "thiiiiis", of course I mean, "enough to post what is probably the nerdiest picture of me IN THE ENTIRE WORLD."

Happy Friday, guys.

(And if you cannot get enough of nostalgic eighties photos, check out the corresponding flickr set.)

shiny happy people

We were at Lakeside Lounge last month, waiting for a friend's gig to start, when we decided to jump into the photobooth for four very distinct faces - asian-face, tongue-sticky-outtie, goofy, and then normal. We had shared a lovely dinner together, we were a couple of glasses of plonk wine into the night, and none of our faces came out as planned. Poor Kate is almost hidden by Conrad's seemingly enormous head. In one, Conrad looks like those early-century pictures of schitzophrenics made with too-slow apertures. Jen and I look like insane french burlesque dancers in another. (go through to flickr to see the entire strip.) But it was a fun night for the four of us, a good gig, and an awesome photobooth strip.

Saturday

Sandwiched between our Debaucherous party and our heartwarming AIDS Walk, there was a day of laziness, barbeque, and bubbles. We sat in parks, had eggs for breakfast, played our way to Paris in Midnight Club, dropped off laundry, assembled a grill, and had a wonderful night. It was perfectly lazy for a perfectly lazy day. See the whole day here.

the shutterbug project

So, thanks to the previously-mentioned loan of the Nikon 5700, I'm happy as a clam, taking photos of this and that, generally enjoying every single minute that I've got my finger on the trigger. I'm an incorrigible shutterbug, but it's been limited to point-and-shoot snapshotting since graduating from the place with twenty-four-hour darkroom access (O, darkroom!) and still not being in posession of a really solidly good digital SLR until this loan from my totally awesome dad.

To celebrate this month of photographic bliss, I've come up with a new way to procrastinate at work entertain my readers and make the most of the camera. It all started with the Creepy Drunken Statue you saw in the previous post. He made the words Opa! Opa! get irrevocably stuck in my head, which means I had no alternative but to create a banner with them. (Hopefully, they will put Opa! Opa! in your head too, and I think that your life will be the better for it).

Making that new banner made me remember how much I love changing site design around here, and specifically how much I love making banners with my own photographs. So I took my favourite picture from Greester and made it into a banner. I'll be doing this every few days, as suits my whimsy, as pictures suggest good banner titles and good banner titles lead to new banners.

Eventually, after this orgy of pictures and pithy sayings, Jason and I will sit down with a twelve pack of beer and completely redesign the layout of pH, but this is my hold-steady until then, and hopefully will be just as amusing and interesting to you as it is to me.

You'll also notice that there are now category links in the body of my sign-off line (along with the bright red donate! button that you should still consider very important, as the walk is next weekend). I've gone ahead and indulged my inner (inner?) organizational freak, creating categories that broadly suit everything we talk about here at pH. I've managed to categorize as far back as November 2004, and will continue moving laboriously back through time. Eventually, my new sidebar will contain links to all of these, for ease of movement through the site.

Changes are around every bend. Opa, Opa!

Opa! Opa!

Opa! Opa! is a restaurant on 31st street in Astoria, the kind of dive that my father refers to as "greasy spoons" in some sort of ethnic slur reclamation attempt.

Click Opa! to see the rest of my Flickr sets and streams.

I spent a few minutes dodging and burning the picture so that the drunk-looking statue that's supposed to lure you into the restaurant is in full effect. If this doesn't make you want to live in Astoria so that you can pass this guy every single day, I don't know what will.

Relatedly, the happy coinciding of my father's month-long loan of his Nikon 5700 (thanks, buddy!) and my self-gifted flickrPro account (thanks, myself!) means that you'll be seeing a lot more photographs up here, making it one of those pseudo-artsy photoblogs you know you hate.

Starting.... NOW.

Shave and a Haircut

Let it be known that roughly 10% of the hairs on Stuart's newly-trimmed head were trimmed by me.

and for the even smaller attention spans

click to enlarge and see the Dooce Stipple Effect.

Stories, lists, pictures... all in one day. So don't ever say I don't give you the world. THE WORLD.

and i've been waiting such a long time

When you look through these pictures (click above), I want to reassure you that it's okay to sing the Chicago song. Just in case, you know, you were worried about your image.

evidence

If there's any proof that images are misleading, it's the fact that you can't see my sunburn in this photo.

It was tennis on Saturday and a two hour walk on Sunday. It goes from the top of each cheekbone to meet on the bridge of my nose. It's the first blush - literally - of summer.

And try as I might, I couldn't capture it. But maybe if you look closely, you'll see what I mean.

March 18th, 2005

I like to think that if Stuart and I were ever in a pretentious band like Belle and Sebastian, this would be our album cover.

* Only be warned - the Next and Previous buttons are freaking out in some of the other galleries. I wish someone would fix them for me. Hi, Jason!

The Great Equalizer, or, Our Flight Is Delayed So Here I Am

I'm generally an incredibly ethical person so it may come as a surprise to some of you that I'm using a wireless network from the Continental President's Club but I'll tell you what: Continental switched our pre-assigned seats so we're not sitting next to each other anymore and so I'm going to ROBIN HOOD THE FUCK out of this shit.

DAMN, man.

second hand

In our continuing quest for two decent nighttables that will hold all of our books and mugs and eyeglasses and lamps and alarm clocks, Stuart and I stopped in to a place called Furniture Market on Astoria Boulevard, right where it makes a V with Newtown Avenue. After twenty minutes of looking at the major, useful pieces of furniture and not finding those shabby-chic bedstands of our very dreams, we got a little punchdrunk on knick knacks, tschotkes, and thing-a-ma-whatsits. Oh, and the who-za-ma-doodles.

I poked through the old Vivitars, Kodak Instamatics, and camera brands long since defunct. We saw an ashtray shaped like a coffin and I "oohed" over a swinging mahogany bassinet, just to mentally appease a Jen that wasn't there. Stuart spotted a 1980's gaming system I've never even heard of. There was a cassette tape of Lawrence Welk Sings The Classics, stuck among the wall-eyed dolls and dingy plush toys. It was a little creepy.

I picked up a device that looked like a cross between an old fashioned hospital blood pressure machine and something you'd use to home your robot.
Krissa: "Do we NEED this?"
Stuart: "What IS it?"
Krissa: "Look at this stuff... isn't it neat?"
Stuart: "Oh NO you don't."

I kept humming it, all through the store.

There's something about second-hand furniture stores. Is it because each item, no matter how useless or hideous, once had a history with someone? There are canes hanging from the ceiling that other old Astorians had used to hobble down the street, walking slowly in front of another young woman like me. There are telephones that, in the mid-70's, were the height of modernity. There are coffee service sets that births were announced over, neighbors were gossiped about, and hard decisions were made. It's history, living in objects that are asking for another chance at life.

And then there's the bargain scavenger in all of us. Especially those of us with a shopping gene. I found myself digging through the accessories, training my well-accustomed eye, hoping to spot a gem that surely, the old proprietors couldn't possibly know the value of, like perhaps an old Gucci handbag, or a vintage Mary Quant hat, or even something from the heyday of the great New York department stores, like Bonwit and Teller or Sealfon's. We, those hardened shoppers, charge forward on the assumption that our lexicon of intrinsic value is more finely-tuned than the guy that slaps the pricetag on some box of purses or hats or shoes. Sometimes it works. This box didn't even have a gem, much less an outrageously lowly-priced gem.

The other funny thing about furniture adoption stores is the books they use to decorate the shelves and sometimes bring in a penny or two. A valuable thing to know about books is: just because the spine is old doesn't make it a classic.

"Think Smarter, Speak Better?" Stuart read aloud, as his curly head cocks sideways in the universal language of shelf-scanning. I ran my finger along the spines of about twenty attractively-packaged and vintage Reader's Digest Books. Charmingly old. Just as bad as they were when new.

It reminds me of that scene in The Birdcage where the books on their remodeled apartment shelves are all old and smart-looking, and up close they're just old Nancy Drew mysteries.

When we finally stolled into the late afternoon sunshine, I'd forgotten what we went in there for in the first place. Oh, right. Nighttables. Still, there was something refreshing about the clutter of tattered armchairs, splintering formica-topped modernist dressers, tables piled high with somewhat desperate china and lamps and popcorn machines, and the ugly paintings leaning against every available wall. If nothing else, it makes the entrance into our neat, well-appointed apartment feel even more like coming home. It felt good to look at the things we own, the things we chose and cherish.

Things that, in a few decades, will serve as someone else's second hand junk.