i'm pretending it's not yet fall

Some things that have happened recently, in no particular order:

Suz visited me on her way back to Austria!



We went kayaking on the Hudson.



We were attacked by the wake from a large boat, which left our butts rather soaked.



Nonetheless good times were had by all.

My friend Amanda and I had long bonded over our mutual love of food, with an emphasis on the deliciousness of meat. Since we work about ten minutes' walk from my apartment, we'd been joking around about how we should come back to my apartment in the middle of the work day and cook. Ideally, something with meat. It would be called Meat Lunch. Recently, in an impressive feat of time management and all-around awesomeness, Amanda and I made Meat Lunch a reality.



Steak, mashed potatoes, broccoli, and bread, all prepared and consumed within (just barely more than) an hour. On a Wednesday.

I discovered that, when straightened, my hair is surprisingly long these days.



I remain far too lazy to straighten my hair on a regular basis, but it's pretty cool to see what it can look like!

Lastly, tonight I attempted Käsespätzle for the first time since two summers ago. I forgot one of the cardinal rules of cooking, however, i.e. when you are making a dish (Spätzle) that has all of four very simple ingredients (salt, water, eggs, all-purpose flour) you should not substitute for them. White all-wheat flour will not have the same results as all-purpose flour. The Spätzle was something of an unholy mess to work with, and tasted mediocre at the end. Sadness.



Lesson learned!

lucy the elephant, down by the seeeeeea

In the early 2000s there was a jingle on the radio advertising Lucy the Elephant in Margate by the Sea. It was on the radio all the time, and also it was kind of creepy -- the combination of which made me want to stay far, far away rather than going anywhere toward Lucy, or even find out what she was beyond "some kind of elephant thing." (You can hear a little bit of the jingle here; you'll see what I mean about the creepiness.)

Anyway, a few years back my mom actually saw Lucy, though she never went inside, and she wanted to go back for the Lucy tour. And over the past couple of years I've come to appreciate weird roadside attractions in a much greater way than I did as a teenager (I think that a road trip around the country to look at the World's Largest Cross/Rocking Chair/Ball of Twine would be excellent fun). And since Lucy is billed not only as the World's Largest Elephant but also as the Eighth Wonder of the World (who could argue with that??) I was very interested in going.

Luckily, there was a nasty gray day at the end of my Labor Day vacation last week, so my mom and I headed up to check Lucy out.



So Lucy is a six-story-tall wooden elephant originally built in the 1880s by a dude from Philly who thought it would be a good way to attract people to the area south of Atlantic City and buy real estate. The large wooden elephant didn't inspire a whole lot of people to buy real estate, but it sure worked well as a tourist trap. It was also an advertisement for a hotel; a family spent the summer one year living inside Lucy; and briefly the elephant's belly served as a bar, until some idiot nearly burned the elephant down. I think this last is the best use of the elephant -- I feel very strongly that there would still be a whole lot of interest in an elephant bar. Sadly, she is now only open for tours; no beer involved.

   

The views from the top of the elephant, front and back respectively. Left, Lucy is oceanfront property! Right, from the top of Lucy the Elephant, you can see . . . Lucy the Elephant Water Tower!

   

Left, a very blurry picture of my mom inside the elephant (to give you a sense of the size of the interior if nothing else). See? Lucy is big enough to make a great bar. Right, there were water stains all on the inside of the elephant that they are eventually going to paint over -- including some, very creepily, in the shape of an elephant.

   

My mom (left) and I (right) in front of the elephant herself. Lucy is freaking big!

I'm down in Stone Harbor for weekend #10 in a row, which is pretty excellent in my opinion. There have been entire summers where I wasn't working in NYC and didn't get that many weeks in a row in Stone Harbor. (Granted, at that point I was spending the whole weeks here rather than just the weekends . . . but still not a bad deal this year.) Unfortunately the NJ Transit bus down the shore switched over to the winter schedule the day after Labor Day, so there's no real way for me to come down for the weekend without someone picking me up in Atlantic City (forty-five minutes away). My mom told me that I should find a jitney to drive me the rest of the way.

"What the heck is a jitney?" I said. I'd never heard the word in my life. She told me it was like a little vehicle, some kind of public transportation, but I still didn't have a good visual.

And then, in one of those moments of total bizarre coincidence, we were driving down Atlantic Avenue toward Lucy the Elephant and damned if there weren't a half dozen blue vehicles with JITNEY on them in big letters on the street coming toward us.



Apparently they've been running in Atlantic City since 1915. I laughed until I cried.

Also, if you're ever in Atlantic City and looking not for a casino or an outlet but in fact for a bakery, I highly recommend Formica Brothers Bakery. In spite of the name, it's actually quite cute.

dear gravity, you held me down in this star-lit city

It seemed a little cool for a beach afternoon, so I took a Wawa hazelnut coffee and a package of Tastycake chocolate cupcakes and a book and meandered down to 88th Street pavilion with Sunny.

   



No-see-ums chased us off the pavilion after a while, but not before we got in a solid 45 minutes or so.