I apologize

I just wanted to say I'm sorry for not writing more interesting things about living in New York City. The truth is that it is just so cold here, I spend probably 95% of my time either in the apartment or at work. This is just not the weather for long walks or neighborhood exploring. Usually I'm just trying to get from the subway to wherever I'm going in the shortest amount of time possible, not even pausing to look up or marvel that I live in this cool city. January was just frigid. We had snow at least twice a week for the whole month and I don't think it probably got above 35 more than a couple days. We still have snow on the ground from Christmas, although it's on it's last legs now - the 3 foot high piles have subsided to mere inches now and the dogs are having to go to the bathroom on the bare sidewalk for the first time in a month. February has been a bit warmer and it hasn't snowed yet. It was 40 yesterday for about 10 minutes, then a cold front came in while I was at work and by the time I left, it was 20. This morning it was 17 degrees when I left for work and with the wind chill, it was supposed to feel like 2 degrees. Trust me, it did.

So, really, we haven't been exploring much, we haven't been walking or touring or leaving the apartment for long stretches of time. Frankly, it's starting to drive me a little bit crazy and I'm feeling a little bit trapped. At least in Oregon, if it stops raining for a few hours, you can go outside.

We have, however, been going to the ballet a lot, which is a nice way to get out of the house. I think I mentioned this before, but the ballet is set up more like a symphony performance. The season includes about 30-40 dances, each probably 30-40 minutes long and every night they perform a difference combination of 3 or 4 of these dances. So if you go on a Tuesday night, you will most likely see 4 different dances than you would if you went on a Saturday. It's actually really cool and good for those of us with shorter attention spans. They usually do a very traditional ballet, and contemporary ballet and then kind of a broadway/more showy ballet. A little taste for everyone.

Having only ever seen the Nutcracker before, I wasn't sure if I would actually like ballet, but it turns out that I do! It's just amazing to watch these incredible athletes who are SO strong, yet so beautiful and graceful. They flit around the stage looking effortless and weightless, and then you focus on their arms and legs, and you see how hard they are working, how much strength it actually takes to make these things look effortless and weightless. It's pretty astounding, actually. Swan Lake is coming up and, having seen Black Swan recently, I'm really hoping that we will be able to get tickets to that. But, I'm sure it will be a very popular performance and there might not be any availability for us free-loaders.

Hope everyone else is staying warm!!

Bottling

The wait was finally over last Sunday, and we bottled the beer. It was a little nerve-racking to take the top off of the fermented and hope that there was beer inside, but there was indeed - delicious, aromatic, amber-colored beer.

The first step was to go back to the home brew shop and buy a bunch more equipment. Bottling bucket, bottles, bottle caps, siphon tubing, racking cane, bottling cane, bottle tree. I won't lie to you, the setup for this hasn't been cheap. Its put a deep, $200 dent in my pocketbook. But it was worth it the second I took my first deep whiff of the fruits of our labors. We took the lid of the fermenter and looked down into that gorgeous, delicious liquid and the two weeks of babysitting the swamp cooler, swapping out frozen water bottles twice a day, it all seemed very worth it.

We ended up getting 22oz. Bottles because that's all they had. At first I was bothered by this, but with home brew, there's always a little layer of yeast at the bottom of the bottle, and it's probably better to pour it out of the bottle to drink anyway, so I got over it.

We came home and washed and sanitized all the bottles and hung them on the nifty bottle tree until it was time to put the beer in them.




Then we had to move the beer from the fermenting bucket into the bottling bucket. The bottling bucket has a spigot on it which makes getting the beer out of the bucket much easier. So step one was to transfer the beer. Easy right? Just hoist that bucket up and pour it out? Nope, turns out that getting oxygen into your beer is, like, the worst thing you can possibly do to it. So, instead, you must use a siphon to gently, gently suck the beer out of one bucket and into the other. The last time I used a siphon, I was about twelve and cleaning out my fish tank. To get that siphon to work, I used to submerge the whole thing in the tank and then slowly work all the air bubbles out of it. Somehow I didn't think submerging a whole siphon plus my hands and arms into the fermented beer was going to work for this, so I had to YouTube "how to use a siphon". Looked pretty easy on the video, but try as I might, in our kitchen, I just couldn't get it flowing. Luckily, it turns out that Neil has been hiding his secret talent as a siphon-starter from me all these years. He's a pro! He just looked at the thing and it started flowing!

Inside the fermenting bucket, there is all sorts of crap stuck to the edge, where the yeast bubbled up during fermentation. And then at the bottom of the bucket is an inch thick layer of yeast and who knows what else. You don't want this in your beer, so you use a racking cane attached the siphon to get the beer out, and leave the yeast behind. The racking cane has a little cap on it that keeps the suction about an inch or so off the bottom of the bucket.









Once the beer was transferred from the fermented to the bottling bucket, we attached the bottling "Thingy" to the spigot on the bottling bucket. I'm sure there is a technical name for it, but I'm just too lazy to look it up right now. Basically it's got a spring in it that when you insert it into the bottle, and push down on the spring, it releases the beer into the bottle. When you let up on it, the flow of beer stops. It's actually super-awesome. We then proceeded to bottle. I filled up the bottles and Neil capped em.

















When we we finished, we had 24 22oz. bottles and three 12 oz. bottles. Now they sit on the shelf and condition for 3 weeks and then we drink!! it's really hard to wait and wonder what it is going to taste like, so...we didn't! We siphoned a little bit into a glass and tasted the fruits of our labor. Wit wasn't carbonated, because the carbonation happens in the bottles, so it tasted totally flat, but if you looked past that, it was really good! Good flavor, good body, I think it is going to be delicious. But, we still have to wait two more weeks to find out for sure.

Next up, we'll be brewing a clone of Obsidian Stout, which is one of my favorite stouts.





Look at that pretty!!

Amber Ale

Last weekend, we took a trip down to ye old brewshop and picked up all the equipment and supplies to make our first batch of homebrew. I bought Neil a brewkit back in Portland about 3 years ago, but for some reason we never got around to making any beer. In San Francisco, our friend Alec shared some of his delicious homebrew with us and when we moved here, and realized there was a homebrew shop 3 blocks away from us, it just seemed like time to make some beer. Not to mention that the price of beer is RIDICULOUS here - $6/pint in bars and $10-13 for a 6-pack. Definitely motivation to make it ourselves.

For our first batch, we decided to do an Amber Ale. The process was really fun - the first step was to steep some malted barley in the GIANT brewpot, then we added more water, some malt extract and brought the whole thing to a boil. It's really hard to get 3 gallons of liquid to boil, let me tell you.

(bag with grains in it for steeping)

Then we added three different types of hops to the boil and different times. The hops smelled AMAZING when they went into the pot - so fragrant and delicious. The hops that you boil for the whole time give the beer it's bitterness, and then the other two additions add fragrance. We added Centennial, Willamette and Mt. Hood hops.

(hops pellets waiting to be added)

After all the boiling was finished, we cooled the wort in the sink, with ice.

Then we poured the wort into the fermenting bucket, along with 3 gallons of water and poured in the rehydrated yeast. We put the lid on, put the airlock into the lid, and let the yeast start to do its business. The next day, the airlock started bubbling!

That crazy setup that we have it in is called a swamp cooler because the beer needs to ferment at about 65 degrees, and our apartment is usually around 75-80 degrees. We don't have control over the temperature, so we had to find a way to keep the beer cool while it fermented. So we sat the fermenter in a restaurant dish tub, filled it up with water, covered the fermenter in an old t-shirt, and we swap out frozen water bottles twice a day to cool the whole contraption. So far, it seems to be working. 

So next weekend is bottling weekend and then I need to re-read by book to see how long it has to stay in the bottle before we can drink it!! I'm just praying that I didn't do something to ruin it somehow and that we don't end up with skunky beer. 

I wanted to leave you with a super-cute picture. Neil got a new coat this weekend, and it's basically made for hunting, so there is a pocket in the back of the jacket. When he tried it on at home for the first time, we realized that it would fit Lola and Swarley perfectly:

A walk in the park

So here's a general overview map of the 5 boroughs of New York City:

Manhattan is #1 (Blue), the Bronx is #4 (Red), Queens #3 (Orange), Staten Island #5 (Purple) and Brooklyn is #1 (Yellow). Brooklyn is on the very tip of Long Island, and that grey across the river from Manhattan is New Jersey. Before I moved here, I had absolutely no idea how all of the boroughs fit together, or how New Jersey fit into the puzzle. 

This is a close-up map of Brooklyn and all of its neighborhoods. We live in Park Slope, near Prospect Park. Brooklyn is huge. In fact, if it were a city unto itself, instead of being a part of New York City, it would be the fourth-largest city in the world. 

The sun was shining bright today, so we decided to take a walk around Prospect Park. That's the nice thing about winter in New York. It may be cold, but it sunshines a LOT. Coming from the Pacific Northwest, I kept waiting for the rain to start. For me, November means the start of 6 months of rain. But it never came. All we've had is sunshine and snow. And frankly, that's pretty great. 

It was a perfect day for a walk, warmed by the sun, cooled by the brisk breeze. 

Families were out sledding, bikers were riding the loop all bundled up in their winter riding clothes, people were running, walking their dogs, or just having a nice walk, like us. 

We even saw a person cross-country skiing.

In the rest of the city, the sidewalks are shoveled and the roads are cleared of snow by just hours after the snowfall. But in the park, they left the snow on most of the walkways. Walking there made it really feel like it had snowed. 

We did a two hour loop around the park and by the time we got home, we were ready to curl up and watch some football in the cozy apartment. Too bad the Seahawks got stomped!

Edit: Neil just pointed out that I got my facts about Brooklyn wrong. It would be the fourth largest city in the U.S., not the world. Fourth largest in the world is now held by Sao Paulo, Brazil, with appx. 17 million people. Brooklyn only has 2.5 million. Whoops! 

Reality

There are times when it strikes me as completely surreal that I live in New York City. Like today, when I exited the Not-for-profit conference that I attended, and found myself in Times Square, instead of Lloyd Center. Also, it was pretty cool that the Assistant Director of the FASB was our seminar speaker. (Only accounting nerds will probably get this. Charlotte, I expect a comment.) It's moments like these where it really hits me how exciting and crazy it is that I live here.

Although, I did run into my old boss from Portland while at the conference. My two worlds colliding...

Week in review

We've been back in New York for a week now, but it feels like so much longer than that, for some reason. We had such a wonderful holiday vacation, we got to go home for a week and although we both got sick, it caused us to slow down, rest, and really enjoy our time with family and friends.

After a leisurely weekend recovering from the colds, and just getting back into the groove of being in NY, on Monday, it was back to the normal routine. We met up with some friends who just moved here from San Francisco and we went to Ethiopian food, which Neil and I had never had before. It was very interesting - you eat with your hands, using flat bread to scoop up the food. The food was yummy, but it did kind of tie our stomach in knots for the next few days - I don't think we were used to the spices.

I got back into the swing of things at work and it was really nice to be back. The ballet season is starting now, and so I have big plans for us to attend. Ballet is different than Opera; with Opera, they do, say, three shows in a two month season. For ballet, they have 20-30 short ballets, and when you go on a certain night, you will see 2-3 of those ballets. It's like going to the symphony, where they might play 3 different 30-40 minute pieces. I have never been to a ballet besides the nutcracker, so I'm interested to see how it is.

Yesterday, we had our first major snowfall since we've been here. We missed the huge blizzard over Christmas - we got out right before it started and came home after it had been mostly cleaned up. It snowed for most of day yesterday, but unfortunately, it was a little too warm for the snow to stick and stay and by the time I left work, you couldn't even tell that it had snowed. But, it was beautiful while it was coming down. Our office has a big row of tall windows, and the snow was swirling outside of it in big, floaty flakes that made me feel like I was in a snow globe. I kept stopping work to go stand and stare. I tried to get a picture of it, but it's hard to capture something like that with a phone camera. :)

Last night was also a free night at the Whitney Art Museum, so Neil met me after work and we headed over the Upper East Side to attend. There was a line waiting out the door when we got there, though, so we decided to eat dinner and let the line subside a bit. The nice thing about New York is that it forces you to be spontaneous. When you're out doing something and your plans change slightly, or you don't really know much about the neighborhood that you're in, you are forced to try new things. I used to never go into a restaurant without first doing extensive research of their menu, their reviews on Yelp, etc. I hate wasting money on bad food. But I feel like, here, there is less risk, somehow, of getting bad food. I know it's out there, but we really have yet to encounter it. I think, without exception, that all the food that I've eaten here has been really wonderful. So, last night we wandered until Neil spotted a BBQ restaurant and it ended up being perfect. BBQ beef brisket on a chilly night hit the spot exactly. And Neil also got a 20 oz. goblet of beer that he enjoyed immensely.

By the time we got back to the Whitney, the line was gone and the galleries had really cleared out. The main show on display there was by a relatively unknown artist named Paul Thek, and it was really interesting work. He was a sculpture and installation artist, primarily, but he also did paintings and drawings. I thought his sculptures and installations were the most interesting pieces. He did a whole series called "Meat", which were wax sculptures that looked like pieces of rotting meat, encased in plexiglass boxes. There was something very appealing about them, even though they looked so macabre.

There was also a show of Edward Hopper on display. The Whitney has a large collection of Hopper's because his wife donated a huge number of his works after his death. I love his paintings - you can always tell a Hopper because they are so still, so contemplative, so quiet. Even in his scenes with people in them, I always feel as if everyone has paused, that there is complete silence in the scene, like he caught them in a moment where everyone had just stopped talking. There is always almost a sense a melancholy in his paintings. They make you stop and think, consider what just happened, what is going on in the lives of the people in the paintings. One of his most well-known paintings:

Do you feel it? The quietness? There is no noise in this painting. It's cool, calm, collected. And then melancholy lurks right below the surface. 

Here is one I've never seen before, but I get the same sense from it. I don't feel like those women are talking. It's like they both paused to think about something for a second, and that's when he caught them. Maybe it is something to do with the composition, the women are not really the focus of the painting, the focus is somewhere above their heads, on the coat hanging on the wall or the sign outside the window. But I find it very interesting. He had such a unique style, unique point of viewing all these regular scenes. 

Next Friday, it will be off to the MOMA for their free night. It's so great to have so many amazing art museums in one place. What a treat!

In other news, the Farmer's Markets have been very dreary places for the last few weeks. Food just doesn't grow here in the winter like it does in California. Obviously. And it's so cold to be out and about. So, for the next few months, I decided to join a CSA-type organization that sources its food from local farms whenever possible, but substitutes in a few greens and fruits from warmer climates like Florida and California. I got my first shipment on Thursday, and it included mostly root vegetables and squash from local New York farms, but I also got some spinach from Florida and some oranges from California. I haven't had an orange since we left California, and the tangerine that I had yesterday was SO good! I don't love that they have to come all the way across the country, but good citrus is SO yummy. I also got a rutabaga in the box - does anyone know what to do with a rutabaga? I have no idea. Some further research will be required.

Finally, my friend Gabby gave me this link yesterday, that provides a whole report and scorecard on organic dairies and milk. I found it very fascinating and horrifying to read about the co-opting of the organic label by mega-dairies and corporate farms. Basically they are continuing in their factory farm practices, calling it organic and getting away with it, because the USDA is not really interested in regulating the use of the term "organic". There was some very eye-opening stuff in the report and on the scorecard. Brands of milk that have such great reputations that, after some investigation, don't really live up to their rhetoric. Strauss milk, for one, in California, was scored quite low. But it's the gold standard in San Francisco. Interesting. How does your milk stack up?

Have a great weekend!

Resolution

I resolve, as soon as I kick this disgusting head cold, to begin telling the story of our new city. I'm sorry I've been so deficient in posting lately - moving to New York was a much, much bigger task than I thought it would be and after two interruptions for Thanksgiving and Christmas, we are just now beginning to feel slightly settled. So anyone who hasn't given up on me, please stay tuned for more stories in 2011.

                                                       Happy New Year everyone!!