Holiday Windows Part 1: Jewelry for Buildings

 Yesterday's Jedi Traffic Cop and numerous colleagues in blue were helping maintain the traffic flow in midtown Manhattan. What was I doing in midtown Manhattan on a weekend day? Same thing I do once every year around the holidays - yep, on Sunday it was time for my annual holiday shop-window viewing and Teuscher chocolate splurge with Mandy! 

We couldn't have asked for nicer weather, we've been having this ridiculously springlike warm spell for a while here that's got all the flowering bulbs confused and coming up - boy will they be in for a shock when winter finally gets around to hitting us, but in the meantime, what excellent weather for strolling outdoors. I actually did that on both days this weekend; TQ and I joined a pleasant crew from Sebago in a tour of Green-Wood Cemetary (tour of a cemetary may sound a bit weird and macabre to those who are not from NYC, but it dates back to the early 1800's, is a beautifully landscaped and well-cared-for green space, and became a very popular burial site during the Victorian era, when mortuary art reached wild heights, leaving some astounding memorials behind. It's also the final resting place of some fascinating people, and Commodore Emeritus Tony did some good research to prepare for the tour and led us by familiar names, good and bad (Tiffany, Ebbetts, Tweed) and some less familiar names (Henry Chadwick, anyone? Eliza Gilbert?). That was a lovely day, and then Sunday was just as nice. 

I have a ton of pictures to sort through but I thought I would start off with a set showing jewelry for buildings! Here's Cartier, Tiffany, Bulgari, and Harry Winston, all dressed up in their holiday sparkle. 

NYC Traffic Cops -

Now with lightsabers! :D

"The Navigators" at the Center for the Urban River at Beczak - pix from a great evening!

Deb, Terri, and John-Mario, who made this excellent evening happen (I helped too but just a little bit!)

What a fun night at the Center for the Urban River at Beczak's last Rivertalk in 2015. Deb Kuupuaonaona McCue was the organizer for this one, for which the main event was a screening of Sam Low's excellent documentary The Navigators, preceded by a welcoming chant and then a hula lesson by John-Mario from Halawai and followed by a little more talking story about the Hokule'a, the continuing adventures of the Hokulea Crew (slated to arrive in NYC in June 2016 as part of their around-the-world Malama Honua trip), and how the success of the Hokule'a led to a renaissance of Hawaiian culture. Fantastic evening, I'm so glad I could make it! Great seeing so many friends from the Yonkers Paddling and Rowing Club!

Terri and Deb made delicious Island-kine snacks - including spam musubi! Yes!

Friends from the YPRC sample the goodies

Deb and John-Mario greet the crowd

John-Mario sings 'Ano'ai, a song of thanks sung by a guest to their host.

Next, John-Mario taught us the hula Ke Ao Nani, a simple seated hula that speaks of the beautiful things of the earth. Up above...

The birds of the air

Here below

The flowers of the earth (that, btw, was the exact line I referred to in my Na Pua O Ka Honua post a few years back, I'd been taught this hula at the Bishop Museum during my 25th reunion visit)

In the sea, the fish of the ocean

In the mountains, the trees of the forest.

After this the movie was shown, and it's wonderful. I'm thrilled that director Sam Low has given me permission to do one screening on his behalf at Sebago; our boatbuilding committee is going to LOVE it, ok, everybody will, but especially the boatbuilders - maybe our next boat will be a proa! 

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Afterwards, a couple of tries at blowing the Pu (conch shell trumpet) that Deb brought from home.

Jolly old St. Sturgeon-fish, lean your fins this way!

Deb, John-Mario, Terri, and me. 

Two Months Out

Here was my last rolling session before my mastectomy, which was exactly two months ago today. This was on September 26th; my surgery was on October 8th, so I did have one more weekend to play with, but looking back to my October posts, I see that the forecast had been blustery on the following weekend and I decided to focus on shutting down the garden and doing the attendant freezing and pesto making. Funny thing is it's been so warm that the chard roots that I didn't bother pulling out have grown another helping of leaves, plus a few of the beets came along, so I do have at least one more picking!

Anyways, I never got around to posting about the 26th but it was a fun day on Jamaica Bay and I actually had 3 separate things to pick from - there was dinghy racing, a kayak paddle, and a family fun seining trip with the canoe committee. I decided to go with the canoes in my kayak partly because I thought seining sounded like fun (and it was!) but also partly because I actually thought this was going to be my last paddle for a rather long time, and I wanted to get in some good playing, which I would be able to do better with the slower-moving canoes.

On October 10th, I did what has actually been my only post about my health issues so far. The lack of subsequent updates was partly because I got veryveryvery busy with work after I finished my 3 weeks of medical leave, but also partly because (and this is going to sound weird but it's actually fantastic) this somehow didn't end up feeling like that big a deal! Some people have cancer ordeals. I'd rate what I've been through so far as more of a cancer hassle. I was fortunate in a number of ways - my ob-gyn steered me to an excellent pair of surgeons; the cancer hadn't spread beyond the original tumor (ended up being stage 2A); I did get to keep most of my lymph nodes (they used to just take 'em as a matter of course but they now actually test 'em while you're on the table, and although it did turn out that they took 7, not just the one closest to the tumor as I'd originally thought was the case immediately after surgery, the average person has 20 to 30 in each armpit, so I've got a good batch of those left, and I think that helps the healing); and then the things I can take personal credit for are being in good condition when I went in, and then getting up and about again as quickly as I could while following directions. I also had a few friends (hope they see this!) who have been through cancer themselves and told me their own recovery stories, which I think really helped to put me in the right frame of mind - plus a couple of people who I've known who didn't recover (my awesome clubmate Joe Glickman and my wonderful Aunt Char, I miss them both) but stayed so strong and positive that I couldn't help but be inspired by their examples - they faced their much worse outlooks and treatments with such strength, worthy of emulation.

Can't resist putting in a little moral here - women over 40, do get your mammograms but also keep up with your self-exams, and pay attention to how you look - a mammogram I had in the spring missed this when it maybe should have caught it, but I found it in time through a self-exam that I did because I had seen a weird asymmetry develop during the summer. If I'd been regular about those self-exam I would almost certainly have caught it even sooner. I didn't end up paying for that delay, but that was sheer luck.

With all that going for me, recovery went much faster than I ever dreamed it would, and one month almost to the day (November 7th), TQ and our friend Frank took me out for my first post-surgical paddle. We kept it short and gentle, only going to the "Jeep Marsh" (a typical destination for one of Sebago's open paddles, just a couple of miles), just squeezing in there as the tide was rising and then hanging out chatting and watching brants fly by and the marsh fill up, but boy, it was wonderful being back out there so quickly. 

I've only gotten in one paddle since then, but there's also been hiking and carolling and visits to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (a friend of mine is doing the NYC ID thing where you get free access to a bunch of cultural institutions, but only if you appear in person at each institution and register, so I joined her on a couple of those) and Irish music and stuff - so here at 2 months out I'd say I'm pretty much back to my normal life. YOWZA.

It's not OVER, but really, so far so good. Hopefully the cancer is OVER (fingers crossed, knocking wood, all that good stuff), but there are still some medical stuffs to do that will last for a few more months. There's some ongoing reconstruction stuff done during weekly visit that's a little tedious and uncomfortable but not too bad. The test results were pretty close to the point where an oncologist might say a person didn't need chemo, but in my case there were a couple of mitigating factors that made my oncologist recommend it - however, since it was kind of a precautionary measure, she did present me with 2 choices of regimen - an old-school one that is a hair more effective and takes half as long, but is pretty much guaranteed to make you feel like you got hit by a truck (to use Nurse Thelma, my oncologist's nurse's, exact words) and make your hair fall out - sort of the classic picture you get when you think of chemo, right? - or a newer version that takes twice as long, but that leaves most people able to carry on a normal life. I've been to 2 of my 8 infusions and so far it hasn't really knocked me off my stride too badly, just a little bit of an upset stomach, and I'm hoping it stays that way - I just couldn't imagine choosing the harsher version, Thelma said people mostly pick that just to get it over with faster but I've been amazed at how normal my life has been through all of this once I got past the initial recuperation phase (I was runnin' 'round with Flat Stanley by the middle of week 3), and I'm absolutely delighted that that's been possible.

Last photo - I took this reprise of the "It's blowin' a gale in Midwood" shot I've done twice before shortly before the chemo cut - "chemo lite" doesn't make your hair fall out like "chemo classic" but it can cause shedding. Nurse Thelma's recommendation was to go much shorter so that the hair is lighter and doesn't need to be yanked back in a ponytail. Fortunately I'd grown just enough hair since my last donation that going to a just-below-the-chin bob resulted in a ponytail long enough to donate! And so far no noticeable thinning, so once again - so far so good! 

Holiday Hymns for Hounds - Union Square, 12/5/2015

Well, I think I may have a new holiday tradition to add to the seeing-the-windows one I've been doing with a friend for years. It's funny, I get annoyed by the force-fed holiday music in the stores this time of year - but boy, I do still love actually singing Christmas carols! Actually I really enjoy choral singing in general; I didn't grow up doing it but I somehow fell into singing with the very good choir at Brick Presbyterian Church when I was living on the Upper East Side, did that for a few years but then when I moved to Brooklyn, it got harder to get up there, and then when I took up paddling, I finally let it go after a few tries at singing and then joining in something on the water proved that that was trying to squeeze too much into a day. Having moved farther out into Brooklyn, I don't think I would've stuck with the choir even if I hadn't gotten into wanting to spend my weekend time out on the water, but it was something I did like doing and I was sorry to have to let it go. 

I especially enjoyed the holiday singing, though, so when my much more singerly friend Vicky posted a Facebook link to an article with non-touristy ways to celebrate Christmas in NYC that included the Messiah performance her group, the Queens Oratorio Society, performs, and mentioned that she was also going to join in on the Holiday Hymns for Hounds, I jumped in on that as soon as I was sure that I would be done enough with my forecast marathon at work to make it to rehearsals. It turned out that I'd already missed the first rehearsal by the time I was sure of that (oops), but the way the Facebook group for the event was worded, it sounded like as long as I could make the second one, it would be fine.

Rehearsal itself ended up being "plenty good fun", to borrow a phrase from my youth in Hawaii - here was my Facebook post about it: Only in Brooklyn. In Studio C, a bunch of people practicing Christmas carols to get ready to raise some funds for NYC animal rescue organizations (Union Square at noon tomorrow). Two studios over, Sean Paul and Busta Rhymes doing something rap-tacular. Gotta give a little shout-out to Complete Music Studios - you'd think that the ordinary folks might get short shrift when the actual rock stars are in the house. You would think wrong, they totally took good care of us! Fun night, looking forward to singing again tomorrow! Union Square at noon!

And the singing was great fun, and we got to play with the pups for whom we were raising funds, and we raised $200 for Mighty Mutts and Ollie's Place with an hour and a half or so of singing, and then we went up to the cafe in Whole Foods for some thawing-out (it was actually a lovely warm day but usually when I'm outside in the wintertime I'm doing stuff, so I totally underdressed for two hours of standing still), then Vicky and I went and looked at the sparklies in the holiday market, and tried a slice of crack pie (no actual crack involved, just addictive levels of butter and sugar, yumyumyum) it was just a really, really fun day.  

Here's Vicky and me - happy happy! I think this photo that Vicky took and posted is the first social-media sighting of my chemo 'do, short enough that I don't have to do much with it - haven't noticed any shedding so far but treating it gently is supposed to help, plus I've been getting surprising numbers of compliments! My foot-long ponytail is sitting in the living room waiting for me to send it to the hair donation folks, it'll get there eventually. 

Here are some of the hounds!

This is Rita. So cute, so sweet, does the adorable head tilt when you chirp at her, and if my life were currently in a form that would allow dog ownership I think I might have been making inquiries.

"I'm Copper! I'm a hound dog!" Copper shows off his shake-paws trick -

takes his treat politely

and finishes off with a happy ear-flappy shake.

Angelo with a couple of the carolers - not on the website but another very sweet dog. He's a leaner - if he liked you he would lean on your leg and then you couldn't walk away because he would fall over and you wouldn't want to do that, now would you? 

And here we are singing. There was talk afterwards of adding some Hanukkah songs to the mix next year, but this year it was all traditional carols and pop favorites - with occasional "dog lyrics" thrown in for fun. I had a great time, I'll be back for this next year if the young women who organized it run it again! BTW, prize for longest distance travelled to sing here goes to the gentleman in the hat with the sign and the soprano in the red hat behind Vicky - they were visiting from Australia and they were totally going the non-tourist route - it was great having them join us! 

Excerpt from Sunday Bonus Escape - Two Swans and a Goat...

or is that a Pterodactyl? 

Clubmate Dotty L. organized an absolutely splendid Bonus Escape for the club on Sunday, which TQ and I were able to attend. It was billed as a Use Up the Leftovers Paddle (paddle followed by a fantastic feast of Thanksgiving leftovers), nota Bonus Escape, but that's what it was for me. It was so lovely that I just couldn't resist a little frolicking, first since my surgery in October and possibly a little foolhardy as I haven't specifically been cleared for kayak frolicking (how do I even explain this to the plastic surgeon who's tending to my reconstruction?), but I was careful, sliding into all of the braces off the back deck, not flinging myself into them, and everything came out OK...

We had 19 kayaks and for a time we were joined by active sailing committee member Pat in his handsome Goat Island skiff, I Am Zenia, Pterodactyl (IamZ,P for short). Pat stayed out lots longer than the rest of us and as he was finally coming back to the dock, he was joined by a pair of mute swans. These are kind of problematic birds - they're not native to this country, they out-compete native waterbirds, and they can be quite nasty (the one with the raised wings was hissing at me, clearly felt that I was invading his turf but fortunately didn't go beyond visual threats and some small-kine talking stink) but...ooooh, look how pretty, especially when accompanying an attractive hand-made wooden boat.

I've posted more pix from the day (plus these ones) on Flickr, click here to see those. No captions but it was a pretty straightforward paddle - we got ready, Dotty gave us a pre-paddle briefing with the game plan, which was to paddle around Canarsie Pol, come back, put boats away, and then eat some good food and drink some good drinks - and then we did that. Unfortunately the dining pix didn't come out well but the time of the bay was beautiful! And if you want a little more backup on the reasons I gave for not being in love with the beeeyootiful schvansies, the New York Times just posted an article that does a nice job of describing how they got here and why they're rather troublesome. Click here to read that.

Escape from Black Friday 2015

They'll never find us here in the Devil's Den!

 

Happy Thanksgiving From NYC!

Rollover Day for the Point Comfort 23, Or, The Biggest Boat Sebago Ever Rolled!

As I think I'd mentioned here a while back, we had a very exciting event at Sebago on November 7th. Holy cow, that long ago? I was thinking weekend before last but it was the weekend before the weekend before last - did I mention work's been crazy? Yes? Repeatedly, you say? Oops, sorry. Anyways, to get back to the point, it was the day when we rolled the biggest boat we've ever rolled - and on dry land, even!

Kayak committee members are always rolling our kayaks, but on the 7th, a whole crew of Sebagoites got together to roll the Point Comfort 23, the sharp new committee boat/safety boat that Sebago's new boatbuilding committee has been working on all summer. As you can see above, they've been constructing her upside-down, so all we've seen of her is her bottom (hehhehheh, I said bottom, hehheh -- and a fine bottom it is, innit?). The photo above was taken back in October, at the beginning of the final piece of this stage of construction, namely painting; a few coats of paint later and it was time to turn her over so that work on her interior can begin. 

It was an impressive effort, and I'd been cleared to paddle at this point but not to help lift twenty-three foot boats, so I took lots and lots and LOTS of pictures, which I finally had time to sort through last weekend, when Saturday ended up being a quiet day of catching up at home. Click here to visit the Flickr album. 

No captions, but the stages were - 1. Rolling the boat (unfortunately TQ and I only caught the tail end of that, Jim had rigged up pulleys to help stabilize and it looked like it would've been an interesting process to observe); 2. Bringing our antique war canoe back into the boat shed and raising her up to her winter home; 3. Preparing the base to receive the now rightside-up boat (this was an interesting combination of brute force - the fellas had a blast with the sledgehammers! - and the finest attention to detail - final adjustments involved a laser levelling device for precision) 4. Moving the boat back into the shed - and then finally the results of the naming contest (the winner was Canarsian).

And of course after that we had a feast. This IS the Sebago Canoe Club we're talking about!  

Link #2 - Great Hokule'a article in the New York Times!

Argh! It was such a good plan - link a day for the rest of the week and then I couldn't even keep up with that. What a week! Anyways, finally coming back with the second link, which is to a great article about Hokule'a in the NY Times (illustrated online with this beautiful photo by Na’alehu Anthony of the Polynesian Voyaging Society and ‘Oiwi TV). 

It's from a while back, I didn't have a chance to go look at it when the word went out among some of my friends at Halawai but fortunately Sam Low, author of Hawaiki Rising (that's his FB page, here's the Goodreads review), reposted it last week. Very good article, nice to see extensive mention of 'Iolani alumna Jenna Ishii! :D 

 Hokule'a is in South Africa now - I think I saw on the PVS website that they are now actually as far from Hawai'i as they are going to be, and it looks like they are having an amazing visit there. Continued best wishes to the wa'a and her crew, I'm so looking forward to her visit here in June! Click here for the article. Enjoy!