Saturday adventures

I got sick this weekend, a consequence of having to wait in the 26-degree January air for ninety minutes just to get a table at Prune on Saturday. (That's 26 degrees Fahrenheit, you Centigraders!) I was crabby in the cold to begin with, but when we finally got in, the food and fruit juice blend (Meyer lemon, lime, orange and grapefruit) went a long way toward brightening my spirits. I remained in a good mood until that evening, when my body decided to develop a cough and fever. So, no church on Sunday. No blogging on Sunday either.

But if I had blogged on Sunday, I would have written a list of things I saw while out walking on Saturday. Here it is:

• A one-eyed Pekingese on 1st Street. Pekingese dogs are funny-looking enough, but being monocular makes them downright creepy.
• Three small breadfruit floating in a basin of water, at the Essex Street Market. I didn't even know what they were until I asked the Spanish-speaking fruit vendors.
• A chunk of the most beautiful piece of Kobe beef I'd ever seen, in a glass case at the butcher. Also, I saw a chunk of jamón ibérico (Spanish cured ham) at the cheesemonger. Ibérico had been banned from sale in the United States until just last month, so it was the first time I'd seen it. At $99 a pound, I couldn't afford it.
• And also, this was at the discount candy store:

One embarrassment at a time

Yesterday, I ran out to buy toilet paper. The Duane Reade on Broadway was closed (what with it being New Year's Day and all), so I went to the deli around the corner. I bought a four-pack of Cottonelle rolls (the one with the puppy on the wrapping, because nothing makes me think of toilet paper like a yellow labrador retriever).

Sarah and I hate plastic bags. They clog waterways, cause illness in sea turtles, and take a thousand years to degrade in landfills. So when I paid for my toilet paper, I declined the plastic bag and just picked up the rolls and walked out. And yes, it did seem sort of weird to walk down a Manhattan street carrying nothing but toilet paper. It must have seemed weird to the group of people who walked past, because some of them laughed and I know they were laughing at me because I heard one of them say something something toilet paper something.

But... my temporary -- and probably unwarranted -- embarrassment was a small price to pay. For there will now be one less sea turtle with gastrointestinal distress out there.

Wag the blog

I've been following the exploits of Lucky and Flo -- two black labrador retrievers trained to sniff out hidden stashes of potentially pirated DVDs in Malaysia -- for months now, and I found out today that they're coming to New York City. This is exciting for several reasons. Except for a delinquent stint in college, I don't download illegal music or movies, and as a musician and music-lover, I support only legally acquired tunes. And I love dogs. And Malaysia. And DVDs. Yes, I know Lucky and Flo's impact on the global piracy problem may be a mere drop in the ocean, but it's encouraging (in a bizarre kind of way) to know that the price on their heads proved they were doing something right. Who knows what they will or will not be able to do in NYC, where peddlers will offer you pirated DVDs while you ride the subway. All I know is if I see them on the street, I'm buying each of them a hotdog.

Kitten caboodle

For some reason, every time I tell people we have a cat, they are shocked. I guess we don't seem like cat people. What's worse is that none of our friends have ever really seen our cat, Meg. This has more to do with our apartment being much too small to host visitors comfortably than Meg's skittish personality. But here, I present proof of her existence, and her fondness for ice cubes:Keeping a cat in our tiny one-bedroom apartment is difficult enough. I don't know how dog-owners do it. One of our former neighbors was a single woman who shared her apartment with two ginormous dogs. Imagine a wolf weaned on whale milk and growing up on a steady diet of elephants and bears. Now imagine two of them in a 300-square-foot apartment. I don't know how she kept them quiet, but I never heard them bark.