Oh Laundromat, why hast thou forsaken me?

I really, really miss having a washer in my building. The other day after work I packed up my laundry and headed over to the laundromat. It is only a block away so it isn’t any great hardship, but when I arrived they were not open. I really wanted to get my laundry done, so I decided that rather than go home, I would try the laundromat that is a few more blocks up. I had only seen it once as I passed by and did not remember exactly where it was, but I thought I could find it. So here I am wandering around my neighborhood with my laundry in tow and 6 blocks later I finally found it. Do you think it was open? Of course not. There was one more another 5 block away, but by the time I got there it would have been too late to get everything in and dried before they closed. So my laundry and I went home and 2 days later it is still sitting in my hallway waiting to be done. I went by the laundromat today on my way to get groceries and it was still closed, with no note or any information as to why or when they would re-open. I really hope they re-open, the other one is a little further than is really comfortable to carry my wash and it isn’t as clean as the one right here. Who knew clean clothes would become a luxury?

Big Brother is watching...and waiting to take over

Yesterday I bowed to the peer pressure of ¾ of the people I know and signed up for a Facebook account. In less than 24 hours I have come to the conclusion that if someone wanted to take over the world, this would be the way to start. Get everyone in the world so involved in what everyone else is doing then no will notice that you have quietly taken over. For those of you unfamiliar with Facebook this thing tracks everything that you, and people you include as your friends, and people they include as their friends, do on your accounts and chronicles it all in a running ticker tape that you can review and know everything that everyone in your purview has done on their account. It tells you when someone makes a comment or adds pictures to their site; it tells you when someone makes a comment to your site or to someone else’s site. It also can tell you, who else on Facebook you might know and might like to invite to be your friend (while of course telling them about you as well). On the surface this is sort of nice, I just started my page yesterday and I already have 10 friends, but simultaneously I am starting to feel like Big Brother is watching. A luddite at heart, maybe I am not quite ready for this ‘social networking’ experience.

HOPE 2009

On Monday night I participated in the NYC HOPE 2009 project. Hope stands for Homeless Outreach Population Estimate and the project consists of organizing volunteers to wander the streets of NYC (in an organized fashion) surveying everyone we meet to determine if they are homeless and to offer them services if they are. From these surveys NYC has an estimate of how many homeless there are and from changes in the estimates from year to year, they make funding determinations and evaluations of current projects. I was introduced to the project by a friend and was assigned to a neighborhood in the Bronx. I have to admit that when I received my assignment I was somewhat concerned, (white girl walking around the Bronx at night? Not the best of ideas) but I talked to a few people who knew the area and the subway stop I would use was located directly next to the project headquarters in one of the better areas and once I got there I would be with my team for the rest of the night. So off I went.
I am really not sure what to make of the experience. The organizers at my base facility (of which there are a couple dozen across the city) were not very organized, so the evening started off with a lot of confusion including: having our team reassigned twice, not having a team leader in our group, having our police escort reassigned 3 times and not being given the proper paperwork. Fortunately everyone in my group was pretty laid back and we just went with the flow, I finally volunteered to be the team leader (even though it was supposed to be someone who had volunteered before) so that we could just get going.

Our canvas area was a residential neighborhood with almost no open public spaces, which basically meant that there was no where for a homeless person to shelter, therefore there were no homeless people for us to count. I thought our assignment to this area was odd, and two of the people on my team who both work for agencies in the city that work with the homeless confirmed that someone who is homeless is not going to be in that area late at night because there is no where to go to be out of sight (of both police who would make them move on and of people who would harass them). But I suppose that if you want to know if the housing situation is so bad that people are sheltering in places they normally do not use this would be the way to find out.
We canvassed our area from 12:30 – 3:30 am and spoke to 17 people who were out and about who all claimed to have homes. Not that I wanted to find lots of homeless people out on the street, especially as the weather was below freezing, but the experience was somewhat anti-climactic. Especially when we returned to the base and I learned that as the Team Leader, I had to complete some paperwork including an evaluation. Now evaluations are standard procedure for just about everything now adays and one of the most basic tenants of an eval is that responses are anonymous. So when I handed in my evaluation, complete with comments on how unorganized they had been, imagine my perplexity when the worker read it and started questioning me about it while I was standing there! Uh Hello, can we say conflict of interest?

So am still trying to make up my mind about the experience. It wasn’t negative, but it wasn’t positive either. It was just rather blah.
For more on the project check out
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dhs/html/press/pr012709.shtml

And be sure to check out the Department of Homeless Services near you, most cities do some form of counting of the homeless population annually.

Use the back door!!

One of the things about living in such a densely populated area is that you come into contact (continually) with soooo many other people (whether you want to or not). This can be great when you think about it in terms of opportunities for people watching, for learning about different cultures and just generally seeing some interesting things. But this can also be frustrating when things that seem like they should be simple common courtesies just do not seem to occur to some (many) of those people you are in continual contact with resulting in the actions of one functioning in a way that make things more difficult for everyone else. These individuals, who move through (or worse stay put) as I move through my day DRIVE ME CRAZY. I often wonder if people don’t realize they are being a pain, don’t know how to not be a pain or just don’t care that they are making things more difficult for others around them.

Case in point getting on and off the bus. Busses have 2 doors for a reason, to make getting on an off more efficient. You have to get on from the front because you have to pay the driver and you should get off in the back so people getting on do not have to wait for you to push your way to the front and then get off. With, of course, exceptions being made for people who for individual reasons cannot use the back door, and/or people sitting in the front who would cause a delay and more problems trying to push to the back. Pretty simple, straightforward, not difficult logic to follow right?

Daily I see people holding up the bus because someone who was sitting in the far rear feels the need to walk all the way to the front of the bus after it stops (as opposed to working their way to the front en route). On a nice sunny day, when you are not really in a hurry this is not a huge deal (although it is still annoying), but on a crappy, rainy day like today, when the bus is already running 30 minutes late and you are standing there getting wet because you put your umbrella down in preparation for boarding the bus not realizing some schmuck is going to try to press their way to the front and then stand there while they take out their umbrella before stepping out of the way… it makes you want to beat that person with a stick.

Although the worst I have seen occurred yesterday. On my way home from work there were two boys on the bus that were probably high school freshmen who, when I got on the bus, were standing in the well by the back door of the bus. Every time that someone wanted to get off using the back door they had to try to maneuver through these two. Finally, when it came time for these two to get off the bus, do you think they used the back door that they had been standing in front of all that time???? Of course not, they walked to the front of the bus and got off. While some of it is obviously teenaged idiocy they are just one example of soooooo many.
Maybe there should be a gate ¼ of the way into the bus and if you go past that gate you can’t get to the front of the bus anymore and you have to use the back door. Of course that would only further exacerbate another bus courtesy issue that I will address in a later post, this one already being much too long.

How early is too eary?

Do you remember your first crush, your first love? When was the first time you thought about getting married? I doubt it was as early as this couple. Check out these early bloomers.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7811686.stm

The Gotham Gazette Garbage Game

Check your sanitations skills in this game. It is specific to NYC but still a good indicator of how far we still have to go in dealing with our waste and frightening to see how much waste is created here.

http://www.gothamgazette.com/games/garbage.php

Central Park

I finally got some pictures of Central Park and thought I would share them out. These are from the south end of the park.