No matter how you look at it....

DD, DS and I are on our way from the park. Kids are happily talking to each other, when DS suggests, "I am Kipper, DD, you are Arnold, and Mommy, you are Pig." DD, "No, I am Kipper, you are Tiger and Mommy is Pig." They went about it several ways, but either way I ended up being Pig.


Clearly, I am Jake. On the other hand, Pig makes one mean chocolate cake :)

How I wish you were there or In the heat of the night - Part II

I was told by a fellow blogger, who shall remain unnamed, that there could be apricot ice cream in Tovelli's on Ave. M. As a chance would have it, I actually was on Ave. M today and made a small detour walked 35 minutes from my house with a stroller to Tovelli's.

Let me tell you this, Tovelli is no more. And not because I single-handedly took their establishment apart after discovering that they do NOT carry apricot ice cream or frozen yogurt or sorbet. In fact they do not carry anything apricot flavored. The thing is Tovelli went out of business and whoever took over carry only Klein's ice cream. They have some interesting flavors, but not apricot. Antisemites!

Yet I am not giving up hope! Give me apricot ice cream or give me... well, any other flavor will do, I guess.

In the heat of the night

Wish to congratulate everyone on the start of the air conditioning and consequently high electricity bills season! Those who were complaining about an unusually long cold weather got their wish, bleh! No more baking, farewell to home made cakes and pizza, roasted potatoes and peppers, baked fish and chicken. On the other hand, welcome unapologetic consumption of ice cream!

Which reminds me, last night a had a huuuuge craving for apricot ice cream. I could not remember for the life of me when and where on earth I have had apricot ice cream/frozen yogurt or was it just a figment of my imagination and I never actually had it? Hmm... If any one of you has any idea where I could get one, please drop a comment. (Could it have beeb one of those Israeli five-flavored tubs? Anyone? I am stuck at home and can't check out my theory.) The craving is gone, but the mystery of where I had or hadn't this flavor of ice cream is still bothering me.

Pools and Hot Tubs Warning

If your children use pools, you must read this.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/01/15/entrapment.pools/index.html

Update: I have forwarded this link to some of my co-workers and received the following reply from one of them: "My friend's daughter died from this. She was 17, 5'7" 160 pounds, not just children need to be careful."

What I did on my summer vacation...

So we went on vacation with our kidlets. It was a short one - we left on Sunday and came back on Wednesday. SubHub wanted to go some place with lakes and trees and away from the city. So we went to Lake George. Overall we had a very nice time, but one theme kept on popping up that spoiled it a bit: how to entertain the kids. If we went alone, this vacation would've been just perfect. However, there wasn't much we could do with a three and a two year old. Some activities were too mature for them, some too long, some were just too expensive to justify the cost, and overall there weren't that many activities to begin with.

All of this reminded me the times when my parents, my brother and I used to go on vacation. Those weren't just three day getaways; ours were for 15 days (those damned Communists and their long vacations!). And I don't remember our parent wrecking their brains about what to do with us. Granted at that point we were older, and I, being three and half years older than my brother, could keep an eye on him, but still. This seems to be a common theme among many parents: how to entertain kids on vacation.

So what did we do during our two weeks vacations? We went to the beach with our parents. We also played cards and chess with them, read, and did some basic chores. At all other times, along with other kids, we were roaming the grounds of our so-called resort. And it didn't occur to anyone to keep a close eye on us. As long as we were back in time for dinner and not too dirty, all was fine. We had relative freedom, which was enjoyed by parents and children alike. Our freedom gave them freedom from worrying about how to occupy us during beach-free hours. Yes, we participated in mischief, scraped knees and got into fist fights, but no one seemed scarred for life. It was part of growing up.

Were our parents reckless? Did they not know about child molesters? I don't have answers to this. All my parents say now is: it's was a different time and a different country. So did people change? Or is it that the media brings so much spotlight on the horror stories that parents are simply afraid to leave kids unattended in their own backyards, let alone community playgrounds? Is it good for kids to have this much supervision and pretty much no freedom from parents' watchful eye? I think it's terrible.

But don't look for me to start the movement for bringing freedom for children. Because I'll be watching mine as a hawk, or least try my best. Still I crave those innocent times and feel sad that my kids won't experience them.

I am not looking at them, they are looking at me

I haven’t been posting or answering emails as promptly as I used to for several reasons. The main reason for my cyber space neglect is SubHub’s vacation. He’s been home for a few weeks and has been hogging computer expressing desire to spend time with his wife. The nerve! And I have so much to write about, I am bursting at the seams (and not because my clothes are too small). I have another week and a half of this to endure, but then we should be back to our original programming.

I wanted to write this entry ever since the beginning of summer, but always put it off. However, after my company had an evacuation drill, I feel that I can no longer keep silent. Have you noticed that if you see a woman in a New York crowd dressed in super skimpy clothes, so skimpy that she stands out among people wearing mostly tank tops and sundresses, nine times out of ten she speaks Russian?

I was thinking exactly that during our evacuation drill. In the crowd of a two hundred people, one could easily spot my some of my former compatriots based solely on the way they dressed. No, those weren’t the raggedy clothes of poor immigrants, for the most part those were expensive duds, but…. One woman was sporting VERY tight pants with three inch heels. How she climbed down twenty something flights of stairs is anybody’s guess. It’s a good thing that Russian women also possess high endurance. She was talking to another woman who was channeling a 12-year-old trapped in a body of someone about three times that age. The second woman looked like she borrowed clothes from the last Children’s Place collections: a tiny polo shirt with a super mini skirt that looked like this (picture taken from Children's Place website):

Something tells me that there was a little girl in Brooklyn, bitterly crying over the loss of her favorite outfit. And just to put it all in context: this is how these women were dressed for work!

But young women with good bodies baring almost all are only half of the problem. Older women refusing to accept realities of their age, weight and the laws of gravity are much worse. Go to any Russian wedding/birthday/big party if you haven’t yet, and you’ll know exactly what I am talking about. When a woman in her 20s shows too much skin, it’s one thing. When her 50 something year old mother does the same, it’s a whole new ballgame. And I am not talking about grossly overweight ladies; most of these older women are rather fit for their age and would look awesome, if only dressed a bit more…I can’t find a word - well if they were just a bit more dressed, I guess. The things that I have seen would only come in some designer’s nightmare. (From now on I will only be talking about women in 50 plus age bracket.) I have seen them wearing skirts or dresses with slits up to here. It could’ve looked attractive, if only the slit didn’t show spider and varicose veins, cellulite and hanging skin. Not pretty. I have seen low cut dresses and blouses without appropriate support – gravity is a law of nature, you can’t opt out simply because you don’t like it. I have witnessed women squeezed into outfits a few sizes too small for them. That looked funny, both funny ha ha AND funny peculiar. And don’t get me started on makeup. I guess the concept that less is more haven’t reached Brighton Beach and Russian media yet. Let’s hope it catches on in this century.

But the winner of them all almost made my eyes bleed. I have seen her, a woman in her fifties, at a wedding, wearing a laced up corset top, few sizes and twenty years too inappropriate for her, like this one,

only without an extra layer of fabric, with her skin literally popping out from between the criss crossed laces. The saddest part was that this woman was rather attractive, and had she worn something less risqué, she would’ve looked pretty rather than desperate for cash, old and fat.

It all would’ve been just in the realm of aesthetics, and we all know that this one is hard to argue logically. However, this propensity to dress inappropriately often time translates into undesirable treatment. I worked once with a girl who preferred wearing tight T-shirts and short shorts. This was a deli type of establishment, and most people at the counter were teenagers making extra cash while in high school or college. Sooner or later this was bound to happen: one of the guys started making comments about the way this girl looked in shorts. His biggest offense was to tell her that she would’ve looked much better if she exercised her legs a bit. The girl went ballistic and started screaming about sexual harassment. While in no way have I condoned the comment the guy made, I still asked the girl as to why she wouldn’t put more clothes on her body. It only makes sense to me that if you are not comfortable at people looking at your body, then maybe you should cover it up. She said that those were clothes she was comfortable in and she was not going to change the way she dressed because of one jerk. I would’ve seen the logic of it had she not complained to me on a regular basis about people making jokes and commenting on her looks. (When another guy – in my presence - paid her a very sexually explicit compliment only a few months later, she didn’t complain. I guess it didn’t constitute sexual harassment if her looks weren’t mocked or criticized.)

Where am I going with this? I am not sure, but I need to conclude. I am not saying that all Russian women dress like this. Actually, most of them dress just fine and not much different from their current compatriots. But the ones who stand out like a sore thumb make all the rest look bad. Russian girls are often stereotyped as easy and promiscuous, and I suspect that the way some Russian women dress has a lot to do with it. (According to my friend who lives in Austria, it’s the same story there. If you see someone in uber mini there, 95% of the time she’s Russian. And it embarrasses the heck out of all the other Russians because many Austrians also developed stereotypes about Russians.) I am not suggesting that everyone should emulate my old lady frumpy style. But how about some common sense: if you don’t want to be treated like a cheap whore, don’t dress like one?

A cautinary tale

We took the kids to the Bronx Zoo today. Once again, the Zoo turned them down citing administration's fear for the welfare of the animals. Just kidding. It seemed like a good opportunity to go somewhere since SubHub is on vacation and for August, today's weather was rather mild. We made good time on the way there, about 45 minutes. However, a lot of people felt the same way about today's weather, so finding parking took about another 15 minutes. We should've tried parking on the street, and not at the Zoo. I didn't take any real food on purpose, deciding that it was much preferable for everyone to be a bit hungry than to end up with food poisoning.

So on the way back everyone was tired, myself included. I set up our GPS to "home" and closed my eyes. When I opened them, I saw something that I totally didn't expect: IKEA, Elizabeth and a worried SubHub. He asked me if I was sure that we were going in the right direction. I said I was. To be double sure, I reset GPS to "home" again and wrote off the entire experience to weirdness of the device. Sometimes it tends to give strange directions, like last week-end when we went to check out new IKEA in Brooklyn, when on the way home the device kept on sending us to New Jersey.

When we were asked to take Garden State Parkway, I lost all trust in the device. We were going further and further from home. I looked at the GPS again, and all of a sudden I had a light bulb moment. SubHub had lent our GPS to his friend a few weeks ago. What if - the thought was almost unthinkable to me - his friend changed out "home" setting. Lo and behold, I was right. We were ten minutes away from out new "home" in Mahwah, New Jersey.

SubHub was pretty ticked off. It meant that he was going to be late for the meeting with - ironically - that same friend who took liberties with out homing device. Somehow the whole thing ended up being my fault. Not his friend's, who changed out default settings. Not SubHub's, who all of a sudden took liking to precisely following directions (I guess as long as they don't come from the wife or the manual, but from electric device, why doubt them?). But mine. Because I didn't check. Whatever. Two minutes later everyone calmed down, and turned out that the friend mentioned something about changing destinations to SubHub. Once again, it never occurred to SubHub that the default settings would be changed (but it was supposed to occur to me).

So the several lessons of the story are as follows:

1. Never skimp on snacks, especially if the real food was not served on time. I thought I went a little overboard, spending $25 or so, but we pretty much went through everything.

2. Having plenty of hydration is important!

3. Put on a diaper on your toilet trained toddler. You'll thank yourself later, especially if #2 applied.

4. If you are a wife, be prepared to take the fall for everything, including bad weather and other acts of friends and G-d.

5. THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSON OF ALL. If you lend someone your GPS (or any other electronic device), make sure that your default settings are still intact. Or you might end up living in Mahwah, NJ for the rest of your life.

Another thing I hate about you...

I don't know how I could have forgot this one!!!!


#13. (in reality should be much higher on the list) - People who still haven't discovered the invention of deodorant!!!! Especially the ones that take a subway! Especially on 34th or 42nd street! And if on top of it they wear flip flops....

12 things I hate about you

I am the first one to admit that I dislike summer. I didn't dislike summer before I came to New York, but here the minute winter is over, the temperatures get into high 80s within days, making spring virtually non existent. So here are some of the reasons why I dislike NY summer:


12. It is harder to hide extra weight in light summer clothes. Also, finding modest summer clothing that doesn't suffocate the wearer. requires all the skills of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple combined.

11. Flip flops, everywhere. I don't know why, but they are annoying.

10. Allergies

9. Heat

8. Bill for electricity, double the usual amount due to constantly running air conditioners. For some reason I don't mind the extra expense of ice cream consumption. I wonder why...

7. The music from the ice cream truck!!!

6. Inevitable arguments in the middle of the night, "I want to raise the temperature, I am cold", "But I am hot as is!" "But I am REALLY cold and can't sleep" "Well, get a blanket" "I already have a blanket!" "Then take the winter blanket!!" "Don't you think the temperature is too low if I have to use WINTER blanket in the middle of the SUMMER?!!!. There is a reason why they call it a WINTER BLANKET!!!!!" Not really conducive to the marital harmony. Makes cold winters look really romantic, when one's natural inclination is to cozy up to the significant other...

5. Cooking in the hot kitchen.

4. Having to figure out ways to warm up the food on Shabbat without melting itsconnoisseurs.

3. Ants. Everywhere. Literally. Having to check EVERYTHING in the kitchen for the presence of their little bodies. Even salt. Ewww. Also reminds me of the ant story in Hundred Years of Solitude, bringing back unusually strong desire to strangle the author and hug my children all at once.

2. Mosquitoes, bees, beetles and all other insects that are unusually active during summers.

1. Taking subway. If anyone had ever taken a subway on 34th or particularly 42nd St in Manhattan in the middle of the scorching heat wave, they would know what I am talking about: temperatures that is 10-15 degrees higher than on the surface, terrible smells of subway, hardly pleasant in the chilly weather, intensified tenfold during the summer, gasping for every breath; need I go on? Those who believe in the flames of hell should try it - a very good deterrent against sinning...

Summer's in the air...

I think I have finally figured out at least part of the reason why allergies get worse as the weather gets warmer. It is actually quite simple. You see, as it gets warmer, people start perspiring more, and some of them still haven't discovered the existence of deodorants. So G-d mercifully stuffed our noses to protect them from these awful smells. My allergies fortunately only started bothering me while many of my co-workers have been suffering for some time, so I am still susceptible to the BO's. Probably not for long...

But it makes one wonder how people lived before deodorants, every day showers or baths. Many history books say that people and cities smelled badly, but at this day and age it is hard to imagine how badly they reeked. Once again, thank G-d, and may we never find out.