Playing Injured

Bruce and I are just back from five days in New York, and here's a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge to prove it.

Last time we were in NYC was November 2010, and, really, the place has changed a lot.

First of all, the new World Trade Tower has broken ground and then some. A friend observed to me recently that the new tower looks ever so much like an extended middle finger. 

At 7 World Trade Centre, a fountain featuring a monumental Jeff Koons balloon sculpture has been installed, a tribute to those who survived the 9/11 attacks. Signs explain to visitors that this is private property and many activities are not permitted including playing in the fountain. Cue photo of cute little kid playing in the fountain.

We saw too many things and had too much fun during our visit to share in a single short blog post. 

I propose to add bits to future posts. For today, I'll review the highlights.



Best thing we should have done long ago: New York Public Library. We went inside the New York Public Library after many previous visits where we gawked only at the outside. It is splendid indoors. A show featuring children's books transported me to my happy childhood when I spent hours dug deep in Charlotte's Web, Pippi Longstocking and stories about Winnie-the-Pooh. 

The actual toys Sheperd based his drawings on.

Best new find: The Rubin Museum. Founded in 1999, this small, modern museum houses an amazing collection of art from the Himalayas. The pieces are spectacular, the curation scholarly and, what we enjoyed the most about the space, the crowds of fellow-museum-goers very, very small. Nowadays people treat visits to the Met and the MOMA like trips to Coney Island. Giant, raucous groups of families and friends rove the museums, posing with artworks like they were cardboard facsimiles of movie stars, making a huge racket. Need a new, quiet, beautiful place to go? Try the Rubin.

Best food: Bruce and I usually have bad luck trying to find good places to eat anywhere, not just NYC. This time, we ate well no matter where we went. And the very best place was our second choice after we found out the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal wasn't open on Sunday. A quick search on Yelp took us to Nirvana, a new Indian food place. We had our misgivings about the menu, but ordered some likely-sounding dishes and oh, man, were they good. The waiter came by to clear the table of the 100% clean dishes and smiled as he asked the unnecessary question of whether we had enjoyed our meal.

Best new New York neighbourhood: Brooklyn. We have always stayed in Manhattan before this, but got some really cheap digs (basically renting someone's bedroom through airBnB) in the Fort Greene neighbourhood in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is historic, green, diverse and full of young people. It has its own major green space Prospect Park, a major art museum and a big botanical garden that, due to a navigation error, we spent more time walking around than walking in, but what we saw when we got there was pretty cool.

Brightly-coloured water lilies.

125-year-old Japanese White Pine bonsai

Those are the highlights. The only thing I have left to do is explain the title to this post: "Playing Injured."

We went to NYC this time in the enjoyable company of our dear friends Kate and Ed. Here's Kate posing with a sewer alligator sculpture in Brooklyn.

This bronze cast is part of a multi-piece work - Life Underground by Tom Otterness - installed
around the subway station close to where this photo was taken.

Here are Kate and Ed with Super Mario in Times Square.

Last time we vacationed with K&E, we were in St. Augustine, Florida and I was hobbling around with an injured left foot. I learned after returning to Canada that I'd walked the length and breadth of the US's oldest city with a hairline fracture in my third metatarsal. 

I cannot holiday with these friends without a broken bone somewhere, apparently. A couple of weeks before our departure to NYC, I cracked a rib in yoga class (go figure). 

Other than using this injury as an excuse to not participate in the world's largest open air yoga class on June 21st in Times Square, it didn't bother me.

"Mind Over Madness" - as mad a public display of yoga as I have ever seen. This is a small part of the crowd, and shows only one class, many more of which were held over the day. An estimated 15,000 people participated. 

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen

That Was Fun

On Thursday, the people I spend most of my day with and I spent most of the day sitting or standing around at the Winter Garden Theatre in downtown Toronto. This was the location for the Amethyst Awards, the Ontario Public Service's ceremony for recognizing outstanding service to the people of Ontario.

This is me, all dolled up for the Amethyst Awards, in front of the Winter Garden Theatre,
which was also all dolled up for the Amethyst Awards.

The day was everything: thrilling, boring, engaging, dull, entertaining, hot and rainy - it just depended on when you were looking. 

This is show biz, so they needed to herd us all in like cattle several hours before the show so we could sit around and worry about creasing our fancy clothes and the men could get uncomfortably hot in their suit jackets. They also made us wait until 2:00 before we could eat anything, so we were, circa 1:45 p.m. collectively hot, bored, hungry, crabby, dehydrated outstanding public servants.

All part of the magic.

As for me, my goal for the day was not to fall out of my shoes. And I'm proud to say I reached my goal.

Solid in my shoes.

In retrospect, the tedium of the dress rehearsal and the long wait served to make the event that much more spectacular. And it really was a spectacle. The Premier - Kathleen Wynne - arrived in person and spoke to the assembled crowd. She was warm, funny and appreciative of the public servants she was addressing. Were I not doing it already, after that speech, I'd have quit my job to go work for her. 

The entertainment for the day included two amazing performances of an Indian dance company, songs by a  beautiful young man billed as "the talented tenor" and three rock covers performed so fabulously by a band comprised entirely of public servants that we all wondered what the hell they were doing working for government. 

Another great thing about the day was how many people's families got into the act. Just about everybody had their mom, dad, partner, sister, kids, friend or somebody in the audience to cheer loudly when they came on stage. 

The truth for me was that I had both looked forward to and dreaded the day. I'm part of the 10% of the population that suffers genuine discomfort at the thought of that much attention. But, the time on stage was brief, as noted I managed to keep my shoes on my feet and, when a three-second clip of my red carpet interview played for the assembled crowd at the start of the ceremony, I was proud and grateful for the fact - because my face was eighteen feet high and filled the stage - that Jane Saracino had done my hair and make up.

Have a great week!

Karen


     

That Vision Thing

Right now, where I am, there is a perfect storm of political drama: we have a crack-smoking municipal mayor, a wrongfully e-mail shredding provincial government and a federal government with a slush fund for bailing out erring appointees.

Crazy.

With all this tomfoolery at every level - all of which is blown to gargantuan proportions by the hard working members of the fifth estate, the average citizen has to wonder how on earth it is the case that our whole society hasn't fallen to rubble and dust.

But here's the thing: it hasn't.

The other thing I've been doing a lot of recently may be part of the reason why we're not up to our necks in pulverized cement and twisted rebar. 

Subscribers recall the short piece I blogged about Samara, that organization that has set itself the task of setting to rights Canadian democracy. I'm part of a randomly self-selected group of people earnestly visioning the future of that shop.

Recently, in less randomly-selected groups of people, I have also participated in other earnest discussions on more-or-less the same topic: a vision for the future of the organization for which I work, which has as its task the setting to rights of the quality of the environment in Ontario.

What a vision is supposed to do is provide a foundation and a sense of hopeful, compelling direction, so that when events erupt and crises temporarily shatter focus, there's always something to refer to, hold onto, and return to when the kerfuffle has passed. If it's a good vision, your foundation builds on what you value and your direction takes you to a place you want to be.

So long as enough people in a society have that vision thing, their stupid, irresponsible, corrupt and ridiculous leaders can be as distracting as they like. It won't matter.

Pictures and stories about Molly-the-Dog are available here.

Have a great week!

Karen

Awards, Underwear, Phones

The stalwart group of policy professionals that I lead and I (plus my hard-working, long-suffering boss) have been selected to receive the Ontario Public Service's most auspicious award - the Amethyst Award - for our work on that five-years-in-the-making national air quality thingy I blogged about last year.

This is a big deal and probably isn't going to happen to me twice. This calls for new shoes. Here they are.

And a new dress. Here's an idea of what it looks like.

And underwear.....

A long time ago, I watched a short clip of a cat that completely lost it at a pet show. After hours of combing and poking and primping and posing and all those things not so second nature to cats, the poor little thing did a sudden six foot vertical leap in the air, spun 180 degrees, clawed its owners face and shot like a rocket under the bleacher seats where it glowered, yowled and struck out at anyone who tried to get it out.

The other thing I did in Belleville last week besides cooking up a storm was to go to my kid sister's favourite underwear store and check out the costly bras. I have my whole bra-wearing life stayed away from underwire. I can't stand it. It makes me crazy. I turn into that cat at the pet show.

But, if you are prepared to pay enough for your underwear, a good bra can lift your spirits without making you mad. I bought a nice purple one to wear to the ceremony.

The new underwear, while vastly superior to lower-cost instruments of torture, still took some getting used to, and, while on the topic of the awards, I shared the details of this situation with some of the people at work - those, at least, with whom I can have a relaxed conversation about the bra I'm wearing.

After a chat about the ceremony, my new shoes and underwear, one colleague asked, "Will that be all you have on?"

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Always on the lookout for new metrics of inebriation, I was glad to hear a young woman say this to her friend as they waited for the streetcar at the crowded corner of College and Yonge:

"I was so drunk I didn't know where my phone was."

Have a great week!

Karen