NOT a True New Yorker

I went to the TimeOut NY website today in search of some good summery activities. The website is not the most user-friendly (read: too much stuff, yet not easy to find) and I got distracted when I came across the "Are You a True New Yorker" quiz.

I am a sucker for personality tests.

Now, I have lived here for the past 15 years. I like to think that I've been around the city block a few times. I was not concerned about my New York-ness. Hell, I lived here during 9/11, the blackout, the transit strike, that guy with the tiger in his apartment and before Williamsburg was completely overrun with dirty looking hipsters. Even before Target came to the 5 boroughs, for god's sake.

After answering all of the questions (and there were several pages of them), what was the verdict?

I was one step above a tourist.

WHAT!?

Needless to say, I was deeply offended. I mean, really, WTF?

Here's a sampling of questions:

• Have personal waterbug and rat horror story. CHECK.
• Be unable to leave the house in the morning without watching NY1. (I heart Pat Kiernan.) CHECK.
• Adopt a piece of furniture you found on the street. CHECK.
• Go to the Bronx for something other than a baseball game. CHECK. (shout out to SMark in SoBro!)

Those are fair questions, right? Well, I think these are the ones that demoted me to almost a tourist:

• Order what the people sitting at the next table in the Chinese restaurant are having—without knowing what it is. I'm Chinese, I know what the hell to order. IN CHINESE, IF NEEDED.

• Buy an umbrella that's just gone up in price to $10, and then leave it in a cab. Point #1: See above regarding NY1. Which means that I watch the weather on the 1s. So I know when it's going to rain and thus bring an umbrella. Or use the one I keep at work just in case, thus avoiding the need to buy an overpriced, poor quality umbrella from a man selling them out of a grandma cart. Point #2: I don't leave shit in cabs. I always look back as I'm exiting.

• Be approached by a heroin addict on a bicycle pretending to be a PA on a commercial shoot who has no money to get to work—and be impressed enough with his hustle that you don't mind forking over 15 bucks. Again, I must exclaim, WTF!?
  

Worm Update: Harvesting Worm Excrement

Well, the time had come to harvest compost from the worm bin. It's been many months since I first got the worms. We had our ups and downs and a few casualties along the way. Luckily there were no tears, at least not on my end. Harvesting compost is not quite as straight forward as people make it seem. Sure, there's a good amount of compost in my bin, but there are also worms that are very sloooooooow (or perhaps just resistant) in moving over to the other end of the bin, and there are bits of newspaper and things that aren't fully decomposed. It took a little extra time to clean it up, but I got some!














I know it's technically worm poop, but this stuff smells really good, like the best kind of soil you can find. I mixed it up with regular soil and put it as a top layer of some of my plants. I am a little nervous since over-fertilizing can easily burn plants to death, but I am hoping this will just make my plants even happier than they are now. We should find out in a day or two...

A Good Pencil is Hard to Find

I'll be honest, I don't really want to be at work. It's been a tough few weeks since returning from Road Trip 2008. I've had some serious post-vacation depressive disorder.

One of the things I'm working on at work is an audit. I have forms to fill out and double check against other documents that then get filled into an electronic form. It is as tedious as it sounds, even for someone as OCD as I am.

I decided that it would be best to use a pencil to fill out the forms since I'm not entirely sure what the hell I'm doing. I don't want to commit to ink. But I've realized that it's hard to find a good pencil in the office these days now that I'm no longer in grade school. I started out using one with refillable lead, but the lead kept breaking after every word. Then I tried an old school pencil, but I require a very sharp tip at all times (back to the OCD) and it is counterproductive for me to be sharpening my pencil every 2 seconds.

I looked around in our supply closet and although there were enough post-its to wallpaper my apartment, there was nary a pencil. Finally, my resourceful admin. assistant managed to scrounge up an automatic pencil she had snagged from another department last year. Crisis solved!