Brooklyn Botanic Garden

I was driving The Awesome Co-Worker crazy. Or at least that's what I knew she was thinking, but didn't say. She didn't say it, because The Awesome Co-Worker happens to be super nice as well as being awesome.

All last week I vacillated between buying a camera and not buying a camera. On Thursday evening, I finally gave in and went shopping. Down to B&H I went, wallet in hand, debit card swiping. (So much for paying double on that one bill.) I've been happy as a clam ever since.

Here's a sample of what I've been up to. This one's probably my favorite. Which one's yours?

This one was particularly beautiful! All frothy white and goodness.

These cascading blossoms were breathtaking. I have another photo I'll post later in the week showing the drape of branches.

So whadayuthink? Was it money well spent? Scratch that. (The frugal ones in my family will say no.) Which one did you love?

-Bitter

Cherry Blossom Festival, Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Just a short post tonight, I'm going to head off to bed early. What's that you say? It's already 10:00pm? Oh. I guess that means I'm going to head off to bed semi-early tonight.

I have been burning the candle at both ends all week long, and would love to sleep in tomorrow, but the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is calling. The annual Cherry Blossom Festival is this weekend and I'm going. (Before you rant that I spelled BBG, it really is Botanic, I checked twice.)

Although this will be my first time attending here in NYC, I've been to a Cherry Blossom Festival before. When I lived in Washington DC, I went twice. Loved it with a capital L.

So I did a little shopping yesterday...I won't tell you what I bought yet. I'm going to save it for a surprise on Monday, but I'll give you a hint. I've been salivating over one recently, and it starts with a C and ends with an N.

-Bitter

The Day I Stopped a Gang War, no, they didn't have knives...or guns

Yesterday afternoon when I went outside to make a quick personal phone call, I got to stop a gang war.

Well, not really, but I had you going for a second there didn't I? *insert chuckle*

Well I did stop something. It wasn’t a gang war per se, but it was about to become a nasty fight (there were about thirty or so young men egging each other on). This is how it happened.

Yesterday afternoon I stepped out of the office to call my Brother-in-Law Nick because my blog was experiencing glitches from the work I'd done the night before. He fixed the problem, (brilliant computer geek that he is) so now in order to get to my blog, you can type i-m-bitter.com into your browser and it will bring you right here. Snazzy huh!

So here I am, minding my own business, walking away from the doors and building construction heading toward the spot where I wanted to make my call when I saw them. About thirty young men, ages twelve to sixteen, milling around the sidewalk. I didn't think much of it, so I whipped out my phone and looked for a place to stand.

I scanned the group wondering if they'd be too loud for me to hear my Brother-in-Law Nick, when I realized that all might not be well on that particular smog choked, overcast, construction dust laden bit of NYC sidewalk. The groups weren't milling, but circling. Then I became aware that there were two protagonists with groups forming around each one. Heckling came from both sides, egging each other on. Oh dear.

All I could only think two things. The first, this isn't happening, they aren't really going to fight. And second, as the only adult standing around, (I work near the park, and had used a side entrance to the building) I couldn't let it happen. Besides can you imagine the headlines? Young boys fight, end up in hospital as "Fill in the Blank" Employee stands idly by, watching, or turns her back, or something...I don't know but it would have been bad I'm sure.

So here I am wading into the fray as soon as the preliminary shoves are over, trying to shout over the din and calm the testosterone induced adrenaline surges. All I could think to yell was "Do I need to call the "Company" Security Guards? Over and over again. One of the would-be fighters glanced down at the Company ID badge I held in my hand and backed off immediately, the intense desire in him to beat the crap out of the other kid dampened. Some small corner of my brain recognized this, so I swung it with vigor at the rest, card in one hand (you know, to look official) and cell phone in the other.

The crowd started to break up, but it took a little while to calm down the other half of the crowd. I vaguely remember gently rubbing the arm of one young man and saying "Settle down, settle down." He was trying to incite the crowd to riot again.

I don't know what I was thinking to have waded into the middle of that crowd, must have been the "I can't let this happen" part of me. In the end it all worked out, the crowd dispersed. Half of it went one way, the other headed off in the opposite direction. Disaster averted.

But there was a moment there when I was in the middle, with my back to the half of the gang I had mostly calmed down when I thought. "Um, this probably isn't a good idea. What If I get jumped from behind?" I suppose it would have been okay eventually....The building has security cameras, they'd eventually see me getting beat up...and later after I'd calmed the boys down, two guys I know from IT walked by. I'm sure they would've played Good Samaritan and scraped me off the pavement.

Just after the IT guys passed by, I finally called my Brother-in-Law Nick. Unfortunately, he had to listen to gibberish for about 15 seconds since my ability to form coherent sentences had fled, by then, the shakes had set in.

So there you have it. The story of how I stopped a gang war. Well it was a large group of boys, and they were about to fight. If that isn't a gang war I don't know what is, I swear it was just like West Side Story. Except there wasn't any singing and dancing, and it was definitely a lot scarier.

Bon Voyage WIP, aka Freedom!

I mailed my manuscript off to The Professor and The Mother of Boys today. It felt good to hand it over to the US Mail system.

I’m looking forward to my time away from the story. In about a month or so, I’ll be able to look at it with fresh eyes. Plus, it’ll give me the chance to catch up on some reading, and work on some photos that I’ve been itching to retouch. I’ve also thought about starting another book, this one outside of the adventure and genre that I’ve been working on since October. I’ll keep you posted.

The weather is supposed to be nice this weekend. I think I’ll spend some time in the park. Talked myself out of buying the Canon Rebel X camera again tonight. I Really, Really want it. As I am currently camera-less, keep me in mind if you have an old one you want to send my way. Or if you work for Canon or Nikon, send one to me, I’ll write up a great review. Well, ‘great,’ meaning that it’ll be well written. Can’t say if it’ll be positive, but I have high hopes.

-Bitter

Technopeasants Unite! aka Not at Home

In honor of International Pixel-Spattered Technopeasant Day, I present a short story by The Professor who so graciously accepted the invitation to contribute.

Feel free to share (non-commercially) The Professor's story with family and friends, although if you decide write about it, please link back to this entry rather than host it on your personal site (so that I can track how many people read it).

As John Scalzi said so well, "This novel fragment is yours free to read; you don't need to pay me a damn thing for it. However, if you find yourself enjoying it so much that you feel the need to show your appreciation in the form of cash, allow me to suggest that rather than sending the cash to me, you instead send it to Reading is Fundamental, which is an organization that supports literacy in children and adults..."

A couple good links to find more Technopeasant stories.

John Scalzi's The Durant Chronicles
The International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Blog
And the woman who helped make it official, Jo Walton. This takes you to a list of stories that were posted in honor of the day.

Happy Reading!
M. Bitter

*******************

Hey Bitter,

As promised:

Not at Home

When I was too young to know what a calendar was, or that holidays were predetermined and fixed in their periodicity, or even that days followed each other in an orderly, fixed sequence, I knew the Fourth of July. When I was little, the Fourth of July was fireworks.

Every time we’d go to Grandma’s (unless there was snow on the ground), I’d sneak a look in the closet in Grandma’s breezeway. I knew that sometimes there would be boxes and boxes of wreaths and flowers, which meant that we’d spend the day driving. I knew that there’d often be nothing out of the ordinary—coats and mysterious garment bags hanging out of my reach, assorted bottles of water and taped-up cardboard boxes on the floor. But sometimes, there would be a gigantic box, open on one broad side, full of fireworks. And when there was, it was the Fourth of July.

To me, the Fourth of July meant the ‘rockets’ red glare’ over the street in front of Grandma’s house. It meant lighting snakes with Uncle Clark, my dad’s only brother, sparklers at dusk, and watching as Uncle Clark and Aunt Erna took turns lighting off fountains and firecrackers, Roman candles, bottle rockets and sundry other explosives and missiles while Grandma instructed and ordered and Mom and Dad probably worried. We’d spend what felt like hours watching things blow up, and search out ‘duds’ the next morning.

It was Grandma that decided when I was old enough to light fireworks myself, my small punk-holding hand guided by her own or an aunt’s. I lit little whirling things, simple bottle rockets or Saturn missiles. And I loved every minute.

A few years ago, I took my oldest son, Evan, then four years old, to buy fireworks down in Ohio, where the variety (if not the abundance) reminds me of the South Dakota of my childhood Independence Days. I look at the hundred-dollar boxes of assorted fireworks like the ones Grandma always had for the Fourth, and my fingers itched. I reined myself in, sticking to sparklers and ground-bloom flowers and a couple of spectacular Roman candles. But every Fourth, I bring my boys out, way past their bedtime, to watch as the neighbors and I light our fireworks. And every time I do, I think of Grandma, and magical childhood nights under an exploding sky.

Fireworks weren’t Grandma’s only magic. I remember visiting Grandma once when I was maybe nine or ten years old. We’d driven all day in a rattling old Plymouth Duster to arrive at Grandma’s after dark. It must have been late in the fall, because although I don’t remember snow, even though it was already dark it wasn’t so late that we were sent immediately to bed. Instead, as Grandma talked to the folks, she got out cookies and poured milk into mugs, and called my brothers and sister and me to sit around the table.

Cookies and milk at bedtime. I was more than a little in awe. This was something that people did on television, not in real life. This was a tradition from a fabled, alternative reality, some sort of domestic ideal—and yet, there they were. Cookies and milk, and Grandma gently prodding us to sit up to the table and indulge.

Few prods were required. My 10-year-old disbelief wasn’t going to slow down my 10-year-old fondness for all things sugary, and I dove in, as did my brothers. And that’s where the next twist occurred—Grandma hadn’t told us how many cookies we could have. It began to dawn on me that she wasn’t going to—I could eat as many cookies as I wanted. This was something akin to finding religion or falling in love in its novelty. I remember looking surreptitiously at my parents, waiting for someone to stop me, but they didn’t (though Mom may have given me a look or two).

Many milk-and-cookie evenings followed. To me, they epitomize Grandma’s generosity of spirit and her connection to traditions of hospitality that may be fading from America. To me, those cookies, whether they were Grandma’s version of Aunt Enzie’s peanut cookies or a big bag of Oreo double-stuffs, were abundance, warmth, acceptance, and understanding. I’m 33 years old now, and live half a country away from Grandma. We get to visit only rarely. And I have to admit that, when we do, a little piece of me still hopes that we’ll get there a little late, and that Grandma will insist we have milk and cookies before bed.


L. D. Taylor