hogglestock

I just returned from a great, if short, trip to British Columbia (which I will write more about later). While I was in Vancouver, I remembered a little factoid from my one previous trip there about five years ago. The Starbucks in VanCity have the BEST fudge oatmeal bars in the world. I am thinking about buying them in bulk. But that would make me a little bulkier than I want to be. I haven’t tried this recipe, but it says it is for the Starbucks Oat Fudge Bars. Bake a batch and send a few my way.

You may recall that I was going to try and not acquire anything unnecessary until we buy a house next year. And then I had a few minor slips here and here.

Well, since then all hell has broken loose–at least as it relates to that goal. I get no prizes for largely limiting my unauthorized acquisitions to books. It is so difficult to go to great used bookstores and not buy something. You might say “stay the heck out of bookstores”. But on the very short list of places that give me pure joy, bookstores are right at the top. The money spent on these books has been pretty low (thanks to the “used” part) but the stacks of books, unread and read, are becoming structurally unsafe. Toss in a few classical CDs I bought after determining I needed some fresh fodder for my iPod, a box of travel-themed stickers (Am I a 13 year old girl? What the heck am I going to do with them?), a pair of sneakers to relieve my literally aching feet, and it all adds up to an abandoned goal.

The good news is that I don’t really beat myself over unmet goals. This will become especially apparent when I do the final reckoning of my 40 by 40 list next month as I leave my 30s behind and face the ever-quickening march to death. And before my Dad chimes in (Ernie in Peoria) and tells me to get over myself and my perpetual mid-life crisis, I am actually just being funny about the march to death part. It is true of course, but it doesn’t bother me in the same way that it did a few years ago.

Now I can’t wait to “acquire” a house next year so I can find room (in fact a whole room) for all of those books…

Upon closer inspection, bits of a city start to peek out. The bucolic scence gives way to post-industrial lower Manhattan.

The High Line is a linear park made from the remnants of an elevated freight rail line that ran from the Meat Packing District on the West Side of lower Manhattan all the way up to midtown. The first segment of the park just opened to the public and goes from Gansevoort Street up to about 20th Street. Currently you have to enter the park (as seen below) from the Gansevoort Street entrance. Eventually the park will go up to 33rd Street.

For decades the rail line was unused and ever decaying. As if humans needed a reminder that we are superfluous to life on this planet, it also proved to be a repository for all kinds of wild flora eager to take back this thin slice of Earth. Any seed with even a little bit of moxie managed to find fertile soil on the tracks turning the abandoned line into an urban meadow. The truly wild meadow is no longer there, but the park designers, and the great Dutch landscape architect Piet Oudolf did an amazing job recreating a space that manages to maintain the wild spirit of the High Line.

Entering the High Line at Gansevoort Street one is greeted by the Standard Hotel which straddles part of the line.