quinnkdotme

Well, I am safely ensconced or trapped, depending on your point of view, in the Best Western by JFK.  It was recently redone, so it’s hella clean, but it’s in the middle of nowhere!  It’s located next to the garage for the department of sanitation, and it also features a lovely view of the department of transportation’s salt shack.  So if I am craving some road salt tonight, I can wander over.

Checking in, I was offered two options for food:  the shuttle to the casino or take out menus.  I will stick with my ziploc baggie of cherries that I brought along for the bus ride.

Have been reading up for the new job, and thinking that since I have to get up early, maybe I should catch some zzzzs.

Also, of note, I have averted my housing crisis.  Tuesday, I return from Boston, but I don’t have access to my sublet yet.  And, for reasons beyond me, the price of NY hotels jumps to $400/night… in the cheap places.  So what’s a gal to do?  I was thinking of posting my disaster on Facebook for an A.P.B. requesting a couch, but thankfully the sublet people have surfaced, and I will be staying in my new digs.

Housing crisis over, I now have time to contemplate my impending fashion crisis.  I had to pack a week’s worth of clothes including 2 suits as well as my bedding and a towel for my sublet into a teeny suitcase – that I can carry-on the flight tomorrow.  I have managed to get it all in, but I think I will be looking somewhat bedraggled by the weekend.  Hoping that my room isn’t cold because all I have is a sheet set.  I guess I could always head to the local Duane Read and purchase a cheap-o fleece, but I would really like to avoid adding any  more clutter to my life.  I can’t believe what a pain it is to move stuff for a 2 month sublet.  Good grief.  Must learn to be minimalist…. ugh, tired, must learn to spell minimalist.

Well, on that note, I’m going to peer out at my beautiful view of the dept. of sanitation’s parking lot, and head to bed.

As ever,

K. Quinn

to come up with things to blog about.

Sometimes, as I go through my day, I recognize little foibles or happenings that could be made into amusing anecdotes…. or maybe I just think they are funny and you all think my life must be very dull.  Hmmm, I’ll have to think about that one.

In any case, let me start this story with… I love my dad.  Somehow after two weeks away from State College, it has erased my father’s memory that I have spent the past 6 months here.  As we drove around doing errands (actually transferring ownership of my car to him), he pointed out the various landmarks to me as if I had never seen them.  Yes, I actually did know that the giant pile of stones just outside of Penn State Campus was a Pennsylvania furnace.  I knew that in December, and it hasn’t changed in the many, many times we have passed it.  I love you, dad. 

Less funny, is the 45 minute debate I just had with my parents on where to stay and what to do with hotel reservations, cancellations and fees I have incurred for changing travel plans.  I booked a room through Hotels.com for my first two nights in NY because my sublet wasn’t available.  I booked the room while I was in France.  The penalty for my organization is…. I am now in Boston for those two nights, so when I went to cancel my room I learned that my ability to cancel the room for a full refund expired last Sunday!  So now I am out $338, unless the hotel can resell the room!   Arrrrgghghh!   Plus, because I get back late from Boston, I can’t get the key to my sublet… so if I don’t succeed in stalking down my new roommate to be… I need to get another room for Tuesday night.  And guess what, the cheapest room anywhere in Manhattan is $400.  Seriously? 

I have friends in NY, but this is the worst week possible – nobody has a couch available.  Good grief – how complicated can this get? 

I won’t even go into the donkey soap debacle that has also been debated throughout my family and household.  Suffice it to say, I will not be giving donkey soap as gifts to anyone!!! Even though it supports a donkey sanctuary, and has rescued donkeys I know and love…. evidently soap that contains donkey milk is too creepy for people stateside.  I am going to side with the French on this one- they don’t seem to have a problem with this… . and yes I know certain small parts of that population actually eat horsemeat so what’s a little donkey milk…. but we use sheep, goat and cow’s milk with no concern. This is a losing argument I have discovered… so I will abandon it.  However, I will continue to financially support the donkeys, in spite of the jackass jokes, etc.

Really hate to end the blog on donkey soap note.  Hmm.

Wow, I can’t come up with anything. 

Thunderstorms here tonight.  Guess that will have to be it.

As ever,

K. Quinn

As you know, I am moving to NYC. 

What I am now working on is how to break my move,my belongings, and perhaps even my psyche into different phases.  For example, I learned yesterday that I need to go to Boston for the first two days of my job.  So, now I need to pack for Boston keeping in mind the fact that if I fly up there I am limited on toiletries and what to bring… unless I do the dreaded thing of checking a bag.  But I will also have 3.5 days to deal with in NY… in a new sublet with no supplies, until my parents show up next weekend with my bags.  Now I feel like I am headed off to college with mom and dad helping me settle in, and thank goodness they are ready and willing.

I need to bring my duvet and sheets to NY, but I don’t want to bring them to Boston.  Ok, I will bring sheets with me to Boston, and hope for warm weather the first days in NY.  I need to bring a couple dishes, but again I don’t want to bring them to Boston.  So, I will have take out for the first week.  You can see where this is headed.

I only sublet for two months – so it’s sort of like summer camp in NY.  No real need to bring a bunch of stuff that I need to move in two months…. so what to bring?  Work clothes – a given.  A couple of books.  My French dictionary?  My French teacher banned me from using it… I was pretty compulsive with it, I admit.  But what if my new class insists on it.  It does however weigh a lot.  Ahhh, decisions.  A couple of DVDs to entertain me?  Legal papers?  Who brings legal papers to camp?

And then the next phase, which I look forward to…. the full on move into my own apartment.  August!  By September I will be able to delve into books I haven’t seen in months.  I will probably question the rationale I used to pack up certain electronics or kitchen items that have by then made it across country, take up too much space, and never be used.  I did while in LA at the beginning of this week, part ways with a collection of canning tools and an ice cream maker I never used.  …. sniff…ah, well.

Which brings me  back to where I started… how much and what to bring to Boston?

As ever,

K. Quinn

Well, LA was surreal at various moments…. like my hippy experience at Aroma Cafe… my friend and I went to get coffee.  He asked for a scone, and they responded, “grrrreat……(pause- insert cricket chirping here) any scone?”  My friend:  What kind do you have?”  Hippy response, “Weeellll, let’s go and see!”  Then there is a somewhat sexy, breathless litany of the various scone types.  After choosing a scone, my friend and I head to register to pay.  The following conversation ensued:

Register guy that had to have been smoking:  Hey

Giant pause

Us:  Hey

Giant pause

Register guy THTHBS:  Are you being helped?

Us (after another baffled pause): Um, we just need to pay.

Register guy THTHBS:  Great……………………….OK…………………..Sure!

Seriously?  Maybe I am ready for NY.

Left LA early Wednesday morning – had way too much luggage as I was attempting to empty my LA storage space.  The guys at Flyaway weren’t so happy with me – and try as I might, batting my eyelashes at 5 in the morning was pretty painful.  But it either worked, or they just felt plain sorry for me.

Drove home from NY and arrived in PA about 130AM.  Being on LA time, I just stayed up til 230AM trying to complete my French homework… because silly me scheduled a lesson first thing Thursday morning.

And, then I woke up today to one of those wonderful days- lots of good things happening:

Wonderful email from a friend.

Wonderful email from another friend.

Wonderful text from another friend.

Discovered I will be going to Boston first two days at new job for orientation.

Hair colored, hair cut, and my stylist goes to NY often – so she can do my color in NY.

It’s all good.

So, now watching movie with Verbal asleep on my lap.  It’s a happy day.

As ever,

K. Quinn

Well, I have just come back from the burn center’s family camp weekend which was wonderful, sad, happy, and endearing… but what happens at camp stays at camp… and in the hearts and heads of those who shared it… so I won’t be blogging about it.

As I was riding back to a friend’s house, I was amazed to find comfort in the boring mundane scenes of the Los Angeles freeway system.  The brown, dried out grasses and hillsides; the brown fake hacienda appearance shopping malls; McDonald’s with tile roofs – also trying to embrace the hacienda architecture; the smoggy haze that envelops the Valley; things that had become, at least to me, synonymous with ugly and represented the parts of LA that I wanted to leave behind.  There is beauty in LA – mountains, beaches, parks, etc., but the color and beauty of LA that I most miss is the colors of the wonderful friendships that I hold extremely dear to me.

I realized as I looked with fondness upon the urban desert landscape, that my comfort was in the fact that it is also so familiar.  For the past six months, I have been living in Pennsylvania.  There have been true moments of beauty – sunrises, sunsets, walks in the parks and woods, and drives through the mountains.  But I have resisted calling Pennsylvania home and adopting the new landscape.  It has been my temporary status that has kept me an outsider as much as the short duration of my stay.

It seems strange to me that some time in the coming years, I will have that same sense of familiar with New York.  Is that even possible?  How can the bustling city that throbs and pulses and seems so alive be a place that will become blandly familiar.  I’m sure aspects of it will, but it is all so new for me right now.  And I suppose that sense of mystery, adventure, or just plain unknown, is what is so unrelaxing in my life right now.  So my brain is essentially clinging to LA as a sort of respite from the limbo I have been living.

Does this even make sense?  Or am I so exhausted from the weekend that I am not only not waxing poetic, I am waning un or il-philosophically.

As ever,

K. Quinn

I hate the end of vacations because in my mind I am already starting to turn my brain back into ‘reality’ mode.  So with two days left…. I’m already making the switch.

This morning, the rain finally let up.  I was able to hike up to the Chateau de Fressac – a 13th century stone chateau that is in ruins on a high overlook.  The views over the valley from up there are incredible.  And, the workout isn’t too bad either.  Because it’s the end of May, all of the flowers are in bloom, so my path was adorned with tiny corn flowers, pyramid orchids, white and yellow meadow flowers and brambles of briar rose.  The smell of the recent rains has brought up all the woodsy smells, and while wet leaves always smell a little musty, the smells of fresh wild thyme and evergreens is wonderful.

Also because of the rain, the path was incredibly muddy at the bottom.  As a French acquaintance described, “It is too moisty.”

After coffee this morning, we headed down to a meadow to pull up the electric fencing and poles to allow a local farmer to bale up the hay.  I was given a plastic spool and wound round and round the wire string as I walked around the entire meadow.  There is something very mesmerizing as you methodically wind a cord around the spool and carefully walk through yards and yards of meadow flowers.    It’s also a  little tedious.

We have just fed the animals lunch, and now are considering bacon and egg sandwiches for ourselves.  Then Estelle and I will head into town to do some touristy gift shopping.  Finally, I have a preliminary meeting with a lawyer regarding the house at 5pm.

The sun has come out, and though the wind has picked up, I am hoping it will blow all the dreary weather away.

As ever,

K. Quinn

Well, it’s a rainy day in France, so I can afford to catch up on blogs.  Also, I finally found an adaptor that will work with my computer’s 3 prong plug… forgot that it isn’t a 2 prong.

Friday, Estelle and I went to a “Stretching” class.  It was nice to exercise after a sort of start and stop couple of days of traveling and adjusting to a new time zone.  I enjoyed the workout, and I enjoyed that I was able to follow most of the French directions… so a good morning, indeed.  Next, we drove over to my house to see the state of affairs since winter tenants.  I don’t know what I expected, but my friends who were lovely tenants left everything in ship-shape order.  The garden hadn’t been touched since December, but we were able to clear the weeds in about half an hour.  Inside, everything was neat and dry.  The only really strange thing for me was that the furniture in every room had been rearranged.  Some of the changes were improvements, but it was just so odd to walk into each room having no idea what to expect.  The previous tenants had also left me various odds and ends so I have a new small dresser in the dining room for plates and things, a couple of new lamps, and a rather abysmal needlepoint picture… the jury is still out on that one.

Sadly, plumbing has been a curse at the house – so I discovered that both toilets were on the blink.  And it looked like the roof may have leaked in the upstairs bedroom, also an ongoing battle, but later investigation revealed perhaps the roof is ok.  Oh, I hope.

Friday night we headed to a young French woman’s house for a sort of housewarming dinner.  We were there with a couple from England who are actually going to rent my house this summer, and the young woman’s new boyfriend.

Dinner was an assortment of tapas which we weren’t sure if that was the meal or the entree into the meal.  Several hours and bottles later, we were to understood that this was indeed the meal.  I kept finding myself wondering if there was an In and Out anywhere on our route home because all of these little crudite bits just weren’t going to cut it…. no such luck.  That’s not to say the meal wasn’t delicious.  It is to say that I could have been more judicious with my libation intake.

I also spent a portion of the night speaking (in French – huzzah!) to the young (i.e. very young) boyfriend.  Now I am being teased terribly that I was a Mrs. Robinson of sorts, monopolizing this boy all evening.  And in my defense, let me just say… 1) he wasn’t even my type, 2) we were both stuck seated in the corner, and 3) he didn’t speak much English – which is what we were all speaking – so when he discovered I could muddle my way through a conversation in French, he wouldn’t let go.  This situation has been much commented on for the past few days…. hoping it will all be forgotten soon.

Saturday, we went to the morning at Sommieres – as did everyone and his wife, according to Estelle.  Parking took forever, we had to squeeze through the crowds, and there were enormously long lines everywhere!  We finally parked ourselves at a cafe and waited to meet up with my friends and former neighbors who happened to be in town from Cambodia.

Ach!  Have spent too much time on the computer, and I am being sought after.  Which means rain may have slackened and I need to go help with the hay for the horses.

As ever,

K. Quinn

Finally a follow-up to my last post…

Well, as opposed to last year’s ill-thought but much enjoyed Cinquo de Mayo party in France, the Ascension Day picnic and horse spectacle was semi-appropriate and there were no cultural blunders that I was aware of…. and I didn’t host it.

We headed to a local and ancient chateau where the grounds were open up to artists and horsemanship.  The artists’ work was displayed on stable walls and tables and the horses and riders did small demonstrations in a round pen.  I went with my friends Bill and Estelle as well as a young French woman called Natalie and a Moroccan woman named Fatyeh (sp?) and her baby daughter.  We met up with a couple, and we all lounged under the shade of a tree and munched on a wonderful picnic of roast chicken, sausages, and bread.  Then Fatyeh brought out amazing flatbread which she stuffed with curried vegetables and chicken, and then homemade pizzas!  We were stuffed!

It was a fantastically relaxed way to start day 2 of my French vacation.

And… because I am behind in my posting… and we are leaving for a market in about 2 minutes…. I must try to spell check this little blog and then finish this afternoon.

But as you can see, I’m not starving in France.

As ever,

K. Quinn

OK confession time here…. today is Ascension Day in French… and I am so jet-lagged, tired, and wined to know if I even spelled that correctly.  It is my first full day, but second day here.  And, I promise to get up tomorrow morning and share all the silliness… and there has been much silliness.

Let me summarize by saying…went to a horse spectacle… which in French sounds very grand, then came home and drank a ton of wine with a bunch of lovely people who had a democratic vote as to what I should do with my ex-husband’s very expensive road bike.  Suffice it to say, the bike may be doomed!

Will write in detail tomorrow, but it is almost 11 and I must go to sleep.

As ever,

K. Quinn

Tonight, I am in New York City!

I went to look at two sublets in the area near Columbia University – not quite Morningside Park.  Wow, what a difference from LA.  Both are two bedroom units with a roommate.  The first is in a fairly nice neighborhood, it’s actually around the corner from the restaurant that was featured regularly on Seinfeld.  The apartment is mini…dark, and small.  Ok… walk three blocks down and find a sunny slightly bigger (maybe?) apartment that is a 4th floor walk up. I could fit either of these apartments into the living room of my former apartment in LA… and everyone thought that was a small apartment.

I admit, the whole New York thing – is a bit overwhelming.  I just have to remember that when I first moved to LA, it was similarly overwhelming.  I remember the first time I drove to Hawthorne, I was gripping the steering wheel in a death grip.  So I am sure I will adjust and get used to things.

On the plus side, I could have eaten my way through about 20 different countries in my 10-block walk.  The smells were amazing!

Tomorrow, I head to the airport, and head off to France.  I know that trip will be whirlwind, but I am sure I will keep you all entertained.  Fortunately, I don’t think there will be any holidays that I can offend people by celebrating.  Cinqo de Mayo has already passed!

As ever,

K. Quinn