The Cat's Nuts

It’s a Tuesday morning again, and surprise, I’m at 35,000 feet, traveling to Columbus. Last week went quickly, and I was rewarded with a nice 4 day weekend when I was told not to fly out again until Tuesday, so that was a nice time. Although technically I had to work yesterday, I would say that my output was hardly that of a full work day, and there was a less than modest sprinkling of GranTourismo 4 in there, so I can’t say that I was working very hard.

Last Thursday, I got word that my company was just acquired by one of the largest consulting firms in the world. At first, I didn’t really know what to think about it, but then, after really thinking about what this would mean for me, and my upcoming plans to get out of NYC, I got to thinking that my overall interests may be better served by sticking around. The integration between the two companies isn’t going to really get going until the start of 2007, but by that point, I will be able to claim employment, thus making my position at the consultancy that much more appealing on my resume. The fact that by staying at my current job 2-3 months longer than I had wanted to, I could get a world class company listed as my first job, isn’t a bad thing, so at this point, I have jettisoned plans to jump ship.

What does that mean for me at this point? I don’t really know. The current plan was to leave NYC on January 31st. I was going to move to Boston, but I don’t really know if that is going to be an option. The new firm does have an office in Cambridge, so with any luck, perhaps I could move there. The other issue is that Laura is looking to stay in New York through April, and she would very much like me to stay living in the apartment with her. I don’t know what I’m going to do about things as of now, but I feel that in a month or two from now, I’ll be able to talk to the HR people at my firm and tell them of my hopes. With any luck, they’ll give me a better idea of where I stand.

This Saturday night, I had the unfortunate circumstance of losing my cell phone…which happens to be a Blackberry. Laura and I were in a cab, and I took out my phone to look at the time. After glancing down at it, I shoved it back into my pocket. A few minutes later, the cab came to a stop and Laura and I got out. As normal, I patted my pockets to make sure that I had my wallet and phone, because I have lost them in cabs before. Sure enough, my Blackberry wasn’t in there. We quickly waved down the cab again, and opened the back door. It being late, it was quite dark, and the tiny dome light in the cab was less than helpful in aiding in my search. I ran my hands all along the floor of the cab and along the seat of the vehicle, but no luck. The cabbie looked back there too, and couldn’t find anything. Befuddled, we let the cabbie go, and I lost my phone. I still, in the light of sobriety, have no idea what happened. I wasn’t even that drunk. Ugh.. That’s what happens when you go to an open bar I guess.

In the past few weeks, I have been less than active in my blogging, and worse than that, I have been a TERRIBLE photoblogger on my other site. It’s just been miserable with traveling and such. I have kind of made a pact with myself that in the coming month (November) I am going to really cut down on the drinking and make some time for the important personal things that I enjoy doing. This past month of October, I was able to, except for this weekend, really cut my video gaming down a whole lot, so after that success, the next one on my list is drinking. I figure that it’ll be easy enough on business trips, so it’ s just a matter of weekend control. Shouldn’t be that hard I suppose. We’ll see.

My battery is about to die on my laptop, so this is going to be the end of the post. Enjoy.

Posted by Michael at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Damn. I can't believe it's almost November already. It seems like just a few days have passed and all the sudden Halloween is on Tuesday. Amazing.

As I said, I've been traveling out to Columbus, Ohio for the past few weeks, and as it stands right now, that seems like it's going to continue for the near future, probably till into January. But there is bigger news than my extended stay in Ohio. As it turns out, my company was just acquired by a much larger consulting firm. My firm was around 5000 people strong, 4000 of which were in India. The place that just acquired us, for 1.3 Billion in cash no less, has around 65,000 people working for them. That just sounds like an accounting nightmare to me, but apparently it works for them. So what does this mean to me?

Well, first off, the company that just purchased us has a much better name and reputation than that of the company from which I was originally hired, so that's an obvious benefit. What it also does, it makes me think that I should stick around and work with them for awhile so that I can officially, without really fudging it on my resume, show that I worked for this huge multi-national company. As of right now, I don't know how that is all going to work out. We're not even scheduled to start the whole integration process until the start of 2007. I am thinking that I should just suck it up and stick to my original thought and stay with my "job" for a full year. At least by June, I would have a full year invested, and I could get out carrying the name of this new company on my shoulders.

The other issue that comes up is my move to Boston and how this whole thing will effect that. As it stands right now, Laura and I are planning on living in this apartment till the end of January, and at that time I was going to move up to Boston with my brother. Easy enough. That was going on the assumption that I would be quitting my job and finding something new to do up there. At this point, Laura has voiced to me that it if necessary, we could stay in this apartment longer than the end of January, but I don't know what I'm going to do as of yet.

As I have so vehemently stated in the past, no, I’m not particularly thrilled with my job, but at the same time, I think the benefit of having a prestigious known employer on your resume, and having a decent tenure at a single place of employment is a good thing, especially when you are someone like me, that already has some gaps (read being booted from school) in his resume that are skimmed over by some crafty resume construction, could really be helped out by not having any more sketchy stuff on there. Not to mention that since I have been involved in this project in Ohio, things are getting better. It’s amazing what having a little work to do and expectations to meet does for your outlook on a job. While it’s still not something that I see myself doing long term, I think that I could suck it up for another 6 months or a year till something amazing falls in my lap or I decide to take the plunge and start my own business, whatever that may be. Not to mention that the longer that I keep working at my current job, the longer I’m going to have good money coming in, so that’s always a good thing, especially if I end up in Boston paying less rent and not getting triple taxed by the New York City Government….bastards. We’ll see.. I have a few months still, so I’m going to keep looking for more jobs and see where it all takes me.

I was actually starting to think that maybe my best move wouldn’t be moving to Boston. The main draw for me there, was that my brother had a place for me, and that I could go there easily, but when it comes down to it, I really just want to get the hell out of NYC, and I could do that in easier places than Boston. I was told by HR that I could move to DC, Philly, or Atlanta without any problem and easily keep working, but I just don’t know if I could handle moving to a city without anyone there that I knew. I think that it would be fairly hard to start like that, especially with a job like mine, where I don’t really have any co-workers that are from my geographical location. I’m going to have to think about it a bit more.

My other option, which, in my mind, isn’t really an option, is to just say fuck it and move back in with my parents for 4-5 months while I sort things out. Miserable? Yep. But at least I could save a boatload on food and rent, could probably carve out a solid piece of my student loans in the process, and at the point when my parents were ready to kill me, I could bail and go wherever, having the ability to leverage the acquisition. Although this sounds great in theory, taking free room and board has it’s problems, so I don’t think that I’ll be doing that.

Posted by Michael at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Haven’t posted in awhile, so I figured that now that I’m just hanging out in my hotel room in Columbus, Ohio, now would be a good time to write a post. Things have been pretty crazy recently, so it’s not really a surprise that I’ve not posted in about a week. So I’ll give a little run down of what’s been going on without really getting into the nitty gritty of it.

Anyone that has been reading my blog knows that I’ve not been particularly happy with my job, but things have kind of leveled out. I’ve been put on a job in Columbus, doing the same sort of stuff that I was doing the last time I was out here last month. While I’m still not excited about it, I am keeping busy, and that’s good to combat boredom. The project that I’m on will keep me traveling for the next month, or possbibly even two, so while that sucks that I will be traveling quite so much, it’s good because I’ll be able to save money while not paying for anything, and that I’m actually doing real work. The bad part is that my supervisor, whom I really liked, is leaving after this week, so I don’t even know what’s going to happen next week once we tell the company that we’re working for, that the lead project manager is going to be leaving. Overall, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens when we tell them. Hopefully it’ll all work out and we’ll continue to work with them.

One of the main reasons that traveling is good, is that I’ll be saving money. While I’m not all that into acquiring massive amounts of savings, while it obviously is good, I actually have something that I’m saving for. After much discussion, it has been determined that I’m going to try to move to Boston in the coming months. I don’t exactly know when that’s going to happen, or what that’s going to mean for my “career”, but it will be a nice change, particularly because I’m going to be leaving New York City, and again, for those of you that have been reading for awhile, you know that I don’t particularly enjoy being in this city. I have this sneaking feeling that I’m going to be needing to save every dollar that I can in preparation for this move, so the traveling will totally keep me in the black.

In the coming months, there’s going to be a lot going on. The biggest of all the events in the next month is that Laura is going to be taking her LSAT on December 2nd. That’s quite a big deal as it will, after she scores an amazing score, enable her to attend a law school that is appropriate to the amazing abilities that she has. I really wish her the best, and over the next coming months, I’m going to be helping to support her in whatever ways I can.

The other day, I was sitting in the office in Jersey City, and I realized that I had a message on my Crackberry. I looked through all my various messages, and couldn’t find the damn message. I figured that it was an error on the blackberry server, so I called up Sprint to find out what was going on. After calling 3 various numbers, and explaining to the various Sprint people what was going on, I was finally transferred to blackberry support. After spending an hour on the phone with them, and trying all the various methods that they prescribed, I ended up losing the damn connection, and AGAIN had to call them back. The next person that I got was a young woman. She explained to me, in a fairly unprofessional manner, that I needed to totally delete everything from my blackberry and then reload it on there.

“Umm, Miss, I can’t exactly do that, because if I lose my contact information and my emails, and the Enterprise server doesn’t reload the information, I’m going to be in rather big trouble.”

“Well… umm… can you back it up?”
“I don’t know… you tell me”
“Ummm… hold on…”

She proceeded to put my on hold for 15 minutes, and then returned…

“Yes, I can walk you thought that.”

So another hour goes by while I’m waiting on the whole process, I kind of assume that the woman doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about. So I asked her

“So… how long have you been working at the Advanced Blackberry support?”
“What is today?”
“It’s the 12th.”
She pauses….
“Huh… one month and a day”
I thought to myself…figures…

“So… did you work for the regular support before moving onto the advanced support desk?”
“Oh no… not at all. I worked at Wal-Mart… this is much better”

Fucking figures. Of course, I mean… why would you put an experienced person on the “Advanced Support” when you can hire some uneducated Wal-Mart worker to do it for much cheaper… Ugh… At least they don’t out source it to India.

Overall, I thought it was just funny. Go Sprint.

For the remainder of this week, I’m going to be working out of Columbus, returning back to NYC on Thursday evening. This weekend, while I don’t have any plans, I hope to make it over to Brewtopia, which is being held at the Javits Center this weekend. We’ll see how it goes. I haven’t seen Laura in about two weeks, so it’ll be nice to get home and catch up with her.

Now that I have some free time, I’ll post tomorrow too, so I’m going to save some other frustrating work news, and my plans for finding employment in Boston, till tomorrow.

Posted by Michael at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I died.. I simply died when I watched this:

Last night was an interesting night. I ended up going up to Columbia for an information session with my company. All in all, the info session went well, and I feel like I was able to provide some valuable insight into how my company works, and what it's like to be an entry level consultant.

Afterwards, I ended up coming home. When I got home, I realized that it was the Barcade 2nd Anniversary party, so I just had to go. Barcade is about five blocks from my house, so even though I had no one to go with me (Damn you Ryan!!) I headed out anyway... and no, there's nothing wrong with going out to a bar by yourself.

I ended up meeting a group of girls from Wisconsin (and California), so that was interesting. Had a good two hours or so of conversation. When they left the bar for the night (around 12:30), I decided that it was also time for me to head home. Knowing that I had only gotten two drinks on my credit card, and that Barcade has a $15 minimum, I decided to have another drink "for the road". Considering how they frown down on that sort of debachery, I ended up chugging the beer....bad idea. Needless to say, when I woke up the next morning (today) I had a slight bit of a hangover.

Last night was the first night that I ever gave out my blog address, and it was actually a rather awkward thing. You never think about it when you are applying for your domin name "Geee... how strange is it going to be to try to explain to someone why you named your blog "the cat's nuts"". Yep, it's weird, and I don't think more than 20 people in the entire world have heard the expression "it's the cat's nuts", so that makes it even harder. Hell, if I named my blog "six of one, half dozen of another" people would totally get it, but "the cat's nuts" just doesn't fly. Oh well. Not much I can do about it at this point.

Anyway, seeing as how I'm heading up to Boston today, I should get some work done. Enjoy he beautiful day.

Posted by Michael at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

So after weeks of sitting around and doing nothing at work, I have finally been assigned to a project. This comes to me as great news, even though the project happens to be located in Columbus, Ohio. The project is slated to last anywhere from 6-10 weeks, but with luck, it will be done before the end of the year. I don't think that the placement could have come at a better time, because I feel that if I had continued along the path of nothingness any longer, all of my non-work related internet habits would have eventually been seen by someone who actually mattered, and that would have been...well... bad.

Last night, Allison, a friend from Columbia, came into the city, and we ended up going over and meeting up with a few other people at an apartment over on 21st and 3rd. The evening was your typical reminiscing about college life, laughing at old jokes, and catching up on current times. After a massive serving of sushi, and 3 bottles of wine, we all decided that it was about time to call it a night. After walking the 8 blocks down the beloved L Train, I spotted one of the most dreaded posters one can see. The sign said that the L train would be shut down at midnight. I was relieved to see, after looking at my watch, that I had arrived at the train station at 11:42, so I had plenty of time to catch the last train before the subway closed down.

I quickly trucked down the stairs and was greeted at the turnstiles by the booth monkey who was gathering up her belongings, 15 minutes before her shift ended. Yes, the MTA did it again. Ignored their own fucking signs and just shut the train down 30 minutes early. I hate the MTA.

With my head hung low, I walked up the stairs of the subway, resigning myself to the fact that I was going to be throwing down $20 for a cab ride home. Upon reaching the top of the stairs I was greeted by a short Asian man. Clutching the truck of his skateboard in one hand, he gingerly smoked a cigarette in the other.

"Where you head? Brooklyn?" He asked me with a very heavy accent.
"Ummm, yeah, you want to share a ride?" I asked, fairly timidly...

He agreed, and we found that he lived only a few blocks from me towards Greenpoint, so it worked out fairly well. We hailed the next cab and hopped in. As we were going over the Williamsburg Bridge, he turned to me, pointed at my camera and asked

"You photographer?"
"Umm, yeah, I try to be."
"What you take picture of?"
"Ehhh, well I like to shoot animals and landscapes, but frankly, there aren't really all that many of those around here, so I just shoot at whatever."
"Oh..."

We didn't speak for the rest of the ride. I guess he doesn't like animals.

This weekend is going to be pretty exciting for me. I'm heading up to Boston on the fabled Fung Wah bus. $15 brings you from Chinatown all the way up to South Street Station in Boston. There aren't many better deals out there. I am heading up there to visit my brother. While my brother may not be the nicest of people, his biting wit, and sarcastic tones are often quite amusing, and make for an enjoyable visit. I figure that we're going to be drinking a bit of beer and probably watching some movies... who knows. Either way, it'll be nice to get out of NYC for a little bit.

Oh, and I've decided that I'm going to stop posting pictures up on this blog. I'll still post funny clips and things, but seeing as how I've set up my photoblog on my other page, it's just too difficult to remember what I have put up on there. So if you are in love with the pictures, feel free to visit my other page. Who knows, I may eventually just move this blog contents over there. At least it would force me to blog daily, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.

Posted by Michael at 09:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's been a few days since I posted anything meaningful, but that's okay I suppose because things have been pretty busy around the house. It's not that anything is going on, it's more of just that Laura and I have been keeping busy and going out and such.

This past weekend we went out to dinner with Ryan and Fran and went to Sweetwater over on North 6th and Bedford. While the food was quite good, I had a rather negative experience there. Anyone that knows me fairly well, knows that I have a very bad alergy to rats, and when I walk into a room that has a rodent infestation or even just has a rodent around (for example, I couldn't stay at my parents house because they used to have a Ginue Pig, and his dander was enough to throw me into a fit), I end up hacking and wheezing and breaking out in hives. Well, upon sitting in Sweetwater for 15 minutes, I began to weeze and started to get very flushed. I got up and went outside to get some fresh air.

After coughing up a few lovely balls of mucus, and blowing my nose in perhaps the harshest napkin I could have found...I made my way back inside. Now, being totally congested, and feeling the hives starting to build on my neck, I decided that it would be best to quickly eat my meal and get the hell out of there, and that's what we did. After we left, I was feeling better in around 15 minutes. So a word to the wise, if you even half way trust my rat detecting abilities, shy away from Sweetwater, because I would be a significantly large portion of money that they are a fairly bad rodent problem.

After Sweetwater, we made our way up the street to the Brooklyn Brewery. You really can't beat the Brooklyn Brewery as a place to go before you make your way out for an evening. For $3 a beer, you get brews fresh from the factory. It's great, and not to mention that you get to sample some stuff that's not available in retail sales. Laura and I threw down $20 for 7 beer tokens and started to down the Brooklyn Blast, which happens to be a Double IPA which comes in at a whopping 8% abv, so it's not your father's Schlitz. Needless to say, after downing 3 1/2 of those in an hour period, Laura and I were feeling pretty good.

After the brewery, Laura and I ended up going to the loft on Kent street where a few people that we hang out with live. Ryan and Fran came with us, and we spent a little bit of time there. Upon leaving and going to another bar, Laura realized that her Treo (smartphone) was no longer in her bag, after around 8-9 beers, she flipped out, I in turn flipped out on her and craziness ensued.

Eventually, after calling the police and filing a report, the night was over and we all moved on. It ceftainly made for a crazy night.

Since then, things have been pretty quiet and I figure they will continue to be quiet for the next week or so. Today, about an hour ago, Laura took off for a trip to Mississippi. She's going to be there for the rest of the week and over the weekend she's going to hit up Houston instead of coming back to NYC. I'm taking advantage of her being away and heading up to see my brother outside of Boston. It'll be nice to see him as I haven't been up to the Boston area in quite some time.

Anyway, I just wanted to throw out a quick update. Also, I have set up a daily Photoblog on my other domain name. If you are interested in finding this site, just ask me, as I don't want to mix my two domains as I still enjoy the freedom from people at work exploring my blog. I still plan on posting some of my photos here, but I figure that if I have a whole blog dedicated to photography, I'll be much betting off in terms of having the motivation to actually go out and get some new shots and to go through the archive of photos that I currently have.

Posted by Michael at 02:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Okay, I'm not going to get into the politics of the whole liberal vs. conservative, republican vs. democrats or any of that shit. What I can't stand is that a school like Columbia, that prides itself in it's ability to protest and be politically active, would stage such a miserable one-sided display of force-fed political thought. If they really believed in freedom of speech, then why the hell wouldn't they listen to the presentation. It's miserable. Just fucking miserable.

Me, being on of those "rich white kids" that went to Columbia, am appauded by their behavior and methods of furthering their own twisted contorted political ideas. Shame on you Columbia, and everything you stand for.

Posted by Michael at 02:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I found an informative little piece about Microsoft's new plans for copy protrecting it's new operating system, Vista.

According to the article, if MS finds out that you are running a pirated version of Vista, it's pretty much going to hold your computer's functionality for ransom. They will limit your connectivity and stop applications from running. Sounds a bit big brotherish to me. Now...let's be fair here, I can respect the fact that MS does need to protect their intellectual property, but at the same time, turning off functionality is going a step too far, a la the Sony Rootkit.

I doubt that in the end this proposed anti-pirating measure is going to be stuck down, but as for now, it's just another excellent reason to switch to Linux. Speaking of which, I'm just about to install Xubuntu, or perhaps Ubuntu Lite onto this terrible little old laptop that I have kicking around. Hopefully I can turn it into a Samba Server and finally have a method to share files.

Posted by Michael at 03:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After another day of sitting around and not really doing all that much, I’ve come to the conclusion that relying on other people to provide you with work is kind of like sitting around with your mouth open, hoping that something will fall in there, preferably food, but the fact of the matter is that even when something does go in there, it’s probably going to be something more akin to bird shit, so you aren’t going to want it anyway. I guess that’s just my overly optimistic view of things.

Recently I just finished reading the book Small Giants, by Bo Burlingham. It was an interesting book that went through about 10 businesses that were small and were kept small by the conscious decision of their proprietors. I found it interesting and actually quite heartwarming at times when they would describe the various acts of the entrepreneurs and their efforts to reward employees and to run their business in a way that would be the best for both profit and for the workers that were employed there. Reading about these various companies and their amazingly strong corporate cultures really make me look at the company that I work for and realize how little culture actually pervades into the workers. Seeing as how there is so little interaction between “team” members, except perhaps those on projects, I don’t really feel that there is any recognizable culture, even if they do constantly try to bring to light that there “supposedly” is a set culture. It’s kind of like saying “I have personality!” and then going silent…just hoping that people believe you. Either way, the book made me realize that eventually, once I have gotten to a point where I can start my own business, creating and following up with the philosophy that gets set is going to be an important key to creating a successful company. I totally recommend this book, it’s well worth the time it takes to read the 250 pages.

In addition to my reading of the Small Giants book, I’ve also started to get Entrepreneur magazine. Every little thing that I read about starting up a business just makes me really want to go crazy and just jump into it. I know that I can’t possibly start anything right now, seeing as how I don’t want to remain in New York City for any length of time, but it still got me thinking a little bit more about different types of businesses that I could run. One thing that came to mind that is kind of a business anomaly is a BOP (Brew on Premises). What it is, is a shop that you can go to where all the ingredients are provided to you so that you can make your own beer. They provide everything you need and the guidance necessary, and off you go. You come back two weeks later to bottle your beer and bam, you have 6 cases of premium homebrew. While this seems to me, someone that homebrews, to be a great and excellent idea, it has failed to be successful all over the country. Currently, there are around 41 (according to beeradvocate.com) BOPs in the United States, so that’s not very many. Pending on where Laura and I end up (hopefully Austin) I will definitely have to look into opening up some sort of BOP/Brewpub/Bar type establishment.

One o the major problems with a BOP is that I can’t really imagine that it would be all that profitable, and having a solid source of income is something that is fairly important to me, so I may end up looking into some other sort of industry. There are thousands of them out there, and seeing as how I have around a year to look into it, I plan on spending a bit of time in the coming months looking into various ideas that I come across.

Today, Laura found out that there are openings at her job. While I just started my job, I had her submit my resume anyway. Yes, I know that it’s not the best idea to leave your job after only 4 months, but at the same time, I could probably finagle a 7K raise, along with getting to work from home and not having the risk of long term travel that I am currently facing. The other huge benefit is that once Laura finds out where she is going to be going to Law School, we can move immediately, thus ridding us of the discontent that comes with living in New York City. Hopefully, in the next few days, we will hear something back from Laura’s job in terms of their interest in speaking to be about a position there, and if not, then I will continue to go about my currently boring existence.

Posted by Michael at 07:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today, being a Monday, I figured that I would hear back from my boss regarding if I was going to have any sort of work to do for the rest of the week/month/year, and unfortunately, his office has been quite silent. I went in there a few hours ago to talk to him about the whole “going to Tampa” assignement that had been discussed, and well… it didn’t go so well. He seemed irritated and didn’t really want to hear what I had to tell him. It seemed as if my desires to stay here and be bored, as opposed to flying to Florida to be bored, weren’t much of a concern to him. It kind of irritated me, but I being a good employee, sucked it up. Later on in the day, he asked me if I wanted to head out to lunch with him, so I agreed. This is not uncommon, so we headed out to the deli to get something to bring back to the office. On the way there, it became apparent to me as to why he seemed so angry earier in the day. Apparently, over the weekend, he forsook his Crackberry and purchased the new Nokia device that’s freshly available. Needless to say, I think it was causing him some major greif, and he was none too pleased.

“This fucking thing. It’s already out of batteries and it stopped working this morning.”

He spent the entire walk staring at the device, walking slowly and methodically down the sidewalk. It was actually quite annoying, because, once he realized that he was going to slow, he decided to crank up the pace, causing a generally irradic walking pace. The moral to this story is this: Don’t ask your boss for favors when he’s suffering from Crackberry withdrawal.

In light of this whole looming Tampa situation, Laura has been getting pretty upset because if I were to end up going down there, it would be a multiple month long project where I wouldn’t be around for 4 or 5 days a week. She’ really at the point where I honestly think she’s going to dump my ass if I don’t find a way around going down to Florida. I sent out an email to my “Coach”, telling her about the situation. Anyway… I’m not going to really worry about it until it’s right upon us, because I still think that it’s only around a 25% chance that I’ll end up going down there, so I don’t think it’s necessary to get my panties in a bunch thinking and worrying about it.

This weekend, Laura and I went over to the NYCBikes warehouse outlet sale. The sale was held in a 5000 sq. foot loft space close to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We didn’t really know what to expect when we walked in, but in retrospect, had I really known what it was going to be like, I think I would have prepared myself a little better. We walked in and there were boxes everywhere, with parts practically overflowing. On each box it was labeled as to the cost for each component. There was a huge rack of frames that were being sold, all for $100 a piece. I was very tempted to pick up a single speed frame so I could convert my current bike to a single speed, but in the end I decided that my perfectly functioning 20 year old Brookstone mountain bike didn’t really need anything to make it work. Laura ended up purchasing a seat for her bike, because the gel one that she has tends to get sopping wet because we keep the bikes outside. Laura also purchased a basket which was eventually, after a failed attempt at hooking it to the front of her bike, attached to the rack on the back of mine.

After finishing up at the warehouse, we decided that we were going to go over to BARC to see about spending some time at their “Cat Loft”. BARC is an animal rescue group in Brooklyn, located at North 1st Street and Wythe. We signed up to be able to stop in and pet the cats and walk dogs. On Sunday we hung out for about an hour, petting the various cats that they have in their loft space. It was a little stinky, the cats often times had some eye funk going on, but on the whole it was a good time. It was obvious that may of the cats were well loved by their previous owners, because upon opening their cage doors, they sprinted forward to receive the affection. I was particularly worried at the end of our visit because Laura, upon picking up a tiny black and white kitten, was practically smothering the poor little thing with love. With it’s tiny purr motor going, I was able to convince Laura to hand him over and go and love on the huge beast of a cat in the next cage over….”Big Jake”. Thankfully, we were able to head out without adding to the already full house of cats that we currently have.

You can see Big Jake, and Mr.Personal (my favorite) here.

Posted by Michael at 01:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)