Birthday and shit

Brandy and I are quite lazy and always find it very easy to sit around the apartment on our asses - me in front of the computer and her sprawled out on the couch. Then maybe later we'll head to one of our local establishments for dinner or drink. Sure, we have a fantastic apartment and neighborhood, perfect for such activities, but we also miss out on so much more that this city has to offer. So we do try to force ourselves out and about from time to time, and whenever we are out in some other neighborhood we are really happy with the choice. My birthday was on Thu and that was a good excuse to get out.
I didn't really feel like organizing anything, so I decided to make the B-day be more of a loner evening. I decided to go down to Brooklyn Heights to check out this coop cafe where they were having a few comedians and storytellers tell stories about "neighborhood", with of course, a NYC theme. It was pretty cool, and afterwards we went across the street and drank on the roof of the organizer. In her story she talked about her first Couchsurfing experience and we publicly chastened her for not having a full profile. We were the only CSers at the event, so lots of people were asking about it after.
On the way home the G train was only running part-way, but we were too drunk to notice until we were headed back towards downtown Brooklyn so we had to get out and take a cab in disgust.
We didn't do shit on Fri night.
On Sat we had a few people over for a cold food dinner party and then smoked hookah on the roof.
Yesterday we went to Governor's Island, finally. There was an event called Meatopia where a bunch of meat-centric restaurants would be grilling and you could sample. This sounded cool and we have been talking about checking out GI for a long time, so we made the trip. The boarding on the Manhattan side is a complete clusterfuck. Very poorly organized where you have to get in a line before being put into this room with everyone else where you have to rush the doors when they open and let a few people out at a time into another queue. Nobody knows what's going on, or whether they'll make the next boat (every half hour) and tensions are high. However, once you get to the island, you forget everything, or even that you are in the city. It's an old military base with mostly abandoned brick buildings and tons of huge trees. Really beautiful and relaxing. The meat thing was overpriced, so we just walked through and laughed at the people who paid huge $ for tiny portions.
We then took the ferry back to Brooklyn, which dumps you at pier 6 of the Brooklyn Bridge Park. Turns out this is nowhere near the Brooklyn Bridge, so we had to walk half an hour since we were going to the Manhattan Brg to watch the World Cup final. They had this big screen set up on a street under one of the arches of the bridge and it was completely filled with people. It would have been really cool to watch there since there were about 300 people and the cheering really echoed through the arch, but we were late and it was hot, crowded, and we couldn't really see, so we wandered around trying to find a decent bar. I was getting hot and annoyed, noting the fact that, for one of my least favorite neighborhoods in the city, I find myself in DUMBO way too much. I finally crowded into a bar to watch the 2nd half, while Brandy said fuck this and sat outside. The game was really boring and I didn't really give a shit anyway, so I bailed instead of watching the overtime and we went and laid down in the waterfront park between the Bridges. This is a really nice spot with great views of the city and the bridges, plenty of nice grass, and shade if you look for it. We got a few drops of rain while we were here, but certainly not enough. It hasn't rained here since we got back from Peru 3 wks ago and everything is brown. All the trees that just got planted in McCarran are dieing b/c the city isn't competent enough to protect its investment and send someone to water them.
Later, we found a pretty nice bookstore that redeems DUMBO a bit. Then we walked into downtown Brooklyn and threw the disc in Cadman Plaza, which is a really nice park.
We took the bus home b/c we didn't want to deal with transferring on the train on a Sunday, but then it was 20 min late (after we'd just missed one) and once we got on, we went one block before a huge traffic jam somehow materialized and we sat in that for another 20 min. Thank god we had our books. I just picked up Les Miserables again after setting it down for last semester. Great book, but man are some parts tedious. And it is ridiculously long. Like 1000 bible thickness pages.

A pleasant surprise from the toilet

Our toilet must be monitored following flush since it typically continues flowing, requiring a hearty punch in the tank to cease. Today I failed to follow through with the ceremony as I discovered to my chagrin when I required its services a fair time later. An unexpected positive externality to this is that the water becomes quite cold, which in turn cools the entire unit, including the seat. A pleasant surprise on a hot summer day.