This week I had the opportunity to visit one of the office projects under construction, it was so great!! We rented cars and left from the city in little groups. The project is in Troy, near Albany about 3 hours north of the city, so it was great to drive thru the hills forest. I left most of my pix at work but here are a few I had in an email.
The project is a series of performace spaces for the , Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
A friend from work is part of a traditional Japanese Drumming group and I took these pix of her performance today. It was such an amazing event, it was so great, and free too!
The Poor Mans Cruise 
Riding the Ferry to Staten Island is the best FREE thing to do in New York!! It was a bit gray when i started out so the pic of the statue of liberty is sort of gloomy but as the sun went down the city looked so amazing.
It was a beautiful day today, a wonderful unseasonably warm day. I was soooo happy : ) A few of us from the office decided to take advantage of the weather and have our lunch in a park near the office. It was a bit windy so my hair was going crazy, but it was a nice day none the less.
i just got an email from a co-worker i had back in paris a few years ago. he sent me a link to the office he is working at in jackson, wyoming. here is an image from the stephen dyhni architects site.
some nice woody projects, they are all set in wyoming so it's hard to go wrong with all those beautiful mountains.
this is not really anything to do with new york : ) but thought i would share anyway, that's why i called it "+ other random thoughts" .
I live a few blocks from central park and I can't seem to visit it enough. It’s such an amazing oasis in the middle of the city. It was particularly beautiful on Saturday with the last bit of melting snow on the ground. It’s still cold to linger too long in the park, but as spring approaches I hope I can have a picnic there and enjoy just hanging out.
I have been my usual busy self which makes for a bad blogger :) but I managed to download a few pix from my weekend activities.
Over the weekend I went to the Harlem Film Festival. It was great, and it happened to be the night they were having a series of short films all by women. All the movies were great, with various political and social ideas behind them. I would write more about this but have to get to work. You can read more if you click Harlem Film Festival above. Here is a pic of the ladies involved. I took this during the question answer time after the movies.
i just tried to change the template and add some links and now my text is huge and OUT OF CONTROL....sorry for the terrible graphics!! I'll have to work on this later. Seems I copy pasted the wrong thing in my little template and messed something up :( and the font is hideous........ more on this later
well i just grabbed a few munchkins (donut holes) and a coffee during lunch after eating part of my organic/ vegan meal from the health food place across the street (bell bates). there are so many dunkin donuts' here in nyc (there are actually 5 in my area less than 1 mile away :o). it's like they are calling my name every day i walk by them, and i always resist but today i could not bare it. i gave in and now i sit here as if everyone knows i just stuffed four in my mouth as i rounded the corner back to the office.
no one in the office ever eats them or brings there coffee to the office in the morning, but i have a hunch they are closet donut lovers too! when i got here i went to the bathroom to make sure i had no glaze flecks clinging to my face as evidence, what a pig huh!!!
how i can eat what i ate for lunch then have a wonderfully bad for me donut full of bad for me stuff i am not sure, but here on my blog i am free to profess my love as all my family knows i have a weakness for donuts :)
I went with some friends to check out Sylvia's in Harlem today. We had some delicious Soul food. I even met Sylvia herself as I was leaving the restaurant. This is yet another great New York gem. We even had great live music to go with our corn bread, grits, fried cat fish, fried chicken and collard greens....yum yum :)
double click on comic to see bigger and more clear, ahhhhh i love being an architect : )
i have been a slow blogger these days as i continue at this crazy new york pace. but i just had to comment this morning about my growing coffee addiction :) today it was coffee from the cuban restaurant as we call it (actually it is called sophie's). good not too strong.
mind you i already had 2 cups at home. i don't know what comes over me but when i am walking from the subway stop to work i have the hardest time resisting buying a cup of coffee. every corner has has another coffee shop. anyway...dad i am sure you are reading this and thinking that hannah, since i know you always hated that i drank so much coffee.
this is one of those random thoughts i am putting down but you can read it or not so that is the beauty of it. i just decided i would record this passing random thought as i sip coffee #3.
in addition to good coffee they have very good cuban food, it's an office favorite but is quite heavy for lunch. see what cuban girl has to say below :)
Posted by cubangirl on 10/24/2005Great Cuban Deal!
This place has the BEST cuban sandwiches I've tasted in a long time. I'm part cuban so when I say this place is good, it's GOOD. Cheap prices, huge portions and authentic cuban food. The restaurant itself is kinda noisy but that's with almost all authentic Latin places. I would def. recommend this place to anyone looking for some good food. Make sure you go there with time though because the sandwich service is kind of slow but well worth it. Delicious maduros (just like Abuela's), rice, and beans, and malta sold for a $1. What more could a person ask for from a place in the city! I would def. go back, without thinking twice about it.
i was so excited about my little move i forgot to write about the event of the day . i was sure that i had survived this unusually warm new york winter" as most had told me but....
"For those of you who thought snow would never arrive - you were wrong," deadpanned Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York. In fact, the storm, delivering 26.9 inches, broke New York City's previous record for a single snowfall, 26.4 inches, set in 1947.
this woman walking her dog took this terrible un-flattering photo of me but at least it helps you get the picture : )
Well it's been quite eventful since my last entry and here I am exhausted on a Sunday night and just making it to my little neglected blog.
hmm well I am settling into my new place after ending my stay at the "nunnery" as my friend Dana calls it : ) the upper east side is quite different than Chelsea but different in a good way in the sense that it gives me the chance to know another part of the city.
The whole room mate thing is already an experience in itself but at the moment I don't have the energy to rant about how much of a clean freak my room mate is. Yes, I know you are thinking who is Hannah to call anyone a clean freak when I am the one who use to get called "misses clean" by my sister, but this woman beats me out. However, I have decided that there could be a lot worse problems and will just try to go with the flow. I am just happy to have a nice little kitchen to cook breakfast as you can see from the photos: )
we don't quite have the same ideas about decor, but at least there is not too much frilly girly stuff well except our very purple bathroom that has a purple toilet seat cover with a snow man on it to go with it. But really no need to complain the whole situation is a gift from the lord, the price the location everything even the frosty the snowman toilet seat cover is small potatoes in comparison to having all that other stuff right.
i don't have much to add tonight since my crazy pace is still crazy at work. thanks jen for your comment, yeah this blog is not that interesting when i am not out exploring the city.
you do learn a lot about your co-workers though when you spend 14 hours a day 7 days a week with them. despite the fact that working late and on the weekend is never fun no matter how much you like your job at least i am working with a team of people and by default having 12 people commiserate with you seems much easier than going at a big deadline alone. anyway for that i am thankful.
not to mention lots of free out to eat yummy food. tonight we had take out from this very good vegetarian restaurant called gobo, you can find the link at right. I had some interesting meat substitute thing called setain. It was quite good actually, interesting but good. i feel like I am turning into a big bump on a log though, too much food and no movement. Well there is always next week : )