OMG! Nerd moment here - I played BattleTech like a thousand years ago. It was my first foray into tabletop gaming and it was GREAT! Well, the memories are, anyhow. The mini painting? Not so good. But it was a hoot and now it’s BACK!

BattleTech has been dormant for years (it’s best to just ignore the boring Xbox 360 remake) but according to this Wired Article, it’s getting a dust off. Dude, the idea of piling myself into a pimped out Marauder and dropping my lance right into a hot LZ to duke it put with some enemy Atlas mechs makes me very, very excited.

Alright, nerdy moment over, just ignore this nerdy rant and carry on doing whatever it was you were doing on the internet.

I went to a drinks night called “Tech Drinks New York” last night and I got to meet Gary Vaynerchuk from the insanely popular Wine Library TV!

Gary had done a spot on CNBC earlier so we checked out the segment in the bar. Today (May 8th) Gary’s going to be on Conan O’Brian, so be sure to check that out.

There was some video shot too. Check it out on the YooToobs.

Good fun in Brooklyn this weekend, my presentation seemed to go OK! Here’s a shot somebody snagged with an iPhone and then sent to Flickr:

I met some really nice people and finally took the plunge and after seeing all the cool stuff you can do with the latest iPhone hacks, I took the plunge and upgraded my iPhone to 1.1.4. As before, the upgrade process didn’t got EXACTLY as planned (I mis-read one of the steps) and for about an hour I thought I had killed my phone, but it’s all good now and everything is fine. It’s really quite terrifying every time I upgrade that phone!

One of the coolest apps get on the iPhone now are mobile twitter applications. They’re not just dumpy SMS updates; now I can post updates to my Twitter feed using a cool interface (which I’m still figuring out) and what’s more, you can even push camera photos to Flickr or embed them in Twitter messages using TwitPic, like this one. I tested it and I can twitter from the phone, attach a photo and send it off all while wandering around. That’s pretty cool - it’s like every iPhone owner in the entire world suddenly become a (poorly trained) freelance photojournalists. For the most part, the masses probably use this cool power not to expose corruption and reveal universal truths, they’ll probably be content reporting pretty mundane things but it’s a neat study in technology nonetheless.

Anyhow, fun weekend, and now I’m going to bed. Stupid twitter, keeping me up until quarter to three in the morning.

Hey! If you live in the New York Area and have nothing to do on Saturday, why not come hear me drone on for an hour about Tiki Bar? I’m presenting at Podcamp New York this Saturday in Brooklyn. Come say hello!

Gettin’ busy again, but here’s a quick snapshot - I hopped on the Staten Island Ferry and did the free little cruise from Manhattan to Staten Island. It SOUNDS really quaint, until you realize that unlike the Islands I’m used to (Vancouver Island, Hornby Island, Denman Island), Staten Island isn’t a lush, quaint little vacation spot, it’s basically where New York dumps the garbage (or so I’m told, anyhow). So I basically went over, grabbed a slice, wandered around for a bit, and headed back.

Going over, you do get a nice view of the Statue of Liberty - she’s actually pretty small in real life. We didn’t pass all THAT close, so it’s a little blurry because my lens kind of sucks (look at me, I’m already trying to convince myself that I need to buy a new camera!)

On the way back you get a nice view of Manhattan coming in (which is also an island - I’m an island hopper! Har har har). I stitched a few together to make one bigger panorama:

Anyhow, we’re all busy at work getting ready for the New York City Comic-Con, which kicks off this Friday. This’ll be my, what, seventh comic-con? I wonder how it’ll compare to San Diego?

I bet it’s got better bagels, that’s for damn sure.

My latest houseguest was none other than the Iceman! Welcome to the Apple, Ice!

We did a fair bit of drinking, sometimes of the juice variety:

…sometimes of the boozy variety…

…and of course, we got hungry now and then, and as the Iceman is absolutely packed to the rim with soul, he decided we’d go to Harlem to get ourselves a tasty plate of eats. Fried chicken smothered in gravy, garlic mashed potatoes and excellent mac and cheese! Deeeelicious!

We even managed to get out to a club, too - there’s a decent trance / techno club two blocks from my pad called Love which, which was like a timewarp back to 1998. It’s awesome an kitchy rave scene; faux fur lined “fraggle rock” room that has little concrete cave - like ledges that people who have “imbibed irresponsibly” can k-hole in, a fun odd waterfall thingie in the front room when you enter, and an absolutely FANTASTIC sound system. It was so clear, so tight - just fantastic (I later learned it was a custom built million dollar rig by nightclub legend Gary Stewart). It felt like… home.

Here’s a shot of the Iceman getting his groove on.

The DJ playing was a little lack-lustre (he didn’t really seem to understand the concept of mixing on the measure, and his music selection seemed a little unfocused). But the joint was cool, the crowd was unpretentious, the drinks were nice and beefy, and getting on the guestlist was as easy as firing off an email prior to arriving, so that works for me. Plus it’s got a great late 90’s early 2k’s old skooler rave thing going for it (dark, glowy and booming) so it gets a thumb up in my book. Ryan even chased down the manager for the night and got her email address saying “my friend is a super star trance DJ from Vancouver, he’s gotta play here!”. How fun would that be? That’d be awesome!

So yeah! I’m totally going to drop her a line and record a new set - as soon as my mixer comes back from Stanton (my old mixer died in shipping, and my new one - which I bought from Canal street for next to nothing - had a weird audio glitch. The dude at the store didn’t have another one to replace it with (and it’s the one I really want - the Stanton M.303) so I’ve just sent it to Stanton to get it serviced. When it’s back I’ll be laying down a new set - thanks to some fun new DJ toys I picked up. But more on that later.

So here’s a bit of “New York Life” that has me a little perplexed. After about a week in my new apartment, I was faced with a pretty common problem - I needed to so some laundry. Problem is, my building is 160 years old and there isn’t a laundry room in the complex, because coin-wash machines weren’t exactly something architects worked into the plans when they cobbled this joint together back in the day. Besides, even if my building DID have a laundry room at some point, it probably would have been converted into two studios going for 1800 a month YEARS ago.

So I went online and looked around for the nearest coin wash laundromat, and quickly learned the ugly truth about The Village - there’s no shortage of great places to eat and drink, but if you come down her a load of dirty undershirts, you’re out of luck. Real estate prices are just too high! I either hop on a train and lug my laundry uptown for forty minutes or I go with the readily available “wash and fold” service.

Now, this “wash and fold” thing is kinda new to me - there’s literally a drycleaner on every block in my neighbourhood. Most, if not all of them offer “laundry by the pound” - you come in, weigh your dirty laundry, and they wash, dry and fold your clothes and you pay by the pound. For girls, hey, that’s great. A few tiny pencil skirts and a half dozen panties? No sweat. Big burly dude with jeans and heavy cotton safari shirts? Different story.

The one near me charges around 13 bucks for an average sized load, which is pretty whack, but the up side of that is they do a jim-dandy job folding everything up. Me? I’d rather pay a buck fifty and hang everything on a drying rack like I did “in the old days”, but hey, when in Rome…

The laundry is, of course, packed in a giant plastic bag you just throw away (the amount of packaging and horrendously shoddy recycling presence is a post for another day). On the up side, the folding is damned near perfect! I’ve never had such geometric perfection in my boxers.

So there’s some fun New York stuff for you. Go home and give your washer / dryer unit a kiss and tell it that you love it.

Another weekend, another trip to Ikea. I take the free shuttlebus, lug home a shelf that I can fit in a taxi, and assemble away. Next weekend might just see the unpacking of the final box!

LAST weekend, though, that was different. No Ikea THAT weekend! I actually LEFT New York and headed NORTH, near the border of New York State and Canada, during one of the worst snowstorms of the season, to party with people I’ve never met. People who - get this - PAID for me to fly up to their party. How crazy is that? It’s beyond crazy. It’s coo-coo for coco-puffs crazy, that’s how crazy it is!

This mad plan was the brainchild of the lady seen wearing the leopard print fez:

That’s “Lizzie Lizzie”, and she’s a lovely lass who found herself in a bit of a pickle. Lizzie and her friends had this party, see, and they had all this booze:

And they had this lovely bar with this fantastic lime squeezer:

Starting to make sense now? Lizzie and her friends have this big Tiki fiesta every year - a number of friends in Liz’s circle celebrate birthdays during March, so they get together, have a big party, play rockband, enjoy a few cocktails, and throw a hum-dinger of a party. They’re a super warm group of really smart, really creative and really fun people who, for whatever reason, figured their quota of nerds wearing cardboard hats was a little light, and they decided that they better fly one in just to be safe. So I got the call.

I called a couple of Tiki friends from just North of the border - “Canadian Avenger” from Toronto and “JJJENNNNN” from Essex (which apparently is near Windsor) who also wandered down (braving snow covered roads themselves) and picked me up in Buffalo. The three of us proceeded to a house full of people we had never met to have a party in the middle of a snowstorm! Aaah, internet; is there anything you CAN’T do? You really do make the oddest stuff happen.

So we arrived at the party and there was much jubilation and an abundance of camera flashes! Whooraaah! Which I still find very, very odd. Here I am meeting Lizzie!

Aww, we’ve got matching fezzes! Well, these folks forked over good hard cash and flew my ass across the state, so I didn’t waste any time - I piled in behind the bar and started making cocktails!

Now, I’ll be honest; I was a little dizzy from all the camera flashes, flushed with excitement (I mean, this doesn’t happen every day!) and my first cocktail ended up being a bit of a disaster. They had this home made blueberry infused vodka (which was delicious) which I promptly ruined with too much vanilla vodka (note: the Skyy stuff sucks! It’s waaay too vanilla-ee! Use the Stoli version!). I dished out as little of the vile blue toxin as I could, raced to the sink, and dumped it (I did force myself to drink a glass so as to punish myself and remind myself not to do that again). I re-tooled the recipe and and went on to the second round.

Round two was much better! We carried on with a few more drinks and then, seeing as how it was a birthday party, we adjourned into the living room where the birthday boys and girls were set to receive some presents.

Oh, and I kid you not, there was a toast to god damned Gary Gygax. I just about started crying.

You know what I love? I love that everyone in this room raised a glass for Gary. The guy who invented the board game you play with your MIND. Gary gave me, these guys, and a whole lot of other nerds a fantastic pastime that powered our imaginations, supercharged our creativity, and gave us some absolutely awesome adventures that we shared with great people, like this son of a gun here:

I love how that in high school, the “cool kids” made fun of us nerds because we liked computers, we loved getting lost in our own imaginations, and we had velvet bags filled with little funny dice. We lived in computer labs, dug A/V equipment, and heaven forbid, dared to “think different”. Now guess what? We nerds run the god damned world. We make great money doing awesomely cool jobs while the so called “cool people” who made fun of us back in high school now get to call us during dinner time from fluorescent lit cubicles to ask us if we’re happy with our current long distance provider. HA HA HA! Suckers! Who’s laughing now? I am, that’s for damned sure!

Anyhow, that’s what I thought of when everyone raised their glass for a toast to Gary. It was totally awesome. Here’s a collection of guys & gals who, like me, love computers, fantasy, imagination, art, and (apparently) the internet (up to and including nerd-centric booze-fueled sketch comedy shows).

So then the giving of gifts began, and I sat back thinking I’d get to watch the birthday boys and girls receive some goodies.

Well shiver me timbers, as if getting me on a plane to come to their party wasn’t enough, they absolutely spoiled me with incredibly creative and heart felt gifts! This absolutely blew my mind! Check this out!

This is a pipecleaner based Johnny Johnny! Check this out! How totally awesome is this! And he’s not alone - Pipecleaner JJ rolls with this little crazy tiki spirit:

Both JJ and the Tiki Sprit have cocktails, because drinking as a group is more fun. These guys live on a shelf in my office now, next to Han Solo, DrinkBot, and my signed Penny Arcade lithograph.

And that’s not all! I also got this little fez-wearing monster from “Bags that Bite“, which, if you haven’t heard of it, are custom made purses, backpacks and bags that look like monsters! So awesome! You should order one TODAY!

My little fez-monster lives on a different shelf between my framed Robots print, some Uglies, and Cam’s Millennium Falcon (oh, uh, by the way Cam, I have your Millennium Falcon. Surprise!).

I also got an absolutely adorable penguin comic done by this lovely lady who has an absolutely adorable and very funny online comic that she does using photos of penguins called “Pencognito“. Her work is great (and, of course, absolutely adorable). I’ll have to post a scan of my penguin comic, which is getting framed right now. So awesome! Look at me, I’m absolutely tickled pink. ADORABLE PENGUINS IN FEZ HATS! IT DOES NOT GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS!

I also got a crazy cool deck of pirate cards called “Pegleg Pete’s Deck of Royal Rogues“. Chris, the host of the party, makes these cards and they’re just great! No home poker game is complete without these cards!

After the amazing array of gifts were exchanged, we went back to the kitchen where Canadian Avenger and I created the drink of the night - a blended drink made from fresh watermelon, coconut rum, vodka and honey infused simple syrup. Dee-friggin-licious, if I do say so myself.

We used this beverage to break into a hot and heavy round of Bunnies!

We drank, partied, goofed off and played bunnies into the wee hours. Canadian Avenger once again braved the winter snow and our little Canadian contingent rolled out of there (after much hugging and long goodbyes) late in the wee hours and we drove back to a motor lodge.

It’s been a week, and I’m still floored by how nice these people were, how they let a bunch of strangers crash their party (and even PAID for one to come!) and were so kind, friendly, open and warm. Team Rochester ROCKS! Thanks for having me, guys!

I flew back the next day and it was an amazingly clear night. My camera is pretty dumpy, but here’s a shot out the window that wasn’t too blurry. Man, that’s a lot of lights. And this isn’t even Manhattan! I’m not entirely sure what this is. Brooklyn? I think it’s Brooklyn and Queens. Whatever, it’s pretty!

So that was my big Rochester weekend. Yahoo!

Ok, I admit it, I have no business owning a toolbox, much less power tools. I suck at home repair / renovation / upgrades / whatever. Even Assembling bonehead items from Ikea taxes my meager handyman abilities. I mean, I managed to put up some new venetian blinds on my windows with luck and some light cursing, but I really had no business undertaking the job outined below.

So here’s the thing. My new apartment has NO COUNTER SPACE. We’re talking a complete absence of ANY sort of working surface. The entire “kitchen” (and I use the phrase loosely) consists of a row of essential items which are a small fridge, a small stove, a sink, and then it’s a wall. When I was unpacking I stood there holding my toaster scratching my head saying “where the hell do I put this?”. Finding a home for the microwave had me totally boggled. No surface, whatsoever. When I wash dishes, I have to slowly add water to the sink, wash the dish, rinse with the water running out of the tap, and then dry them on top of the stove in a little folding dish rack that lives under the sink when it’s not in use. It’s kind of like cooking in a russian space capsule. Well, that’s what I imagine when I’m doing it, anyhow.

So, since I needed a home for the microwave and a place to make guacamole, I figured I’d get a kitchen island. Those are handy, right? Sure! So I went to Ikea and got myself a “GROLAND”:

Perfect! However, this thing now takes up the tiny bit of floorspace I had earmarked for some sort of eating surface. I’ve always been a fan of bar extensions - you see them in some fancy-pants homes sometimes. Those cool freestanding kitchen islands with the little raised bar bit that has two stools next to it and is used for breakfast or whatnot? I figured bolting one of those dealies on to my “Groland” would allow me to prepare nosh on one side and then consume it on the other. Double the functionality with a the same small floor footprint!

I went to Ikea (again) and got the “PRONOMEN” countertop and some funky “CAPITA” brackets. The instructions give you this formula for measuring X and Y and putting holes in Z, which, I assume, places the bar so that the weight of it is transfered directly on the main kitchen island itself. If you had the “wing” hanging too far out, it might tip the thing over, so I made sure I followed the directions (which stole a bit of my preparing area, but I wanted to play it safe).

You attach the legs to the pre-cut countertop and big mother bolts get buried into fresh holes you drill into your target surface, which you then tighten with a massive nut. Easy!

However, when it came time to bore the holes, I kinda forgot to measure the thickness of the target surface. I ended up boring into one of the support beams and when I mounted the bar extension, the bolts didn’t hang down enough to allow me to affix the nuts.

Whoops.

Undeterred, I decided to affix the bar extension to the island by means of SCIENCE!

I stuffed wadded tissue into the gaping holes underneath my island and loaded each hole with a generous dose of 2 ton epoxy. Then I mashed the bar on top, plunged the bolts into the goop filled holes, and it’s now being held in place with two big pots of water (for weight) while the epoxy sets.

Hopefully by tomorrow the new bar will be firmly attached to the island and I’ll finally have a place to eat my instant noodles! Wahoo!

Well, it’s been a month, and it’s been quite a ride. I’m still trying to wedge everything into my new apartment, ruthlessly throwing out stuff that I had previously deemed “essential” (goodbye, upside down shot machine…) or trying to sell or give stuff away. My TV stand is getting donated on Saturday (it’s too big), my favorite speakers are currently on CraigsList (I’m now using pathetic little bookshelf speakers for my TV) and STILL there are boxes everywhere.

To top it off, I’ve been fighting a cold that has reduced my head to a leaky faucet - I’m blowing my nose every ten minutes. That’s adding another level of irritation to my already frustrating “dance of the boxes” that I do on a daily basis - move this box there to make way for this thing, then move the thing over on top of the box, then move both things into the bathroom to make way for two more boxes that need to be opened, re-arranged, sorted and split into three boxes. For a guy who’s in the business of designing efficient workflows, it’s maddening.

On Sunday, it all kind of came to a head - I’m out of room, I can’t breathe, there’s goop pouring of my head every fifteen seconds… I close the bedroom door to make room for another box and there’s a “click” sound as it locks.

Now, WHY the bedroom door has a lock on it, I’ll never know. But the keys are, of course, nowhere to be found. It’s 10pm so calling the Superintendent is probably not going to work - and it’s not like he’s going to know where the keys are, because they were originally in the bedroom door lock (and I had of course moved them somewhere). I kind of just… snapped.

I look to my left and lo and behold, there’s my trusty hammer, sitting on the radiator, glowing in angelic light. I think to myself “I don’t know why there’s a lock of my effin’ bedroom door, but I’m taking it off and I’ll just get a new damned doorknob without a lock! Raargh!” and then I proceeded to take a mighty (frustrated) swing at the stupid doorknob to knock it off.

Now, generally, doors are big heavy wooden things that can take a beating. Well, not here in this 160 year old apartment - like the bedroom wall, it’s not “original”. It’s some after market tacked on paper thin dealie that basically explodes as the lock gets hammered. After a few blows, the doorknob was off, and the door looked like someone had fired a shotgun blast into it.

Yeah, I know, I know. Dumb.

Anyhow, I’ve got a new doorknob from the hardware store and I’ll patch the hole with a 12″x 12″ thin sheet of veneer or thin plywood or something, tack it down and hopefully it won’t look too bad. I’d rather not call the building manager and say “hey, in a fit of rage I bashed a hole in the door, can you replace it?” just yet - I’ll just quietly fix it myself.

Aaah, well.

Anyhow, my internet is finally up so now I can chat with the family back home, like I did last night!

God love iChat, even though I’m on the other side of the continent, a slightly pixelated chat with my family is but a simple click away.

Shona was a lovely houseguest, she seemed to enjoy New York, had some fabulous ideas about home decor, and she’s returned to Canada. Tomorrow sees the arrival of visitor number two - Brandon, fresh from London, ready to spend his his hard earned Investment Banker dollars!

I’m sure we’ll do some exploring of the local watering holes this weekend. In fact, I’m sure we’ll explore a few dozen.

Hey, sorry, no update. The Kidscreen Summit was this week in New York, so that kept me busy. This weekend was the final run to Ikea (well, until next week, anyhow) for some shelving so now I’ve moved most of my junk out of the boxes and on to a selection of the ever boring BILLY shelves (I went upscale this time and bought some doors to make it look a little less dorm-room esque).

My first visitor arrives tomorrow - the lovely Shona Galbraith is crashing on my air mattress for a few days while she does the gallery crawl (she’s fancy pants arts grad, you know). Big fun!

Now that I’ve unpacked most of my boxes I’m FINALLY able to attach my digital camera to my laptop having found the cord. I found a few HUNDRED cords, actually - before I left I just hurridly threw all my audio, video and computer cables into one big box and now I’m going through and sorting them out. It’s going to be another few days until I get my computer and drives and TV online, but that’s ok, the cable guy got the install date wrong so I don’t get my TV and Internet until Friday anyhow, so it’s no panic.

Anyhow, here’s a fun shot from one of the parties at Kidscreen. Wild Brain threw a party where some of the cast of Yo Gabba Gabba and the super awesome DJ Lance opened for “The Aquabats”, who were also awesome. Yo Gabba Gabba is Kid Robot’s preschool show, and if you don’t have young kids (or make your money working in the kids business) you may have never heard of it. It’s totally awesome, and DJ Lance is the MAN! I geeked out and asked him for a photo, because he rules! How rad is this shot?

Yo Gabba Gabba!

So today I went to my new apartment and met my new super. In an attempt to legitimize the shady “passing off of cash” to ensure prompt service in the future, I also gave the super a nice bottle of (nine dollar) wine from Trader Joes and a card. What kind of card do you get someone when the occasion is basically extortion? “Congratulations”? “Deepest Sympathies”? I decided to go with a card that simply said “Howdy”, with no message inside (guess the writers strike has extended to greeting card writers, har har har). I just jotted a quick message about how nice it was to meet him and be part of the area and wandered over for the handoff.

When I got there I asked if I could take another look at the apartment and get some measurements. Man, when I walked in, I swear the place had shrunk 40%. Really? Was I wearing my “wide angle eyeballs” when I first checked it out? The kitchen is literally the fridge, the stove and the sink all jammed into a back corner. There’s no actual SURFACE AREA to work on - it’s wall-to-wall appliance. The bedroom is a lavish 102 inches x 75 inches, with only 82 of the length really usable because the remaining 20 inches is the door.

So, rest assured, it’s going to be… cute.

Let’s hope I love the area, because at this point I’m sitting here shaking my head asking myself “what the hell were you thinking?!”.

MAN I LOVED THAT FIRST APARTMENT!!

Ah well. Onward and upward. At least it’s getting a fresh coat of paint.

Well, the ol’ Sponge has seen a fair bit more traffic in the last three days than usual, that’s for sure. According to my Google Adsense tracker (which has better statistics than my hosting company, since “the sponge” is a subdomain of my main account so it has less detailed stats) I’ve had over 35,000 uniques in the past three days.

That’s… a whole lot of people. So.. uh… hello, I guess. I feel like I should say something important. Don’t steal music? Be nice to animals? I dunno. It’s not always this exciting around here, new viewers, if that’s what you’re wondering.

It’s funny, I came home after “the incident”, I explained to the owners of the house that I’m staying at what had happened and then asked if I could trouble them for the use of their washing machine. After learning about “the third rail”, I kind of just went upstairs, flipped open my Powerbook, and fired out my little report without really even bother to proof read it (as the ten-ish usual friends and family who check this blog now and then can attest, I NEVER proof read). Boy, I wish I had, because sections of my little story - grammatical mistakes and all - have been copied and pasted all over the place (much to the amusement of some Digg readers, who had a hearty chuckle at my inability to differentiate between “too” and “to”).

Anyhow, now that a few days have gone by, I’m remembering stuff that I got wrong in my first report; the first train (the one that would have mushed us both flat) came screaming into the terminal about 20 seconds after I got the lady on the platform and was working on stopping the bleeding (and I was so absorbed in the initial treatment i forgot about it). The maxi-pad lady came OFF that train (the same one that said “do you know CPR?”, which I find even more amusing now). Both the lady who fell and myself were standing near the far end of the platform - where the train FIRST pulls into the station, so there’s NO WAY the driver could have seen me and slowed down in time. It must have been the SECOND train came in really slow, and THAT driver leaned out to talk to me, and I asked him to call the paramedics - and I remember now that he nodded and said “they’re on the way”. So the maxi-pad lady must have told somebody at the station to call 911, and they in turn radioed the NEXT train, telling the driver to slow down as he entered the station because somebody was injured. When the cops arrived, they helped do crowd control for the THIRD train, at which point the paramedics arrived.

I remember coming out of the Union Square terminal after the incident and this girl was standing there with a sign that said “tell me who you are”, and there was another lady with a DV camera filming her. She asked me who I was (explaining it was for a documentary) and I said something like “I’m Kevin, I make cartoons, and I enjoy cocktails”. She said something surreal like “how do you know that’s who you are”, which I thought was a bit odd, so I just said “because that’s who I choose to be”. Then I went and just basically leaned against a park bench for about 30 seconds, took a few deeps breaths, and then thought to myself “I really should go explain why I’m covered in blood”. So I went back and said “hey, can I do that again? I’ve got a better story”. And I did it in a far more amusing fashion, I think, with the joke cracking and the goofy face and the “see this blood here?” shtick. I wonder if it’ll ever make it to air anywhere? I never signed a waiver or release, so I’m assuming it was a school project or something not for broadcast.

What a weird day. I’ve been so damned busy that I hadn’t really even replayed the whole thing over in my head until the bus ride home today.

Anyhow, now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

So I got an apartment! It’s not the super awesome one, but it’s a nice one nonetheless. You know, a few posts ago (when nobody really came to this site) I basically told everyone where I was going to live. So yeah, now thirty thousand people are just a click away from figuring that out. So, I guess, if anyone is out there stalking me, I just drew them a map? I think the likelyhood of me having a stalker is pretty low, so I’m not terribly worried (in fact, I’d probably be flattered, and make a t-shirt that says “my stalker can beat up your stalker” or something).

So, yeah. I have a home. Well, sort of. Some wires got crossed and I don’t actually get to move in until the 5th or 6th (apparently in New York you don’t move out at the end of the month like the rest of the civilized world? Both the rental agent and the manager of the building looked at me like I was insane when I said “but he’s supposed to move at the end of the month! Everyone moves at the end of the month! What planet are you people from where you can just arbitrarily pick a moving day?”. Am I crazy? Isn’t it a universally understood rule that you move out by noon on the last day of the month, so the next person moving in can take YOUR old place at noon? Because THEY are moving out by noon, so someone can take THEIR place at noon; yadda yadda yadda. Right? Or is that some bizzare overly polite Canadian thing? You can’t just say “well, i’m busy, I’ll move on the 4th” because it screws up the whole god damned process! The whole freakin’ dance falls apart! WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS CITY?!

Aaaaanyhow. To get a lease, I had to write three cashiers checks the total of which, if combined, could basically get me an entry level AUTOMOBILE. And I get to move on the 4th. Or the 5th, if I want the place painted.

Oh, and I’m supposed to bribe the superintendant of the building. They don’t tell you that in the travel books. When you move in, you apparently give the super MONEY so he’s more inclined to assist you in a speedy fashion when something breaks in your 100 year old building. And it WILL break, because it’s 100 years old. So I guess it’s like a preemptive tip? Nobody really explained how it’s done; it was just… implied. Twice. Do I just walk up and do the “oh, I think you dropped this” trick? Or is it more like the “what’s this behind your ear? A fifty dollar bill!” trick? I think I’ll just give him a nice bottle of wine and a Bert & Ernie card with “please won’t you be my Super” written inside, and lay some greenies in there too I guess. That should make it feel a little less blunt.

So there you go - Casa Del Gamble will (shortly) be open for business. Reservations are highly recommended and major credit cards are, sadly, not accepted.

Man, I’ve been here almost a week. Do you know what I just finished doing? Washing half a pint of blood off my only winter jacket.

See, I was waiting for the L train at 3rd Avenue just minding my own business when this lovely lady in her 50’s decides to peer down the track to see how far away the oncoming train is. You know the one I’m talking about; the one with the 6 foot drop from the platform that leads down to two metal rails?

When all of a sudden… she falls over the edge.

She hammers the back of her head on the second rail and goes basically limp. I figure the next train is about 60 second away, so I immediately leap over the edge and basically break all forms of first aid protocol. I quickly weigh the odds - she COULD have a spinal injury that I’m aggravating, but I’m going to assume that a POSSIBLE injury is less dangerous than the CERTAIN DEATH she’s going to face when she gets run over by the L train. So I haul her up on my shoulder, at which point she comes to, and I quickly get her back to the edge and holler at a couple of dudes to grab her arms and pull her up.

I clamber up myself back onto the platform (I think I can HEAR the train coming, but I can’t see it, but I’m not eager to stick around to see just how close I can cut it) and I quickly assess her - she’s got a pretty good head of hair that’s preventing me from seeing the wound, but the blood on my shirt and jacket tells me she’s got a pretty nasty head injury (while I’m doing so, the train comes zipping into the station - about thirty seconds later, which would have been the very train that ran us both over). I’ve got her shifted her back from the edge of the platform and use her scarf to apply pressure, which isn’t working all that well, but a lady steps off the recently arrived train, sees the excitement, and asks if I “know CPR”. I tell her she doesn’t need CPR, but I could use a few kleenexes or napkins if she’s got any in her purse. She goes one better and offers a pantyliner, which is great, because they’re just much better at absorbing blood than a knitted scarf. I send the bystander off to call the paramedics and to please come back and tell me how long they’re going to be once she contacts them.

I keep the pressure on her head and get her talking; I want to assess her speech - is she going in to shock? Is she slurring her words? She seems to be in exceptional pain but she’s not slurring, which is good - I get her to hold the bandage on her head (which, I’m guessing, is about a two inch laceration that is really, REALLY bleeding) and I do a quick body search to see if there’s anything else that I need to worry about. She can feel both her toes, which rules out a spinal; her knee hurts but it’s mobile, so that’s good, and while she’s complaining of leg pain, I don’t feel a compound fracture so I leave that area alone and go back to applying pressure to the hole in her head.

I engage her and tell her I just got to the city from Canada and BOY this is exciting and my name is Kevin and what do you do and isn’t New York just a FABULOUS city (I also reassure her husband, who is shaking like a leaf, that she’s going to be fine). Her name is Nancy and she’s an artist from the village, and I get her to tell me about her job while I check what’s called her “cap refil” - which is a really quick way to tell how someone’s circulatory system is doing. You push down on a fingernail and see how long it takes for the white area to go pink again - you’re testing the speed at which blood is flowing to the extremities. She’s about a second, which is longer than I’d like, but she’s still engaging me and answering my questions so I don’t think she’s going into shock (which is very good - it means she hasn’t lost too much blood).

So the NEXT train eventually shows up. It’s going quite slow as it comes into the station, so I guess the lady told someone at the station, who relayed to the driver of the next train that something was up and to take is slow coming in. The driver leans out his window and tells me the paramedics are en route.

I keep the pressure on and just basically hang out with Nancy and we chat until the boys in blue show up in about 5 minutes, with the paramedics about 2 minutes behind them. I keep acting as primary respondent (and the cops do crowd control as the next train arrives) until the paramedics arrive - I hand off the patient, pass on the few of her vitals that I got (I’m sure I missed a load of stuff, it’s been a while since I had my first aid class!) and tell them that this is Nancy, she’s got a 2 inch laceration on the back of her head, RBS reveals no other pressing injuries but there’s something up with her right thigh that I can’t diagnose, that she’s got a bit of an abnormal cap refill, and let the professionals with MUCH more training than me do their magic.

Once I do the handoff and the boys are getting her on a spineboard, I shake hands with the husband, give my name and number to the police, and continue on my merry way.

…on my merry way, riding the subway, covered in blood.

Ever try to ride the subway covered in blood? It doesn’t really matter how crowded the car is. People make room.

Anyhow, I had a couple more apartments to check out, but thought I’d call it a day - nobody’s going to rent a pad to somebody who looks like he’s just come out of a running gunfight. My jacket was covered with the muck and oil and crap from the subway tracks, I had blood everywhere, and just decided to head back to the guest room I’m staying at in New Jersey to see if I can make myself a little more presentable and to salvage the only winter jacket I’ve got! It’s been through the wash three times now and it’s looking pretty good.

So that’s week one all wrapped up. When they say “New York is exciting”, man, they weren’t kidding!

Later someone asked me how I managed to avoid the “third rail”. I didn’t know what that was at the time, which is probably why I leapt down as fast as I did (and why other dudes were so hesitant to join me down there). Basically, it’s the super high voltage live wire that carries the current. How did I manage to avoid it? Easy. Absolute ignorance and sheer dumb luck!

My new employer says I should be in the paper, which I think is probably a bit of a stretch. But then again, it might help me in my apartment search - You want references? Sure, ask this lady and her husband. They seem to think I’m a pretty good egg. Now where on the lease agreement did you want my signature again?

**EDIT: Wow, so it’s Monday now, and the ever kind Jay Adelson decided to pop this story (which I wrote for my friends back home, because I figured it would be easier than five phone calls!) on Digg. Three thousand Diggs later I’ve got a whole lot of fantastically kind comments (and my co-workers gave me a fun pin that says “hooray for me”, which I though was very nice).

Anyhow, a few people have thrown out the “hero” word, which I think is a but much. The guys who hit the beaches of Normandy in broad daylight and ran INTO the machine gun fire? Yeah, THOSE GUYS were heroes. Me? Somebody needed help, and I was there, so I helped. Because that’s what people do, you know? We help each other. I like to think that if it was anyone else in my place, they’d do the same thing if they were able. Hey, if nothing else, perhaps this will encourage people to get out there and take a basic First Aid class - so if you somehow find yourself in a situation where you need to help somebody out, you’ll be ready to rock!

I’m more than a little stunned at the number of eyeballs that have read this story over the past 24 hours (and people who actually read it to the very end - brevity is not one of my fortes!) and I guess I just wanted to take a second to thank you for all the kind words. And Diggs. And Facebook comments. And MAN, some people were even nice enough to click on my Google Ads! Now THAT is awesome!

Oh, and I think I found an apartment - thanks for all the great suggestions!

Cheers,
Kev.

Apartment hunting in New York? Wow. Here’s how it works:

You set up shop in a cafe with wireless access (which you PAY for, because nobody offers free Wi-Fi, which is blatantly outrageous). Then you continially hit “REFRESH” on Craigslist to find the absolute latest posts (under the “agent listed” apartments, because you have long since given up the dream of getting a “non agent” pad - because “no agent” means “absolute cess pit that is way overpriced”). Anyhow, the absolute second you see a listing that is in an area you want (and if it’s more than four or five hours old, forget it, it’s already gone) you frantically call the agent’s mobile number. If they don’t pick up, you usually get a message telling you their voice mailbox is full, and you scream in frustration and dial again.

If they DO pick up, you find out when they’re showing the pad and you high-tail it there ASAP. if you get there and lo and behold it’s not a total shithole, and it’s not on the 9th floor of a walk-up, and it’s in your price range and you like the ‘hood, you say “I’ll take it!” and you race back to your agents office to fill out the paperwork (and MAN, is there a TRUCKLOAD of paperwork).

When you get there, you see some doofus girl shaking hands with the agent who sits at the desk NEXT to your guy (the guy you’re literally paying FOUR F%&!!*! THOUSAND DOLLARS to because he happens to have a copy of the KEY to open the place you looked at, and has the incredible ability to post stuff on CraigsList). And you learn that said doofus has JUST TEN MINUTES EARLIER put a deposit on the place you liked.

ARRRRGGGHHHH.

So that’s my story; I found a place late last night on Craigslist, emailed the broker and asked him
when I could see it. Met him there at 12:30 - at this location. Here’s a photo of the outside.

4th floor, walkup (big wide stairs, which is very unusual; some of them feel like you’re walking inside an ovesized sarcophagus). MY GOD, when I saw it, for the first time in 10 apartments I heard angels sing. I swear I walked in and said “This is it. This is home”. I LOVED IT.

The bedroom windows give you full view of the urbanity - Astor Place is busy, and you just look out the window and see the very New York that you had in your head when you moved here; the very same New York you dreamed you’d be living in. That same busy, furious, frantically energetic New York is right there, pulsing right outside your windows. The bedroom is MASSIVE, big enough for a queen sized bed AND a decent sized desk. Oh, and there’s a fireplace, too. The living room is connected to the bedroom, behind two french doors (and the living room has ANOTHER fireplace). It’s a little smaller than the bedroom, but more than big enough for impromptu martini parties. The kitchen has one of those little bar-extension things that you can sit at with stools (which, might I mention, I have packed in my cube, which is now somewhere outside of Nebraska):

The bathroom is clean, neat, and the toilet isn’t impossibly wedged between the bathtub and a wall.

In short, it was PERFECT. It was the coolest apartment i’ve seen yet. I loved in INSTANTLY. And some jackass twit has beat me to it by twenty #%&!!*! minutes.

Hopefully her application is rejected and I’ll get it - we’ll find out monday morning. Yeah, I’m not holding my breath, either.

So I grumpily wandered back to Union Square (which has free wi-fi access in the park) and sat down on a park bench. I trolled CraigsList on my iPhone and noticed a one and a half hour old CraigsList listing about a pad in Greenwich Village - located here. In this tiny little alley called “Patchin Place”, which apparently has some history to it. It’s a tiny alley behind a gate, and while it’s a whole 50 feet from the busy corner of 6th Ave and 10th St, it feels secluded (which in New York is something a little out of the ordinary) so it’s home to a whole whack of psychotherapists offices because people like to open up when they feel like they’re in a safe environment, I guess. And on top of the therapists offices are little apartments.

So back to the story about the unit there - I called the agent and he had just finished showing it to one couple who didn’t take it. I met him there ten minutes later and while it was only about 40% of the size of the one I just saw, it was kinda neat, and I was frustrated, and it was the end of the day and next Friday is the end of the month so I have to find a place before that hits, so I said “write it up”. It’s a great location (or so I’m told - I know that part of Greenwich Village is hot, but I had excluded it from my searches because it’s too expensive - this one snuck in at the absolute top end of my search parameters). It’s a fair bit smaller, but it’s still a 1br (which is what I’ve been looking for, so my friends can come stay there and I can close my door and drown out the sounds of them drunkenly snoring… not that I’m naming any names MARK BUNTING).

Anyhow, the pad at Patchin Place ALSO has another person who applied ahead of me - but my agent told me “she’s got crappy credit, she’ll probably get rejected”. So I put down three hundred bucks on it as as deposit and we’ll see what happens.

So, Monday morning, I’m either jumping with joy because the girl who took my dream pad got declined for some reason and I get the place. I’ll lose my three hundred deposit on the Patchin Place pad, but it’ll be well worth it.

OR, I lose the dream pad and land the Patchin Place pad. Which is OK, it’s just not as killer as the first one, and it’s a hundred bucks more a month, but (supposedly) in the absolute hippest part of town. Too bad I’ll be too broke from the rent to go our and enjoy it!

OR - I lose BOTH pads, and next week is an absolute mad scramble to find a place before the end of the month, because then I’d be looking at places that are becoming available MARCH 01, or places that are currently empty - and if an apartment is empty in New York for more than a week, something is very, VERY wrong with it.

Bright lights, big city, big headaches. Wish me luck for Monday!