some memorial park...

at the corner of old field rd, main st, and n country rd in setauket, there is a small park dedicated to someone. i read the description on a small commemorative plaque, and have absolutely no idea who its for. trying to find the name of a park when you cant remember the dedicatee... well its a wee bit tough.

mucho algae. or perhaps algaeissimo?

this didnt turn out quite as id pictured. but it is very green...

setauket post office

another stone bridge

deceptively blue water [its the same algae filled gunk]

my mom read me the story a tree grows in brooklyn when i was little. this has nothing to do with it and even reading the description i cant remember anything from the book. but a tree grows in setauket...

the end.

work clothes

everyone at work says i dress up too much. perhaps they just dress down too much... i wore this to sit at my desk for an hour, tape down a traffic counter, and then drive around the town for 4 hours checking "no trucks" signs. wee. but it was ridiculously comfortable and if you are doing nothing all day, you may as well be completely unrestricted by your clothes.

• sweater: new york & co
  
• dress: banana republic [clearance]
• leggings: somewhere in new zealand
• shoes: chinese laundry
  

this outfit however, was chosen for a possible meeting day. fortunately, i didnt have to go as it turned out to be mass chaos and confused lawyers.

• shirt: calvin klein
• skirt: target
• shoes: kenneth cole
  

driving hazards

dear long island:

i dont care that you have never been off the island except to fly your xenophobic ass to disney or on a cruise. you still should know basic rules of the road. just in case you dont... here are 10 helpful hints:

1. the left lane is the fast lane. when you drive at or below the speed limit in the left lane and 5 cars pass you on the right, IT IS A HINT TO PULL THE FUCK OVER INTO THE OTHER LANE.

2. the "no hand-held cellphone while driving" law in new york also applies to texting. if you drive off the road while texting at 65mph, no one is going to rescue you.

3. a red light means stop. it does not mean downshift and gun it through the light [thats a yellow], it does not mean honk at the person ahead of you who stopped, and it does not mean stop, wait until you get bored, and go anyway.

4. the shoulder is for emergencies. this does not include passing stopped traffic and then cutting back in again 10 cars later. it also does not include driving with your right signal on as if preparing to turn, and then cutting off an entire line of traffic when you accelerate ahead of them. if you do either of these moves, new yorkers have a legal right to shoot on sight. [not really]

5. slowing down for no reason is a good way to cause massive traffic backup and road rage. slamming on the brakes to gawk at an accident will also cause another collision, and you being a new yorker, will then sue the person behind you for following too close and will feign horrible neck pains.

6. merging is not a contact sport. neither is it a competition to see who has the biggest penis. IT. IS. NOT. YOU. do not rev the engine as someone is trying to merge from a ramp in evening traffic.

7. emergency lights [fire truck, police car, ambulance] mean something is happening. someones life may be in danger. GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE FUCKING WAY. in order to accomplish this simple task, you must not speed around the other people who are pulling over, or stop directly adjacent to another vehicle as the emergency vehicle cannot pass by.

8. you are not important. the other 75,000 cars on the road are also trying to get somewhere.

9. the lever just behind your steering wheel is called a blinker. in other countries it is called an "indicator" or a "signal". it alerts cars around you as to your intentions and shows you are not a complete douche.

10. no matter how much you spent restoring your car or buying it new, burning rubber from a stop light is not cool. you look like an absolute imbecile and you probably are swerving around trying not to fishtail.

thanks for continuously renewing my lack of faith in humanity. see you tonight on the roads!

love,
liz

withering garden...

idk if it has been too hot or i have been watering incorrectly [?] but shits dying!

from like 20 feet away you can already see something is going wrong on the left side. please ignore the large bare spot on the right side. there is a grape tomato that neatly cropped itself out of the pic, and since planting several weeks ago, has produced a total of 3 grape tomatoes! two of which were already turning orange when transplanted.

and its the cucumber, or pepino. idk if its experiencing a fungus or just a sunburn or if its just angry. maybe the feng shui is off. it is pretty near the chamomile and peppers...and nobody likes spicy tea. then again it is adjacent to the dead rosemary. but i digress.

from this shot the zucchini look pretty decent. the tomatoes are taking over..and it turns out the beans dont climb very well. they are in fact bush beans. oops.

my as yet unnamed heirloom tomato is also going the way of the saber toothed tiger. dead. in case you didnt follow. its still producing about 5 tomatoes a week, but some of the branches were weighted down more than their little capillaries could manage, and are now shriveled.

some peppers...

the highlight of my garden right now [besides my nicely mowed grass thank you very much]: three ghost eggplants! my regular eggplants are just maturing enough to have...maybe one. or its a dead flower. but i dont want to fuck with it just in case it decides to grow into a pretty purple blobby thing, otherwise known as an aubergine.

tomato sauce

fresh from the garden

basil, parsley, & peppers from the garden [peppers were violently re-diced later on]

sauteing onions [for flavor only...and i will pick them out later]

diced tomatoes

sauce immediately after mixing

after 2 hours of boiling

5 hours after initial choppage. and including the forgotten garlic and tomato paste for thickening

bubbly closeup

fin.