An unrelated picture, to get today's sign done, since I'll be very busy later:

It might be a direct translation; I'm not certain, but the 2 characters in the upper right corner are the same as the starts of several lines in an Arabic handout I have for a personal hygiene checklist.

( Continuation of the bittersweet saga of the cats out back )

Let's see whether I can guess this as well as she did.

Name a CD you own that no one else on your friends list does."Walking Mary's Blues" by Diamond Teeth Mary

Name a book you own that no one else on your friends list does.The Betsy-Tacy Companion, by Sharla Scannell Whalen

Name a movie you own on DVD/VHS/etc that no one else on your friends list does. The Italian version of "Howard Stern's Private Parts," with Roberto Benigni doing Howard's voice.

Name a place that you have visited that no one else on your friends list has.Jersey City Medical Center.

Click to enlarge to read the fine print.

Maybe no toco toucan, but you can see the baby sea lion here:
http://community.livejournal.com/baaaaabyanimals/3724274.html

( and plenty of non-toucan birds here! )

Andrew and I took off from work on Friday Sept. 19 and had a nearly perfect day at the Bronx Zoo. The only thing to mar it was that Andrew had to work anyway and was tiptapping away on his Blackberry 20 or 30 times. It didn't seem to bother him, though.

It was the ideal time to go, because it was sunny and in the low 70's, with no bugs and no hot sun beating down, yet not cold enough where the animals would hide indoors. In fact, we saw a lot more of them than usual, because they didn't have to hide from the sun and maybe because they weren't avoiding screaming hordes. Unlike a trip in the spring, there were no school field trips, and many of the exhibits were nearly empty. We decided that we would have to go in September every year from now on.

( Animals here, and the new Madagascar mosaic )

Wednesday morning I packed up and checked out. I didn't feel like paying a bellhop to watch my wheeled bag while I went up the street to the Mediterranean place where I'd gotten a bagel with hummus the previous two mornings, so I asked at the Clarion restaurant if it was possible to get breakfast in a take-out tray. "Sorry, no." Grrr. Again I must be the first person to ask for something "special" in Rochester. (I was told I was the first person to ever request hummus with melted cheese on a bagel, but the Lebanese deli folks were much more accommodating than the Clarion.)

Across the street, I left my bag near JoAnn in the convention hall, where the session was already under way, and walked through the skyway to the Hyatt. The first thing I hit there was the front desk. I asked where in the hotel I could find takeout breakfast and it was a big conundrum, but the person didn't say "no." Instead, she called the restaurant and asked whether they did that. The person didn't know, and had to ask someone else in the restaurant. At this point, I was HUNGRY and was ready to head down the street for another bagel, but the front desk person was being so nice about it that I couldn't. She finally confirmed that, yes, I could go through the breakfast buffet with a styrofoam takeout tray, pay the $18, and be on my way.

It was a fucking fantastic breakfast, and I sampled less than 1/4 of what was available to try there. It would have been a helluva lot cheaper to tip the bellhop and get a bagel, but I had my bag at the end without having to wait behind any nudniks in the hotel. I walked from the convention center to the train station and saw virtually nothing on the way there. I had seen nothing on the walk to the hotel on Sunday, but everything was still closed then. The train station was sort of isolated in an urban wilderness. I got to the station at 12:45 and the train was due to leave at 2:30. The extremely nice ticket attendant in the empty station took my bag into the ticket booth and said I could come pick it up before the train left, but that there wasn't anywhere to buy lunch near the station.

I still had the map and the booklet of restaurants. There was a combination dim sum/Japanese restaurant about a half hour walk away. I got over there and found out where the nice neighborhood in downtown Rochester is: around the music academy. I got a few kinds of dim sum from the takeout menu and then walked down the street and found a fabulous open air cafe full of young people holding instrument cases. I got a large cafe au lait and cookies to go. Everything was perfect, and I thoroughly enjoyed the 7-hour train ride, since the people going all the way to NYC got the car with the chairs THAT RECLINED like recliner chairs where I could raise my legs in extreme comfort!!!. I was a little scared at first because it was right behind the locomotive, and there had just been that head-on collision, but I figured everybody would be acting more carefully and safely right after such a public tragedy/travesty, so I relaxed and enjoyed it.

( Pictures from the train ride here, all from Rochester to Albany, before it got dark. )

JoAnn and I used the barely-a-couple of hours of daylight after 5pm on Tuesday to walk around downtown Rochester. The Rochester tourism table at the convention had included a flyer with 3 phone numbers for 3 walking tours. You call from your cellphone and input a credit card number to get charged $5, and then you have access for the next 24 hours to call that number from your cellphone, punch in a number and hear information about that stop on the walking tour.

The flyer said where to start for each of the 3 tours, so I figured the recording on the phone would say "now turn left and walk..." as a museum audio guide would. However, the recording said "Number 2 on your map..." Uh, what map? (I checked with the tourism lady at the table the next day, and she knew nothing about any map. I must be the first customer they have had for the service.) Fortunately, I had a generic downtown map, no stop was more than 2 blocks from the one before it, and JoAnn and I were good at figuring out what they were talking about. The only thing was that we kept having to click the next number, listen for a sentence or two, and then hang up and walk to the next spot before calling back and listening again from the beginning of that stop.

It's actually a good thing that there was some brainwork necessary, because the walk itself was pretty damn boring. Apparently, most of the character of the downtown neighborhood was torn down when the city decided it didn't like having a lot of industry around the Genesee River, and they tore down the working buildings to build the convention center area. For the remaining buildings, the tour mostly gave what type of architecture it was and who the tenants were over the decades.

( Three interesting things on the tour, behind the cut. )

Back to Rochester later.

This post is about the actual union stuff I did in Rochester. As I mentioned yesterday, I registered on Sunday night, and got a shoulder bag with the resolutions proposed for the delegates to vote on, various committee reports, a lapel pin, and a very nice nametag holder that I'll save for NPL conventions.

Monday morning we met from 9 to 12 in "plenary session" (everyone in one room) for various patriotic and union rahrah stuff, people making statements to hear themselves speak, an award or two, and a presentation or two. There were over 700 of us. It looked like this from where I sat in the Region 11 section (Brooklyn):


We then met in committee from about 2 to 4. What happened then was that the 2 dozen or so resolutions were divided into 6 or 7 groups based on types of issues, and each of those groups had 3 executive board members assigned to chair the discussion in an assigned ballroom. The committee first voted on a recommendation to the full body for each resolution: accept, amend/accept, reject, or refer to an appropriate committee. The most valuable thing the committee does is to amend the resolutions (which may be presented -- in writing, in advance -- by any single union member) to make them better reflect the original intent, clear up any errors, and make them more workable when necessary. After all the resolutions are discussed, the committee then votes on the order in which they will be brought up. This is also very important, because the convention is likely to run out of time before all the resolutions are presented. The chair will alternate one or two resolutions per committee during the plenary sessions, so you really want the things you want passed to be first or second from your group, and the stuff you were recommending for defeat or referral gets put to the end. I joined the "Adminstrative Issues II" group, which had 4 resolutions on such things as election notices in our newsletter and encouraging the creation of safe rooms in workplaces for breastfeeding mothers to express milk.

Monday night 7:45-9 we had department caucuses, which for Agriculture meant our council meeting. Three of us were at the convention, and two others joined by putting 2 of our cellphones on speakerphones.

Tuesday we had a plenary session 9am-1pm to discuss and vote on resoultions, and then we had a rally at a nearby hotel whose workers are trying to unionize, and then we had another plenary session from 2 to 5.

Wednesday was the last plenary session from 9 to 12, and the convention was then adjourned. A Pulitzer prize-winning author gave the keynote speech, and then we voted on as many resolutions as we could in between all the people who just *had to* claim privilege at the microphones for announcements of various people's birthdays and retirements. We got to more than 3/4 of the resolutions in the end, though, which was better than last year.

( More pictures of union stuff behind the cut )

Sunday the 14th I took a nearly 8-hour train ride to Rochester NY on the shore of Lake Ontario in order to represent my coworkers as a delegate at the annual convention of the Public Employees Federation union. It was supposed to be a 7-hour train ride, but we had some delays.

I got in just after 6pm and checked in at the Clarion across the street from the convention center. If I were willing to share a room, I could have stayed nearby at the Hyatt for free, but I wanted to have my own room and, since that meant I had to pay for the other half of the room, I went for the cheaper place. This was the view from my room during the day:


And from a ballroom in a similar spot on a lower floor at night:


saphir23 called me soon after I got to my room to say she could be there to pick me up at 6:30. I said I needed until 7 so I could register for the convention and pick up some dinner to take to her house, since she and her husband Harry had just eaten at his mom's house. Unfortunately, there was nothing open within a 3-block radius of the hotel except for the hotel restaurant, and I didn't have time for that, so I was a ravenous grouchy bear when they picked me up. They drove out of their way to find something open on a Sunday evening in Rochester, and I ended up eating supermarket pizza. It was a special pizzamaking section in Trader Joe's and did not taste bad at all, especially considering it was made in a supermarket, but it wasn't something I'd go out of my way for. Oh wait, I just did.

( Pictures at Saphir and Harry's house behind the cut )

The girl with the giant glasses at 1:08 reminds me too much of myself in college.

POEM STORE
YOURTOPIC YOURPRINT NEWYORK PRICE


He had a customer waiting to pick up an order.

At the end of the long walk of August 31 was the trip over the Williamsburg Bridge back to Manhattan.


( A few more pictures from a few weeks ago. )

Ben has been dead for over 10 years, but there are still votive candles in front of his memorial mural.

I got the latest issue of PandA magazine after handily cosolving the last one with Xemu. I am having a hard time with all but a few of the puzzles in this one and am chagrined to read foggyb's editorial note saying that the metapuzzle in the last issue was unusually easy.

If anyone in the NYNJA wants to get together to cosolve the current and/or future issues, please comment here or email me. If you hear of someone local who was looking, please clue me in on that, too.

Thanks.

PS Whether or not you read PandA, who doesn't enjoy a red panda?

On August 31, I joined a walk of about 7-8 miles led by Shorewalkers VIP Cy Adler. There were about 20 of us. We met near the municipal building in Manhattan, near the Brooklyn Bridge. That's Cy in the middle, wearing the white hat, giving preliminary instructions.



This sign on the Brooklyn Bridge says it was erected by the cities of New York and Brooklyn in 1869-1883.


Many more pictures tomorrow.

That last post about the PA trip brought me up to tomorrow's entry in the 2008 Sign-a-day Project. I'll be in Rochester with unknown Internet access for a few days. I get home Wednesday night close to midnight and have to resume inspecting Thursday morning. So this entry will cover the sign postings for Mon-Wed next week.

( Three not terribly exciting signs in the ladies' room of a supermarket )

We all had a great family-style dinner at Good n Plenty (not fam.Squonk/Cecil unfortunately). The desserts there aren't anything special, but that's ok, because there's no room for them. The buttered noodles alone were worth the all-you-can-eat price.

I would love to do a day trip at Philly Con with an early morning maze visit (they open at 10) followed by lunch at Good n Plenty. I guess breakfast would be on the bus on the way down, although Cherry Crest does sell watermelon and cookies and other foods that could pass for breakfast.

Most of us visited the petting zoo at Cherry Crest after dinner.

You can find 3 pictures of the baby goats and chickens here

( More animal pictures, sunset pictures, and a bit of narrative here )