school days

Here's my new school, where I'm long-term subbing 'til March.  It's in a cool old mansion on Germantown Ave. 

New job means: 

• hours of commute a day (which means hours of podcasts a day)
• early bedtimes (a departure from my most recent sleep-in-til-forever lifestyle)
• the general sense of purpose which comes from employment at any level
• clay in the treads of all my shoes, paint in my hair, glue on my sweaters

Edit: working with little kids also means I'm surpassing my daily hug intake.  Brian Neville once told us that a human needs 7+ hugs a day (source?) to feel the best/do the best/etc.  I'm more than there.

Franklin Flea: the good/bad/etc, "some New York thing"

Today we hit the hot new flea market in town, the Franklin Flea, which has filled the "hip flea market" hole that "sneered" at Brooklyn Flea* left.  I have a couple mixed feelings about it, but generally I'd say to try it out.

The good: it's in the old Strawbridges.  So it's a pretty, old, fancy department store, with a few fixtures (like giant chandeliers) in tact and in use.  There's lots of well curated stuff (furniture, housewares, clothes) and a good mix of vintage and handmade.  For instance, I got this "80's Aztec Babydoll dress", which I think fits into my new "wacky art teacher" wardrobe pretty well.

I also got these sour cream glasses which are kind of my holy grail of finds (Philadelphia '76 bicentennial glasses).

Which brings me to the (kind of) bad. Prices were spot on.  Like, not outrageously high or anything, but like exactly market value.  No deals.
The other bad news is that it's still a little small.  Hopefully they'll keep growing and take over some more of Strawbridges, and it'll be a spot you might want to spend a couple hours at.

In any case, worth checking out.


*this whole idea is funny, how people basically boycotted the Brooklyn Flea when it was at the Piazza just because it had the word "Brooklyn" in it.  This article in Philly Magazine is great (in a way), especially because of the one quote:  "I refuse to support anything in Philadelphia that has some New York thing in it's name."

bill-bored

Faithful readers will know I'm a big proponent of Philly Photo Day.

Here's a really good picture I took with my telephone at the opening last night.  (It was impossible).

Well, guess what!  This girl's photo is gonna be on a billboard!  During the month of December, you'll be able to take a field trip to picturesque Kensington, Philadelphia, and see my "work" real big.

Why a picture of curtains and rainbows got picked is kind of mysterious, but I'm pretty stoked anyway*


I'm also excited that they picked another one that is going to be a giant cat.  But more on that later.

gal-chal

I (and a few other people you may know) have embarked on a November challenge that's not about mustaches.  After reading both some suspicious but encouraging blog posts , and some I know I can do better than this guy posts on the topic, I got inspired to try it myself.  A gallon a day, for a month (November).

To be honest, I always drink a fair amount of water, so it wasn't a huge change to shoot for a gallon. At the onset, the hardest part was trying to keep track.  Fancy water is always sold in liters, but at home or at the bar, I'm more likely to have a pint, and how do pints and liters match up, and how many of those are in a gallon!?  I eventually abandoned any ideas of liters, and locked into those 8 pints a day.

See?  A whole shelf of pint glasses, ready to get filled and emptied and refilled.

Coming up on 2 weeks (I started on the Nov 3rd), and I must say: there's some pros and cons.  Well, only one con.  Bathroom trips.  All the time. The pros?

• feeling good about my skin (this may be imaginary)
• drinking water somehow means I'm eating a little less bad food?  I find I have this mentality that I worked so hard to get all this good (water) into my body, it'd be dumb to eat all the hoagies.*
• going out, I'm trying to alternate drinks with pints of water.  That double results in drinking less booze (saving money/making better choices) and way better mornings, because my body is ultra hydrated all the time
• my apartment is, at times, SUPER hot and dry, and I think having so much water in my system is helping me deal with that without having a body freakout

A few friends have jumped on this hydration-train, with various degrees of dedication. While I'm finding that I'm hitting 12(ish) pints (or 1.5gal) a day, that might not be for everyone (A: one liter is a great start, I swear). Anyway. So far? Feeling good. And now I have to go to the bathroom.

I also wrote about this experiment from a...slightly different/probably less appropriate for you angle here.




*this isn't categorically true, and I wouldn't say I've totally made a switch to a healthy diet, but I'm making better decisions sometimes.

Trick

For someone that likes Halloween pretty good, I sure am ill-prepared for some parts of it.

Sorry, kids.