the great leslie

Although I am now gainfully employed (with health insurance!), my income is still rather...er...limited. At other times in my life, I'd be getting ready to go out for a Saturday night on the town, to hit the bars with friends, maybe see a show or eat out somewhere. Instead, I'm home tonight, watching Sherlock Holmes on PBS.

I'll also be finishing a painting I started earlier, and perhaps trying my hand at some sweet potato dish or crafting something from the bag of fabric scraps I've been collecting. Instead of going out to brunch today, I went for a run in Central Park and did the dishes. And tomorrow, I have a full agenda of doing free things with friends.

So, I'm running instead of brunching and making things instead of drinking my dollars away (not to mention all those empty calories). I'm also seeking weekend work and exploring all the ways to exploit my fine city for free things to do.

This is my new wellness diet, albeit brought on by the recession. I'll still be eating good food, going to good shows, and sharing good times with good people. I'll just be doing it on the cheap, which I hope will serve me well.

I ran into my awesome friend Britta the other day under the JMZ train in Brooklyn, the neighborhood where I now work. She caught me up on all she's been doing, which includes getting ready for a one-day installation of her Window Farms project at the Whitney! 

Window Farms is a system for city-dwellers to grow food stuffs in the windows of their apartments. Lettuce, tomatoes, herbs, squash, and other vegetables. A large Window Farm will be on display at the Whitney's Family Day on October 4 between 1pm and 4pm. Kits for making your own window farm will also be available.

I've been helping get ready for the big day by filling up dirt packets for the kits and scrubbing some of the recycled materials to make them museum-ready. It isn't my project, of course, but I'm feeling some joy in working on something that will be on display at a world-famous museum for an entire day!

So: I got a new job and moved back into my New York City apartment and did the Lobsterman triathlon (read more about it here). It's been a very busy few weeks!

I was hired as the program coordinator at Visual Thinking Strategies (whoa: career change!). I've been on the job for about three weeks, and I'm starting to understand what the heck I am doing! My office is in Williamsburg, so I'm back on the L train and walking down Bedford Avenue on a regular basis, judging peoples' shoes and eyewear.

I'm still freelance writing, and have story in Family Circle this month (download it from the clips page). I will have quite a few pieces in amNewYork this fall, and am sending pitches and hoping to write more in the future.

Now that I'm back in the city, I'm trying to go on cheap/free field trips and catch up with all my NYC friends. I had a great summer in Maine, but I'm looking forward to fall.

A facebook status update led me here, to the Web site of lost words. The folks from Oxford want you to pick a work, but not just any word: a word that has slipped through the cracks of language and become all but obsolete. You can adopt a word to name a pet, get tattooed on your arm, or sky write above your town.

In a certain way, I disapprove of this inorganic way of promoting the use of language. If no one is using the word, maybe it's just because the word is obsolete. That's how language evolves. Words fall out of favor and are replaced by new ones, like bootylicious and locavore.

But, as a Person of the Word, I can fully relate to wanting to save words from extinction. (I also want to save the Blue-Footed Boobie from extinction, just for the record.) This summer, while I was volunteering at The Telling Room, I was asked by a young poet for a word, which she may or may not use in the poem she was going to write. My word (which soon became hers): tintinnabulations. 

I first used the word in the "long-word game," which we played in the Hendrickson household many years ago. Sanctimonious was another favorite. I guess this was my mother's idea of "saving the words."

The poet used the word in a sestina, "a highly structured poem consisting of six six-line stanzas followed by a tercet), for a total of thirty-nine lines. The same set of six words ends the lines of each of the six-line stanzas, but in a different order each time." It was funny and clever, written in the voice of a small child.

I, on the other hand, am off to charter a plane to have the word written above the skyline of Portland, Maine on my last full day here.

The air quality in Maine changed today. Just yesterday I was beaching it...with a sunburn to prove it. And today, somehow, it's that day in August that E.B. White wrote about here. And even though I'll be drinking a summer ale tonight, I wouldn't trade it either.