all about the weather

my uncle in poland sends me weather updates almost every day recently. it feels nice to know what is going on in the city where i was born. weather wise. and yet i like new york storms. just like the one hitting brooklyn right now. the thunder almost instantly following lightning, a good indicator that kensington is catching hits. i am on vacation here this week. i still am going to work, so it is not a real vacation, but i am in amy's place, as she is in madrid, i spend my evenings and morning with mona, the newt and amy's thirsty garden. that's as close to vacation as it got for me this year. a busy summer is taking shape ahead. gigantic clusters of pixels will need to be moved across battlefields of preconception. we will end up in a really beautiful place. i can feel it. read a few comments on the Kensington Blog tonight, and some of them made me want to go out and try one of the many authentic little places here on church avenue. because of the upcoming storm, I did not make it very far, though just far enough to feel as if i had traveled for thousands of kilometers, across at least one border. some of the names of the dishes looked familiar. i was the foreign person here and the game was on. brazil : mexico. i was lucky enough to see the gooool for mexico. a man with a broken arm, who had already left the restaurant came running back to see the gooool again and again... and again, on the incredibly grainy picture of the television, high up near the oddly soggy corner of the suspended ceiling. brazil is not an easy team to play against. everyone in the place agreed. i had expected to eat at the table, yet my food came in a blue plastic bag. the same one that some hardware stores use, the kind that smells like oil mixed with paint. it was a pretty clear way to tell me that it was time for me to leave the premises. the food was rather good, even eaten at home. oh, and i ran into the neighbours in the hallway. and also into jeff from work, in the street, he was on his way to the tennis courts around the corner. this really is a mini vacation. i should send a little descriptive email to my uncle in poland. "it is hot in new york tonight. and it is also raining." i think that's how he would describe yet another wonderful day. he is a poet in many ways, compressing complex events into simple sounding weather report like verses. i always got to decode the little messages, back in the day when his letters tended to arrive with big holes cut by the government censors, and now, when there might be no visible holes in the instant electronic correspondence. i think it might now stop raining.