NJ Transit

Goin hiking
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Yeow

Lately I'm noticing that my weird affinity for industrial light fixtures is being replaced by a weird affinity for antiquated weapons. More specifically, I've gotten hooked (excuse the pun) on harpoons used back in the day by whalers. I've spent most of the day sketching out some harpoons of my own and trying to imagine how to translate them into jewelry.

Amtrak 10:41 AM

Lil C hard at work.
Bored.
Syracuse here we come!
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Chocolate Chocolate Peanut Butter Chip

In New York in the summer, I relish my front balcony, breakfasts at Grand Cafe, outdoor concerts, and long walks along the East River. But there is one thing i miss, something that is a staple of my childhood summers that is near-impossible to find here: ice cream. We have Mister Softee trucks here, but that doesn't even come close to fitting the bill for me. There presence is erratic, and the ice cream is dinky and sub par. And we have lots of Baskin Robbin/Dunkin Donuts combo shops. They sell a bunch of flavors, some questionable to say the least. But for some reason, I have no desire to get my cone inside a chaotic Dunkin Donuts. I don't want my ice cream mingling with donuts and coolatas and lattes. I want to stand in front of a tiny ice cream shop and stare up at a big board with listings of multiple flavors and have my ice cream passed to me through a window. That to me is the definition of how to enjoy ice cream in the summer.

Last night, my urge for this experience got the best of me, and after a little time with Google, i discovered that Astoria does in fact have an ice cream store that fits these requirements. So tonight I rounded up my roommate and my brother and we walked over to 38th Street. The sun had set. Kids were playing on the sidewalk. Broadway was hopping. When we made it to Uncle Louies Ice Cream, the front looked dark and for a moment I feared that my dream was about to go unrealized. But as we lingered in front of the store, the woman working inside switched on the outside light, and there it was: the window for passing ice cream cones and shakes and sundaes over to happy customers. The big board with the long list of flavors. Inside, i could see freezers filled with buckets of ice cream. Sure, the price was double what i would have paid back in my hometown. And I ignored the fact that the woman behind the counter wiped her nose on the back of her hand before she scooped my cone. And there was no soft-serve machine to be found. None of that mattered. We picked our flavors, our cones were filled, and we meandered down the sidewalk happily licking our ice cream.

It was delicious.

Strange and intriguing.... My one-time favorite band Counting Crows are on tour with Michael Franti from Spearhead, who I also totally love. I was at a festival a few years back and Franti joined in on this game of hacky sack with a bunch of hippie kids who were playing in front of our tent. I just liked the vibe about him -- even though he was at the show to headline, he wasn't chilling out backstage in a trailer, he was on the festival grounds just hanging out.

Regardless, Counting Crows have been way too whiny for the past few albums and I really haven't listened to anything they've put out in the last 7 or 8 years. Still, I think it's pretty safe to say that August and Everything After is one of the best modern folk rock albums ever released. Too bad it was a progressive downhill from there...

But some of the clips of Counting Crows performing with Michael Franti look and sound pretty cool: