Scarf For Two (The Black Apple)

After months of favorites-list marking and bemoaning the empty spaces on our white(ish) walls in our new(ish) high-ceilinged if not alll that large apartment, we spent most of this rainy Sunday shopping away on Etsy.

I’ve bought a few things there before, a print and some jewelry, but mostly I’ve just clicked around, saving copies of prints to put in my computer desktop background rotation, where they would lie in wait for the eventual day I’d give in and drop some money on the ones I really liked a lot. And putting painting after print after t-shirt into my favorites list (represented by a cute little heart).

Just in the interface, you can tell the people behind Etsy really care about getting their artists’ goods out to the public, including some very nice shopping features like interviews with artists, galleries (public lists by users), and the innovative if eventually unhelpful color-based shopping path. They have some performance issues at times (we seemed to have abnormally slow page load times around 6-7pm), but considering their relative newness as a tech company and image-content-heaviness, this isn’t all that shocking. If Etsy can figure out how to do Amazon-style recommendations with their content, they could have something truly amazing as opposed to just a great place to buy art.

After hours of deliberation (there’s a ton of stuff on Etsy!), we narrowed it down to a bunch of pieces that really struck us as befitting our styles. A not insignificant but fortunately also not ridiculous amount of money later, we walked off with (technically, sat around and waited for) a nice big pile of art to brighten up those sterile walls.

On the end of North 8th lies the official entrance to Williamsburg’s East River State Park, a small space of grass and concrete providing a much-needed green space along the East River.

The last time I was here, a few years ago, I had to sneak in through a hole in the fence, and it was just an empty space filled with rubble and unkempt brush. Now, it’s a park with hundreds of people lounging and admiring the East River and the Manhattan skyline view. Sometimes, progress is awesome.

Holy crap!

It’s only been 4 years of near-constant disruption on weekends and nights, and the automatic message boards are finally working! It’s like we’re using any other major world city’s transport system, except years ago!

Oh, wait, never mind…

They were also testing the automated robot-woman-voice announcements while we were down there (Lorimer St. L, on Sunday, January 14). Hopefully they’ll figure out the volume control better than they had it working yesterday, as it was deafeningly loud, to the point of being incomprehensible, and was skipping and looping on words constantly.

Part of the city’s green market program, the McCarren Park green market graces the corner of Lorimer and Driggs every Saturday, affording a quality, reasonably priced alternative to bland, expensive supermarket fare. This market has become a fixture of my weekend routine, and the need to get there while the selection is still good is the most pressing factor getting me out of bed before noon.

The following are a few of the regular highlights of the past month:

This is getting ridiculous…