Keeping Organic

When we lived in Brooklyn, we fell in love with the Park Slope Food Coop. Its membership has since doubled to about 14,000, but the PSFC is still a great place to shop due in large part to the wonderful people on our shift and the incredibly low prices. To shop there, members must work 2.5-hour shifts every 4 weeks. The rewards are an amazing selection of high-quality foods at a markup of just 22% over wholesale. Over all, you can't beat the coop's prices.

Shirra and I were lucky enough a few years ago to find ourselves with a great group of people in the 'food processing' unit. This is where people prepare the spice, cheese, olive, dry fruit, and tea items of the cooperative. Our group has six workers, and for most of the past 5 years, they've been the same people. When we moved to New Paltz, we found that we couldn't give up the monthly trips to the coop. Logistics proved difficult, but we've managed.

We obviously can't get all of our needs taken care of in a monthly trip to Brooklyn, so we've had to subsidize our diets by shopping locally. The good news is that New Paltz has several excellent choices to keep our fridge filled with healthy foods. Our favorite spot is Healthy Foods, located in the New Paltz Plaza (off the north end of Main St). The prices are generally great, and when that's not the case (like the high cost of almonds these days), we simply find other favorites until we can hit the PSFC again.

On the lower end of Main St, across from the tattoo parlor, is another good healthy food shop. The choices are different, but I haven't shopped there enough to compare them with Healthy Foods. This shop is smaller, so it's lacking somewhat in feng shui in comparison to its larger competitor, but it's great to have a place to get a healthy snack when we're in the center of town.

If we wanted to save a little money while shopping locally, there is another great choice in High Falls. I came upon it accidentally while antiquing, and I got a good feeling about it right away. It reminds me of the hippy days of the Park Slope Food Coop (from what I've been told), when the membership was smaller and people had to share a lot in the upkeep of the store. The downside with this place is that the discount is only 10%, so its prices are quite a bit higher than its bigger cousin from Brooklyn. Apparently this savings is comparable to that of other nearby food coops, so I'm not complaining. I guess it just shows how amazing the PSFC is and why it's so hard for us to give up our monthly trips to the old neighborhood.

Flood

When the snow invariably melts, the fire department invariably gets called to pump out some basements. Many people have their own sump pumps so that the water that seeps in is dealt with before it rises too high. We get called when the sump pumps don't work (or don't work fast enough), or when flooding happens to a house that doesn't have a sump pump (yet).

I've been to a few pump-outs. They're considered 'public service' jobs, but they're still more interesting than many calls (like the false alarms at SUNY). Here is what the hose looks like when it's in full swing. I'd guess that we remove a few hundred gallons from a typical basement. Often the water is above our knees.