Friday, July 20, 2007

Runover Bunny

Bunnies are far cuter in books for children than when they've been accidentally run over on your road. In both cases, they're 2-dimensional, but in children's books, they always have bushy tails and seem to be thinking something clever. On your road, they have tire tracks and seem to be getting devoured by flies. To me, this type of bunny is far less cute.

I was driving back from the Village when I noticed a flat lump on the side of the road in the shape of a bunny in motion. Slowing down, I verified in my rear-view mirror that my first suspicion was correct. Maeve was in the car at the time, so I couldn't just run out and check. We were on our way to the playground and pool, so I packed the car carefully: bathing suits, towels, sunscreen, and a big shovel. Then we headed back to the car.

I couldn't recall exactly where the dead bunny was, but I knew it was between our neighbor and us (meaning that it had been run over by either my wife or me). It didn't take me long to locate it; at the point where the flies were most thickly congregated, I slowed down. I quickly hopped out of the car -- Maeve is too young to require an excuse for such behavior -- and opened the trunk. In one motion, the bunny was swept into the foliage, taking his buzzing entourage with him.

The joys of country life.

Monday, July 16, 2007

Exploding Peaches

I was just thinking back to 2007, when that whole Moriello Pool debacle started. I pass the location all the time -- it's on my way to the Village -- but what triggered my memory was seeing a woman sunbathing on the lawn of the Hasbrouck playground today.

My family had just moved to New Paltz the fall before, so 2007 was our first (and only) summer of the pool. We bought a family membership just a few days before the whole breast-feeding incident that brought about the end of the pool and thrust New Paltz into the national spotlight for the first time since the gay weddings of 2003.

I was at the pool the day the fiasco started, and in fact, I overheard most of the conversation that started it. A camp counselor from the Y rather loudly "asked" a friend of mine -- let's call her Cherry -- to stop breast-feeding in plain view of the camp kids. Stunned, Cherry walked over to her friends at the pool to describe what had just taken place. People were always running into friends at the pool, which was one of the reasons my family joined up; even though we'd been in New Paltz for less than a year, we always ran into at least three families we knew.

At the time, it struck me as ironic that this particular councelor was accosting Cherry about public breastfeeding. Cherry's breasts, at their largest, would be completely obstructed by the head of a child. One would have to use a good deal of imagination to be offended by Cherry's public display. I should also point out that Cherry's infant isn't translucent. Since I wasn't standing on a rooftop at just the right angle, I didn't happen to catch a peek that day, but as Cherry pointed out a moment later, her breasts are only about the size of small peaches. The councelor, on the other hand, had what my high school friends had called bazooms. Nowadays I use the more PC term "melons." And what made this encounter between the women so unexpected was that the peaches were almost invisible beneath a child and a few layers of shirt while the melons were almost completely visible beneath one of those criss-cross bathing suit tops that expose several square feet of melon.

This is not to say that the councelor was wearing anything inappropriate. Her bathing suit was of the current fashion, and no one but a lunatic would have complained about seeing too much of her ample offerings. Had I been a woman with her endowment, I might have chosen something slightly less revealing when my job was to look after gobs of middle-school kids, but she clearly felt that she was within normal standards.

The encounter ended as so many of these do, with the breast-feeder walking away stunned while the offended party huddled among her like-minded friends. Since I had happened to have my towel right in between both groups, I overheard the councelor's friends making comments like "That's disgusting" and "In public?" Meanwhile, Cherry had quickly regained the power of speech, and from her camp I overheard "2007 -- that's crazy" and something about how women are allowed to go topless in New York state. It was as I was walking over to make this last point that I also heard one of the women mention how the La Leche League would not take lightly to this whole situation.

The name of this group has always sounded a bit odd to those of us with any appreciation of a foreign language, since it would translate to "The The Milk League," but I suppose it's no more annoying to most than the redundancy of an "ATM machine." The La Leches are not redundant, however. They're the only group in this country working to protect the rights of babies who want breast milk instead of formula. Doctors worldwide have agreed with these babies about the benefits of breast milk, and even formula-makers have made it clear on their packaging that their products aren't as healthy as the real thing. The only problem the La Leches face is how to deliver their product without offending camp councelors and others who are put off by the sight of the back of a baby's head next to a woman's armpit.

We all know what happened next. I think the La Leches went a bit far this time, but I can understand their point of view. The Sierra Club protects endangered species, and the La Leches protect endangered breasts. They quickly mobilized their troops -- breastfeeding women who needed a vacation -- and brought four nursing mothers to New Paltz for two days of fun, and milk, in the sun. The nursing moms positioned themselves around the Moriello Pool just as several groups from the Y were arriving. Cherry wasn't present -- she'd been warned away from the scene until the nursers had done their work -- but Melons was. Within minutes, the kids were back on the bus and the pool was virtually empty.

Word of mouth travels almost as fast as the speed of sound, so by the next day, most people were talking about the pool. With each set of passers-by, one would pick up talk about breasts and milk, pools and Leches. The impression I got was that most people understood the law and the health issues, so that even if they disagreed on the notion of public breastfeeding, they didn't take sides. That's what I like about New Paltz: It's a live-and-let-live environment.

Of course, even a barrel like New Paltz can be spoiled by a bad apple or two. I'm not sure how this proceess of spoilage works with fruit, but with towns, it mostly comes down to finances, and that was certainly the case here. Another problem, in retrospect, was a lack of communication. I think that the whole mess would have been avoided if the Mayor hadn't been vacationing in India. He probably would have calmed things down enough that the police wouldn't have been called. And those arrests made frontpage news everywhere and didn't help matters at all, especially since the women were protected by several laws. I also appreciated the motivation of the SUNY women who went topless at the pool in support of their sister (their much older sister), but that only served to divide Noopers even further. It was almost as though people who would rather have ignored the whole thing were forced to decide between sides of an issue that, legally speaking, had already been decided.

The eventual bankruptcy and closing of the pool made the news eighteen months later. By then, the incident only rated mention on page 20 of a Wednesday copy of the Times. No one was surprised that the Post, which had dubbed Cherry the Boob Queen, did not even offer a follow-up, though this may have been a result of Cherry's lawsuit against them.

So when I saw the topless sunbather outside the Hasbrouck playground today, my first though was for Cherry and her explosive peaches. My second thought was that I'd better head to the playground with the kids before it gets closed down, too.

Fire Camp, First-Half Report

Montour Falls Fire Academy

Week One of my intensive Fire Camp (Firefighter 1 course) is over. It was definitely intense. The 78-hour course, normally offered over many weeks of Mondays as well as some full-day classes on Saturdays, usually takes 6 to 9 months to complete. We do it in 12 days.

The first day was relatively light, but even that set the tone. We met some of our classmates as everyone arrived and unpacked, and by 1 we were in a large classroom. There were 36 students, and we were divided up into 8 units by virtue of where we sat, so each 'company' had 4 or 5 cadets. I ended up in a group with Roger, the other New Paltzer taking the course, as well as three boys who were all 16 or 17. One of them ended up quitting after the first day due, I guess, to exhaustion.

After class, which featured a video presentation about avoidable firefighter deaths, we headed to a large room that had once been a chapel. The room had a few obstacles for us to walk over or crawl thru during what is called the 'air consumption' test. In this exercise, all of us don our full gear (boots, pants, coats, hoods, and helmets) as well as our face pieces and air packs, which weigh an additional 20-30 pounds. The point of the exercise is to determine how long we can get our air tanks to last during strenuous exercise. Altho rated for 30 minutes, most packs will last between 15 and 20 minutes under heavy exercise or stress; I got about 20 minutes out of my tank. I just wish I'd thought to wear my knee pads because my fire pants ('bunkers') aren't padded, so my knees got bruised and cut, which affected all of my exercises for the rest of the week. Some people managed to bruise up their elbows. I think people must have pretty different ways to crawl.

The second day was really stenuous, featuring a maze that we had to crawl thru, fully geared and with our air tanks on, in the dark. The maze had stairs, a slide (not sure what house feature that was meant to represent), and some small crawl spaces that we had to squeeze thru. In order to make things really tricky, we had put tin foil in our face pieces so that we couldn't see anything; it turns out that when the smoke gets really hot, it fills up most of the room so that fire fighters have to crawl around with little or no visibility.

The maze took most of us over ten minutes, and it was near the end of his tour of it that our firefighting brother, Brian, realized he wasn't going to make it. He took off his face piece, announced "I'm going down," and passed out. A couple liters of IV fluids later, he was ok, and by dinner time, he was back with his company. He managed to finish the week in great shape both physically and academically. He's an EMT and nurse, so he knew what was happening with his body. Later he told me that he'd had to sit on the side, waiting for his turn, for nearly 25 minutes before going into the maze. On a hot day, that was more than enough to knock out anyone. So when it was my turn to wait for the maze, I kept cool and didn't don my face piece or gloves till the last second.

Academics claimed two students, tho they have a chance to redeem themselves in the next few days. At the end of the week was a 50-question test with a passing grade of 70. Two of the teens, one of whom was in my company, scored in the 60s, but luckily they'll get a 2nd chance to pass the test before the class resumes on Sunday. At the end of the 2nd week is a 100-question test with the same passing score of 70. Of course, that test covers more material, but I imagine it will actually be easier because I'm so used to the type of questions asked and because my test-prep book for the test seems to focus more on the work we covered during week 1.

My favorite hands-on activities were ladders and search-and-rescue. I wasn't especially good at the searching, and crawling around in full gear and on air is fairly tough all around, but it was pretty cool and was definitely excellent practice. The ladder exercise was fun. We had to hoist and erect ladders, one of which could extend to 35 feet, and climb up and down the side of a building; we even learned to carry someone sideways down a ladder, a great trust exercise. Operating various hoselines was fun, too, and it was also neat to learn how to break into different kinds of doors. We worked on our ropes all the time. Opening hydrants was fun, too. I also liked learning how to use a monster chain saw in order to cut into a metal door.

The hardest thing for me was the 2-minute donning. According to some regulations, we have to get fully geared up (with our air on) within 2 minutes. Because I'd never even put on a regulator before, this was harder for me than for those with more experience. Compounding things was the fact that my coat has both snaps and these latchy knobby things that I just couldn't get done quickly. I should have been able to don in about 90 seconds, but I also tended to panic, so I'd forget basic things like pulling my hood over the outside of my facepiece. I think that when we return in a week, I'll have no trouble with donning. It also helps that my lieutenant (in NP) lent me a coat with a zipper and Velcro, just in case.

The instructors are fantastic, averaging about 25 years of fire fighting a piece. Their styles varied -- some were avuncular, others militaristic, Most of them could get quite blue, but I never heard any of them yell at someone in a mean way, and in fact they were generally quite enthusiastic and encouraging. I look forward to returning there in a week, but I still have a lot of reading and studying to do before the big final exam.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Running on Empty...and then NOT Running

Driving to Manhattan from New Paltz affords us the opportunity to benefit from the cheaper (no wait -- "less expensive") gasoline in New Jersey. Even tho Joisey is one of only two states that doesn't allow customers to pump their own gas (which amounts to about 6 extra cents per gallon), it's still about 20-30 cents cheaper per gallon than anything in NY State. So on our trips back from the City, I always fill up the tank, saving about $4 or $5 each time.

Apparently my thrift has boundaries. And these boundaries seem to be located just short of 88th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. That's where our car suddenly came to a stop as I was driving Emmett and Fiona to the unicycle club. And I'd forgotten since the last time my car ran out of gas (college, 1986), that when a car runs out of gas, the power steering stops working. With Fiona pushing the brake when necessary, I steered and pushed the car into a parking space that happened to be right next to us. A passing Samaritan helped out, too, and within minutes, the car was safely parked in a legal spot. [Chances of having a car run out of gas exactly next to a legal spot in NYC: one in a thousand].

Counting my atheist blessings -- this could have happened on the highway, this could have happened on the George Washington Bridge -- I quickly realized that I had two options. The obvious one was to call Triple-A. They would send a towtruck operator with a gallon of gas, but it was already 12:45, and I didn't want to be late for the 1 pm unicycle club. Triple-A usually arrives within an hour, but Single-U is much faster. Single-U is me on a unicycle, riding to the nearby garage. I figured they'd have a gas can, and I was right. It cost more than I expected ($11), and the gas was $3.50 a gallon rather than the $2.80 it would have been in New Jersey, so that one gallon ended up costing about $12 more than it should have and nearly caused an accident.

I put another gallon in the tank before we headed home, just in case we got stuck in some traffic jelly, but it was smooth sailing the rest of the way.

Sunday, July 01, 2007

Top Co-Op Shop...Entering the SPENDOSPHERE!

We still belong to the Park Slope Food Co-Op. A monthly work shift there entitles a person to shop for awesome food at amazing prices. Because the Co-Op only raises prices by 22% above wholesale (compared with 100% for most retail outlets), customers save nearly 40% on most items. So how did we end up spending $560 this past Saturday?

Well, for one thing, we were shopping for three months because of our upcoming leave-of-absense. We can't make our next two work-shift dates, so we told the office folks to put our memberships on hold till September. The other thing to consider was that Shirra is planning to bake up a pasta dish for the monthly meeting of the New Paltz Fire Department tomorrow night. So a small portion of that huge bill is going to be reimbursed.

No one at the Co-Op had ever seen a shopping spree of this magnitude. We'd all seen some in the $300 range and even a few over $400, but this was a whole new spendosphere. I made the suggestion that every time someone spends over $500, a bell go should go off -- sort of like a bit of Las Vegas -- but everyone knew I was kidding.

So what does $560 get you? Well, according to my math, about $1000 worth of groceries. We got 61 fruit strips. The rest is a blur. Peanuts, pumpkin seeds, pistachios. Some laundry items.