The Challenge of Healthy Eating

For about two months now, I've been trying to follow a restricted diet for health reasons. No alcohol, no coffee, no dairy (except yogurt), no sugar, limited fruit, and no grains except for low-glycemic grains like quinoa and steel-cut oats. It was easy the first couple weeks, but after that it became near-impossible. I've learned a few things about myself and society in the process:

* There are no particular foods that I really miss. In fact, I miss bread and pizza a lot less than I expected. Instead, I miss the overall feeling of indulgence. I've realized that our lives are built around little daily indulgences. A morning cup of coffee with honey. A chocolate chip cookie as a pick-me-up during a terrible afternoon at work. A glass of wine with dinner. The evening walk to get ice cream after dinner. I'm used to being able to eat relatively whatever I want whenever I want it. My days now feel like constant deprivation, as I'm confronted with other people consuming foods I can't have.

* Our society is built around unhealthy eating. In the abstract, reading sample menus for a healthy diet don't sound so bad. Really, it's the exposure to all the tasty, unhealthy food that makes sticking to a diet hard. It feels particularly so in New York City, where temptation is on every block, in every bodega, restaurant, pizza place, ice cream parlor, cafe, bagel store, falafel cart, and so on. I must pass more than a hundred places selling food on my bike ride to and from work. I suppose that's part of the fun of living in New York City -- all the easy access to restaurants and bars that push enjoyment as a lifestyle. They call at me to stop and relax and enjoy myself with a drink and whatever food I want. I imagine it would be easier if I lived in a place with fewer options where I drove directly to and from work. For example, I know was able to diet easily in the summers during college because my setting was restricted to campus without a dining hall.

Moreover, when eating out, it's hard to find meals that don't come with bread or noodles or white rice or fries or chips. Because tasty food is what sells, that's what restaurants and companies sell, sending the message that they're okay and normal to eat. Yet, it would be better for us all if refined grains and processed foods weren't so ubiquitous.

* I thought I had my approach to healthy eating down. I pride myself on incorporating a variety of grains and beans and vegetables into my home cooked meals. I consider whole milk and butter and meat healthy when sourced from grass-fed farms. I like to experiment with natural sweeteners like honey and pureed fruits. I have no problem making whole grain versions of foods like breads and crackers and muffins from scratch, but this doesn't even allow for that.

* I also miss making baked goods not for the tastiness of the sugary confections themselves, but for the act of making something fun and creative that will delight people. I used to bake a lot, as documented on this blog. My baking has waned over the past couple years. Part of that is because of Evan, who is always reminds me how unhealthy baked goods are (yet he eats ice cream every day...). Which is true, and which is why it has always fascinated me that some food bloggers bake seem to bake so often, also given that it's expensive to keep buying all that butter and chocolate. I used to take my friends and coworkers' birthdays as occasions to whip up some new creation. In the two years at my current job, I've brought baked goods into work only a few times. I've been wanting to get back into baking, especially now that fall is here. But alas...

* Which is all to say that I haven't kept to the diet strictly. I make small exceptions to help get myself through the days (and big exceptions on a recent two week vacation in Oregon). And it isn't forever. It's temporary. But it's been a good learning experience that will make me more conscious of what I'm eating going forward.

Have you done any crazy diets? What did you learn from them?

Making Sense of Outdoor Space in the City

I'm over at the Green Phone Booth today reflecting on my conflicting desire to have my own outdoor space so I can do seemingly green urban homesteading activities like vegetable gardening and composting, even though it's not sustainable for everyone to have their own piece of land to do so. Moreover, my yard turned out not to be a dream come true. Read on to find out why...

A Day in My Life

I'm over at the Green Phone Booth today, where I'll now be blogging every so often. To introduce myself to the booth, I've shared a typical day in my life, so go check it out if you've ever wondered how I spend my days.

Although, this week has been anything but typical. Hurricane Sandy hit New York hard. I personally felt thankful to be unaffected and thankful for all of our modern infrastructure and conveniences, which meant I was snug in my apartment on high ground without even losing power, able to monitor the news via internet throughout the storm. For me, the hurricane has meant days of getting to just relax, cook good food and do some work remotely at home, while we wait for power to be restored to lower Manhattan where my office is located, and for the subway stations connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan to be pumped clear of flooding. Selfishly, the forced relaxation that comes with severe weather is a welcome relief from my busy life. I am grateful for this, knowing that for others, it has meant days of darkness without power. Given that subway service has already been partially restored and that Manhattan's power will likely be restored by Saturday, I think we can be optimistic about our city's path to recovery.

Living Small

Upon moving out of the apartment with the bed bug issue where I lived with my best friend, my next move was in with my boyfriend. He had been living in a smallish one bedroom, but we thought it was just a little too small for the two of us, so we spent all of March and April hunting for a bigger apartment, to no avail. Because his current rent would be so cheap split two ways and we knew we could make it work, we didn't want to move unless we found something worthwhile, which we didn't. So we decided not to be pressured by the rental market and to stay put until we felt like looking again.

What we learned was that his apartment was not too small, like he had feared. We actually fit together just fine in 400 feet. I'm a minimalist, so I didn't add much more to his space, and I enjoy puzzling out small living spaces. Evan has plenty of stuff like a normal person, including a bazillion musical instruments and cables, but he knows how to hide things away under his bed or shoved in the closet. If we had stayed there longer, we could have invested in more vertical storage like tall, narrow bookshelves or dressers or floating shelves, to use the space even more efficiently.

There are certain elements that make a tiny home more usable, and that apartment boasted many of them: An open kitching/living plan, which made cooking social rather than isolating and made entertaining possible. No narrow hallways to eat up space. Multiple closets to fit all our stuff, with enough vertical room for two shelves above the hangers. More kitchen cabinets and counter space than most NYC apartments I've lived in. To that end, they were deep kitchen cabinets with room for storage above them. Window boxes and ample windowsills for growing herbs and cheery flowers and sleeping cats.

We did rent a storage unit, which I always considered excessively yuppie, but now I realize it's worth paying another $85 a month to hide winter clothes or boxes of your boyfriend's random stuff, rather than paying many more hundreds in rent. (And we held onto some extra furniture in case we moved.)

Now that we're in a bigger apartment, I still miss that one sometimes. I miss lounging on the couch and chatting with Evan five feet away at the kitchen counter. I miss laying in bed and hearing him play guitar right next to me. Mostly, it felt cozy and homey and lived in. I'm glad we had that experience -- it's good to know that we know we could downsize and fit in small space again if need be. I would have been happy to stay there a while longer, but instead, we ended up moving only a few months later into an apartment almost twice the size.

Bed Bugs Part 2: How it affected my life

The unpleasant thing about bed bugs is not the itching. That is much worse if you have say, a mosquito problem, which I've experienced indoors and outdoors in Brooklyn. It's the way you have to live carefully, so that you won't spread bugs anywhere or to anyone else. It's the work involved in keeping your things meticulously clean and sealed up in bags. And doing it all over again when you realize you left a bag open after a late night of drinking or the cat tore it open. It's the paranoia that made me wonder if every itchy spot was a bite, at some point losing perspective on what was normal everyday itching and what were true bites. So looking back, I probably had fewer bites than I feared I did. It was also the indignity of negotiating solutions with a landlord who just. didn't. get. it.*

So from October 2011 to April 2012, I lived out of bags like this. I paid $1,000 a month to live in a ~70 square foot, windowless room in a railroad apartment that meant my roommate and her cat traversed through my room like a hallway.** We couldn't have guests over. Only my boyfriend, who somehow had the patience to deal with the system of coming over, immediately changing into the pajamas he kept there and putting all his stuff in a plastic bag. I did the same thing in reverse when going to his place, to prevent possibly carrying bugs there, which luckily worked.

Obviously during this time, the apartment wasn't a particularly enjoyable place to be, and it didn't feel like a home - more like a crash pad where I would return after work, rifle through plastic bags, to pack up my things to leave again in the morning and spend a night or weekend at my boyfriend's. You don't realize how important home is - as a solid ground where you can retreat and restore - until it's gone.

I'm also angry that it stole from me this time that was supposed to be a year of enjoying single living with my best friend, because I wasn't around as much as I otherwise might have been, and we didn't have parties or friends over the way we had hoped. The apartment that my roommate had decorated so cutely turned out to just be a headache.

The experience was particularly trying because after previous negative living experiences, I had told myself I would never let myself get stuck again. Yet, there I was, unable to move on.

The thing that got me through it was the belief that I would be living in a normal home again by summertime. A place where I could come home and just lounge on a couch or hang my clothes up in a closet. And, it came true, since I now live in a real home with my boyfriend.

* why don't landlords ever get it? why are they all clueless?
** but that's its own story about how the NYC rental market sucks.

Bed Bugs Part 1: The Story

I was waiting for the bed bug ordeal to be over and my apartment security deposit to be returned before talking about it here. So now that it is safely past me (at least this time...because there is no guarantee that I won't get bed bugs again when they are so prevalent in New York) ...

There are two kinds of bed bug infestations. In the first one, you notice a couple bugs and bites and get sprayed right away, a few times over the course of a month and a half. You don't experience any bug evidence after the first spraying, so after the last one you can feel secure that the problem is gone and go back to normal living. This is how it seems to go for most people. It didn't go that way for me.

In the second scenario, the landlord ignores bed bug complaints for too long and doesn't handle the situation properly, which allows them to infest the whole building. I only know of a few other cases like this. 

Our building supposedly had bugs a year or so prior, and then they popped up in one apartment again, but the landlord ignored it for months before bringing in an exterminator. For some reason, those particular tenants didn't care enough to do much of anything about it, so their infestation spread to other apartments and continued to persist. Neither the landlord nor my downstairs neighbors understood the value of a preemptive, comprehensive approach. The landlord refused to spray the whole building on the same day. He hired an exterminator who would only come to our place on his days off from his regular job. Then he had his handyman "trained" as a secondary exterminator, who did a terrible job. Also, it was weird being in a text-friendly relationship with the exterminator that got so friendly he asked my roommate out on a date.

Our landlord also pressured me into not reporting him to the city, insinuating he would withhold our deposit. And since all I ultimately wanted was to be able to move out and get my security deposit back without spending time or money in the court system, we didn't report him. So now that I'm no longer fiscally or legally tied to him, I can say that Marek Kaczor is a bad landlord. It wasn't just the bugs. There were constantly things going wrong, like no hot water for a week, no heat over Christmas, no working oven for a month. Our neighbors downstairs said they had taken out two lawsuits against him. Unfortunately for renters, he owns several buildings in the Williamsburg/Greenpoint area, mostly rented by Bedford Prime Realty.

I would have liked to just move out of the building, like many of the other tenants did within a couple months. However, my roommate refused to move - and I couldn't very well sublet a room with bed bug risk, I didn't want to pay double rent to live somewhere else, and since my roommate was my best friend, I couldn't just leave her to deal with figuring out how to cover my rent. 

Instead, after three months, the landlord realized it was probably because bugs could hide in our cracked floors. So we moved across the hall into a fully sealed apartment while he redid our old apartment. Things got better there, but knowing that the apartment below us still had bugs meant I could not, nor would I ever in that building, trust it was safe to take my stuff out of bags.

We finally moved out in May, two months short of our lease. Ultimately, it turned out for the best that we waited until the spring to move. By then, we hadn't had any definite bites in a couple months, so we felt relatively confident that the bugs were gone and we wouldn't be taking them with us. Which meant I didn't have to throw out or store away my stuff, or spend a month's worth of rent to fumigate all of my belongings, all ideas I had previously, angrily considered.

You can be sure that when I went hunting for a new apartment, I was thorough about checking into the landlord. Most people by now know about the bed bug registry. But in New York City, you can also search an address in the city's public database of building registrations and violations to look for past and current complaints, violations, and lawsuits, and to find out the landlord's name so you can google for any dirt to be found on them. I always ask the broker/landlord/current tenant if there has been any history of bugs or other problems. There is also a disclosure of bed bug history form the landlord is required to complete if you ask for it. See the city website for more on the laws related to tenants' rights and landlord obligations regarding bed bugs. 

This experience also taught me the value in trusting your gut when looking for a new apartment. My gut didn't feel good about choosing this apartment in the first place, but we took it anyway because we felt like options and time were running out. In Part 2 tomorrow, I talk a bit more about how this experience tested my patience and my sanity.

Tips for Entertaining in Small Spaces

The apartment I'm living in now with my boyfriend is a 400 square foot one bedroom. It may not be as difficult as Erin's life in 250 square feet, but it still requires some creativity to make it work. 

For example, we both love to entertain. I often hear people complain that their apartment is too small to have people over but as I've mentioned before, I don't let that stop me. In this apartment, I've discovered two tips that make it possible to entertain in a small space: 1 - rearrange furniture and 2 - have convertible furniture.

We are lucky enough to have an open kitchen/living space that allows us to rearrange as needed. We also both inherited quality wood dining tables that can expand or contract as needed. Mine has extra leaves that can be added, and his can be folded into a small narrow side table.

For dinner parties, the couch is pushed against the wall with an accompanying coffee table. Then, our two dining tables can be fully expanded and pushed together in the middle of the room, in total providing seating for nearly 10 people. Or for bigger parties, the tables can be folded up out of the way against the walls or bookshelves to create open space for dancing and mingling.



When the party's over, the couch goes back into its place in front of the TV, one table folds back into  a side table next to the couch, and the extra leaf comes out of the other dining table, returning to a table for two.

All that rearranging might seem like a pain, but that's just how life is in NYC. And you might be surprised at how many people you can actually fit in your apartment, if you try.

Elements of a Minimalist Bedroom

I am a minimalist in that I don't like buying and owning too much stuff. Just the idea of it weighs me down. The more things you have, the harder it is to clean your home and to move homes. It doesn't make sense for us to deplete the earth's resources so that we can acquire things that we don't really need and that force us to have larger homes to house all that stuff. Each time I move, I take it as an opportunity to figure out what else I can get rid of. I've also learned a few tricks over the years on how to manage with fewer things in smaller spaces. I will admit I have many kitchen things, but in general I aspire to minimize my belongings. This is how I live in a 70 square foot room. (Note: many of these photos are from my previous apartment, which had better light.)

- While keeping my mattress on the floor means I lose storage space under my bed, I also like the simplicity of it and not having a bedframe to move around when I change apartments.

- A storage container doubles as nightstand, covered by an attractive sheet.

- Rather than use a duvet, which I find cumbersome to remove for washing, I just keep my comforter between two sheets.

- I don't have a desk. In the past, I used a tray table, although my current room doesn't have room for that, so I usually bring my computer to my bed or the living room coffeetable.

- I don't own many books (since I do my reading via library loans), I don't own any DVDs (that's what the internet and netflix are for); and I recently made sure all my CDs were burned onto my computer so I could recycle them all at Best Buy.

- You can just see the black suitcase standing hidden behind the door, which serves as storage and also doubles as extra surface area in a room short on it.

- In the past, I have also used boxes for storage instead of buying more shelving furniture.

- I like to hang a plastic bag rather than having a garbage can. You're going to have a plastic bag inside the can anyway, so why bother buying another piece of plastic just to keep it in?

- I try to keep as many of my appliances as possible plugged into one power strip, that can easily be turned off whenever leaving home to avoid using phantom power.

- I periodically reevaluate all my clothes to give away anything I have determined that I no longer like to wear or consider useful. 

Do you have any tricks for simplifying your home and eliminating unnecessary furniture and "stuff"?

Sneak Peek of my new apartment

Yes, as I have mentioned, I moved AGAIN earlier this summer. Such is the way of life of a twenty-something New Yorker. This time I moved out of a craigslist roomshare so that I could live with my best friend Jamie. The apartment hunting process was extremely painful. You may think that working with a broker will be helpful. In fact, the search process involves refreshing craigslist searches every hour for two and a half weeks, calling every lead, visiting multiple apartments each night, working with multiple brokers and mostly seeing apartments that would be fit for a couple but not roommates because of our nonprofit salary price range. We applied for four apartments, two of which the tenants decided not to move out of, and one of which the broker was incompetent and waited a week to tell us the landlord picked another applicant.

The unfortunate thing about New York real estate is that it's more expensive to live with a friend than strangers because it usually involves signing a new lease, which landlords use as opportunities to raise the rent exorbitantly. So you can either live with craigslist roommates in a decent apartment at a more reasonable price, or have an awesome friend as your roommate but not as nice an apartment.

So, we ended up in a railroad apartment, where I pay more than one should to live in a 70 square foot room with no window. BUT, at least we have a cute apartment with lots of plants. We managed to stay in a good area in Williamsburg, even if it's not my favorite part of the neighborhood. And Jamie is my favorite.

Fire Escape Garden

Another apartment, another plant setup. This time on a fire escape, where there's room enough most of the plants I started in my former back patio this spring. Parsley, mint, rosemary, oregano, thyme, sage, basil (which I grew from seed and is just now starting to take off), cosmos (one of my favorite wildflowers) and two tomato plants. I gave away several tomato starts and left behind the lavender.

Camping in NYC

Did you know you there is a campground within New York City's limits? I didn't until last week, when I found myself joining friends for a camping excursion to Floyd Bennett Field, a former airport, now part of Jamaica Bay/Gateway National Recreation Area. It wasn't the best time for camping during the 100 degree plus heatwave. Thankfully, by the time we got there in the evening, it felt about ten degrees cooler than in the city proper with some breezes coming off the nearby water and the shade effect of trees. We made sure to bring and drink several jugs of water and coolers of cold beer. You can get there by car, bike, or by subway and then bus. We took a car to be able to carry all that gear, but several people in our group somehow made the hour plus bike ride in the heat.



There are about five group campsites, with little to medium shade coming from small trees and bushes. Each "campsite" has a picnic table, firepit and grill centered around an open field for frisbee. It was the perfect kind of setting to gather people together to kick back in semi-nature in celebration of someone's birthday. I only wish it hadn't been so hot so we would have wanted to stay all weekend and actually kick back. Even though a fire was the last thing we needed, we built fires anyway for cooking veggie burgers and to ward off the bugs.







We took long late night walks on the expansive paved runways, which felt in the darkness like eerie scenes out of Lost, and made new friends with other campers we ran into on our explorations. The unsettling sound of planes taking off and landing overhead at JFK just across Jamaica Bay comingled with a variety of birdsongs.







It was so hot that we were forced out of our tents in the morning before 8am, surprised to realize that our tent was in shade as we hoped when we set it up, even though it certainly didn't feel like it from inside.



Since the campground is just across the bridge from the Rockaways, we made a five minute drive over to the much buzzed about Fort Tilden Beach, where there are no lifeguards, where girls go topless, where you can freely drink cans of beer. I was surprised to see it looked like an actual ocean beach, like the Jersey shorelines I'm familiar with, rather than Coney Island's crowded, tame and murky water. The whole lot of us headed straight into the water to cool off, some diving under waves, some floating and bobbing, some standing knee deep in cold water to enjoy the occasional crashing spray. However, in what I understand was an anomaly, when we'd step away from the water, the flies swarmed relentlessly, dozens at a time surrounding and biting our calves. It was too much after a sweaty and itchy night already. So back into the air conditioned car we went, back into the weighty 110 degree heat of the city. Someday I'll make the long bike ride to experience Fort Tilden beach properly and hope for no flies.

PS. Did this heat wave make anyone else concerned about a future of global warming where there are more excessively hot days each summer and less available air conditioning as we run out of fuel?

Peeks into the New Place

Although living in an old brownstone comes with the headaches of a decaying building, it also offers charming details like...

Molding and wainscotting


(Horribly stuck) pocket doors


Tin tile (or is it molding meant to look like tin?) ceiling. And the fireplace is defunct but we'll have a mantel for hanging Christmas stockings this year!


Reveling in built-in and open shelving










I wanted this kitchen cart ($25 on craigslist, doesn't get better than that!) so bad that after a failed attempt to fit it in a car, I walked it over a mile home.


Then there are more recent additions, like a wall of forest wallpaper





After my previous bedroom, which was a huge all purpose sort of room, I'm loving this cozy little cavelike bedroom that's only for sleeping.


The bathroom is a work in progress and the tub needs cleaning so bad I haven't showered there in over a week.




In fact the whole place needs cleaning and I'm procrastinating right now...