allison_is

So today's adventure was going uptown to meet friends at the Cloisters and see the special exhibit (on sexuality in the Middle Ages) with them. I took the subway up then walked the last bit through the park with snow softly falling. As I'm walking along the path, a couple coming the other way stop to compliment my coat. (This is the long green redingote with the shoulder capes.) I thanked them and told them about how I loved to make historically-inspired clothing and we chatted briefly then went on our way.

So I saw the exhibit and the rest of the museum. Went to an early dinner with my friends. Then caught the subway back toward downtown, but because it's a weekend I had to overshoot my destination and double back from Columbus Circle. So I'm standing on the platform at Columbus and I hear this voice, "I'd recognize that coat anywhere!" It's the same couple (at the opposite end of town). We chatted some more while waiting for our trains and it turns out they both went to Berkeley for college. What a small world.

This is the sort of trip I never felt able to schedule before retirement: put together several purposes and just take a couple weeks to see people and do things.

I flew out on a red-eye because I always have this dilemma when flying east that I can either get up at an ungodly hour of the morning (which means either leaving my car at long-term parking, or getting an airport hotel room the night before), or I can arrive later in the evening than I want to be dealing with unfamiliar transit systems, or I can take a red-eye and have the logistics at both ends done at a reasonable hour of the day...at the expense of losing most of a night's sleep. I did sleep for several hours, but then spent most of yesterday vegging around L's appartment. (Which worked out because she had several online things to do.)

Today is L's big-number birthday celebration (one of the aforesaid "several purposes"). Then I have five days in NYC in which I have two items scheduled, which gives me a chance for more spontaneity than I usually have on trips. After that, it's up to Maine for the family part of the trip.

I was able to get all my blog/podcast stuff set up for the rest of the month--only need to switch things to "live" on the web--so any "work" I do on this trip can be on less urgent (i.e., actually writing on book projects). I think I've been managing better at avoiding having short-term deadlines rule my creative life, but somehow the non-fiction projects have called to me more strongly than the fiction. I suspect that's because the non-fiction is more in the revisions phased than the "creating text out of nothing" phase.