Weekend Potpourri

When it rains in the Bronx, the Einstein student housing complex turns into a giant vortex of doom. It rained yesterday. The 40-m.p.h. gusts were translated into hurricane gales in the wind tunnel that is Einstein housing. The windows here don't have great sealing (i.e. no sealing), and even in the absence of wind, I feel a healthy draft flowing through my room. Yesterday, that was translated into violently shaking windows, wildly rattling doors, and the pleasant but havoc-wreaking burbling of water seeping in through the nonexistant window seals only to be momentarily spurted by the draft onto the floor.

Bubbling windowsill water

Unhappy, warped kitchen floor -- with happy mold underneath

It didn't stop me from going into the city, as I usually do on Saturdays. Yesterday, I had a new adventure when I donated platelets for the first time. The blood center staff were unexpectedly reluctant to let me do it; they didn't believe me that my veins would be good enough to withstand the constant cycling between drawing and returning blood for 75 minutes. I was persistent, however, and they were pretty desperate for my valuable O- platelets, so they finally acquiesced. I had a very strange sensation of tingliness accompanied with occasional chills and numbness during most of the hour and 15 minutes, but everything went well otherwise, and I was fine as soon as I got out of the chair. Weird.

The wind was bad in the city, too, but it was isolated to certain sections and streets. As I approached East 86th Street from the south, I could see that I was walking into a wind tunnel. I'm not joking: compared to the (relatively) calm breeze on 3rd Ave, the straight-line winds (made exceedingly visible by the rain that was steadily increasing) looked like something out of a movie, and I needed to turn and walk straight into them. Umbrellas were useless. Abandoned, mangled umbrellas littered the sidewalks. I was in for a cold, wet afternoon. My raincoat soaked through, my jeans were shiny from the water, my hair was plastered to my face, and the only part of me that wasn't wet were my feet, happily toasty in my rain boots. Maybe that's why I was so chilled while giving platelets.

Back to the apartments. In addition to the flooding (which was very mild in my apartment compared to some others'), the buildings always suffer from the wind in another way: the doors. My building always seems to have the worst wind effect compared to the others, so the sliding door is taken out of commission, forcing us to use the regular pull-handled door. That's not a huge deal, but the wind has a nasty habit of making it shut very quickly, and sometimes unexpectedly. Today my wrist almost got crushed as a gust of wind took the door out of my hands. Luckily, I pushed my elbow out in time, so it was my upper arm that took the brunt of the blow. I don't normally bruise easily, but I have a pretty big spot developing there. My diagnosis? Inappropriate bruising due to lack of platelets. COOL!

Finally, today is Pi Day (you know, 3/14...3.14...nerdy pi), so this afternoon my friends and I had a Pi Day celebration by eating pie! My contribution:

Blueberry. The best.