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acid reflux in the City
Tuesday, March 6 2012
I took a bus into Manhattan this morning to do another afternoon at the office near the corner of Broadway and Houston. This was only my third trip to this address, but already I have a feel for the walk from the subway station. There she was again, the old lady in the electric scooter feeding pigeons near the intersection of Beeker and 6th Avenue (
40.729468N, 74.002227W. Some of the pigeons pick food directly from her hand. Further south is the pre-teen chaos of the playground at the corner of 6th Avenue and Houston. It's during the school day when I pass it, and there's no evidence of a nearby school, but there are fifty or sixty kids there, some playing games and others just fooling around. I always get coffee and something vegan to eat at Han's Deli, a block or so north on Broadway, and I always eat part of what I bought on the street, usually sitting on a standpipe. Today's gig at the office mostly involved getting me set up to access a certain database hidden behind various layers of security. The fact that I was working from a Windows netbook only made access harder, and after much frustration, the solution proved to be the download of a commercial database client, and getting that connection to tunnel through a fix-IP-address-equipped server opened the door to lesser non-commercial database clients. Somewhere in there three of us went to the local Two Boots for pizza, and I had two vegan slices made with Daiya fake cheese (they weren't bad). The fact that such esoteric vegan slices are ready to go at a West Village pizzeria indicates how widespread veganism is there. Lunch conversation consisted mostly of me talking about experiments I've done with long-range WiFi.
Near the end of the day, I went out onto the streets to score some sort of antacid for my increasingly-pathological acid reflux condition. All I managed to find was Pepto-Bismol at Han's Deli; it turns out GNC doesn't sell anything but dubiously-effective nutritional supplements.
Normally after work I'd try to find a dive bar to add a pleasant nightcap to my urban experience, but tonight my acid reflux issues led me to catch the next bus home. Before I caught it, I went into one of the dreary "restaurants" in Port Authority and got myself some possibly-vegan lo mein. It did nothing to help my stomach, though I don't think it made it any worse.
On today's trip into and out of Manhattan, my Pine Hill Trailways buses both came equipped with complimentary WiFi. I wouldn't have even looked for it, but the driver on the way down, as part of his usual post-New-Paltz message, said something like, "and if there is anything wrong with the WiFi, just tell me and I'll restart it." This particular bus line is already an unusually pleasant experience (given all the dreary Greyhound bus rides of my young adulthood), but once you add free WiFi to the experience, it starts to feel like luxury. It's just one more perk of living in the Hudson Valley.
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