Around Town

Hope you all had a good Earth Day this Sunday! On Saturday Sooz and I were busy with NY Cares' Hands On NY event as part of the Astoria Cares team. We helped out at the Goodwill Triangle and Astoria Park. Pictures can be found here. It was a gorgeous day to be out helping improve our fair city.

Last week I stopped in at the Steinway Branch of the Queens Library and picked up a library card! I've been a fan and user of libraries all my life (my mom trained as a Children's Librarian in college), so I'm a little shocked that it's taken this long to get myself a library card. Anyway, it's a bit smaller than the Emma Clark Library I was used to on Long Island, but it had plenty of books and a lot of interesting "new and popular" books. Also saw that they have CDs, DVDs and Videos to check out, which is way cool. I found some great cookbooks, too. Anyway, with our lack of good bookstores in town, the library is a definite viable option. There are two other branches I'm aware of, one of Broadway and one on Astoria Blvd.

At the Steinway branch there were a lot of community announcements, and I saw an ad for a very cute black and white cat for adoption called "Spookey", and an announcement for a Book Discussion at Igloo this Thursday at 7pm. They'll be discussing Nightingales by Gillian Gill. The book is available at the circulation desk at the library, if you're interested.

While I was out and about, I stopped in at Fresh Start Market on 23rd Ave to pick up some castile soap. They had the kind I was looking for, tea tree scented. I am totally in love with Dr. Bronner's castile soap these days. While I was looking around I decided to get a smoothie, the "Cowboy", which had blueberries and peaches among others. The woman behind the counter gave me a sample of some other juice that had orange and peach in it, and it was really, really good. They have expanded their offerings substantially. You can get all sorts of organic product there, as well as pet food and prepared vegan food. Really impressive, and I'll be shopping there more often.

Lastly, just a note to let you know that as of today I'm writing for the OuterB (but not abandoning Joey in Astoria!), a site about Queens real estate. Come by and say hi!