I remember thinking to myself, just a few weeks ago, that it was so nice that Christmas was a season, rather than just being a day. When I was a kid, the day was everything, not just because of the presents (though I admit they were a factor), but also because it was possible then, in a way that it seems not to be so much now, to feel entirely immersed in the thrill of it being Christmas or your birthday or the day you go to Disney or start your vacation or whatever. The thrill is on you like a cloak, or in you, pulsing through your circulatory system. It's real, and it's really good. As a somewhat more grown up person, I don't have easy access to that feeling anymore, so I appreciate even more having the whole season, the preparation, the decoration, the cookie making, the parties, the candles, to experience. I like me some Christmas.
Why, then, a few weeks later, did I find myself feeling happy that there was a Day, and not just a season? Why did I put a lot more stock in how the day itself came out, whether Christmas Day was a success? Friends, I will tell you why. Because our Christmas season sucked, a little bit. I have already disclosed the wrong-week trip out of town, inviting and uninviting neighbors to an open house situation. The trip was great, of course, but getting the dates wrong like a big dope messed with my plans for shopping, preparing the house, getting gifts mailed, etc. No big deal- I had the following weekend to make up for it. Or did I? The great windstorm of 'Ought Six struck on Thursday night, knocking the roof off our garden shed and taking out the power for most of Bellevue (and lots of other Puget Sound areas). Judging by the swarm of people at the only open grocery store in the area, and the crazy half-mile line of cars at the only open gas station, I am pretty sure Bellevue collectively scores a D minus in disaster preparedness.
Jim thought I was insane for planning to go ahead with the open house in the frigid half-light of our powerless house, but after the previous week's head fake, I wasn't going to let my neighbors down. As if they cared. But five families did come over. We all left our coats on and drank punch and ate cookies and sang carols by candlelight. Except for the singing part. A relative success under the circumstances. We had just finished packing our things to spend the night in Seattle with friends who were less powerless than we when our own power surged back to life. Huzzah! Jim could return to his medieval war-making computer strategy game. And I could put Naomi to bed without going in to re-cover her every half an hour. Sweet modern conveniences!
So now, everything was back on track. The darkened stores would turn their lights on once more. The locked down post office would hum back to life. It was only a couple of days delay! I could overcome it! Sunday morning we tried take a Christmas card photo. I was a little embarrassed to learn that I couldn't tell that Naomi was under the weather until I saw her in the photos. In every one of them, she was staring glassy-eyed in the wrong direction, through pink drooping eyelids. I know cold does not cause colds, but two days of consistent fifty-degree interior temperatures surely didn't discourage whatever viruses were visiting at the time. We scrapped all the family shots and put another sweater on the bunny.
Naomi seemed OK on Monday, and went to school. Tuesday, she stayed home. Wednesday, we decided to take her to the doctor. Normally I am not an advocate for going to the doctor for a cold- I know that there is no treatment, and for kids under two even more so. It just seems like a waste. So although Naomi was clearly SICK, I went not expecting much. Not expecting, that is, for the doctor (one we didn't normally see) to listen to her lungs and start using words like hospital and pneumonia. Youch! She had me give Naomi a nebulizer treatment (which involved a LOT of crying and howling from Naomi, who told me half way through the epic struggle, with tears running down her face, "Mommy, I need a nap!"), listened to her lungs, and then had me give her one more. Hooray! Her lungs had improved. No pneumonia. By this time I had called Jim and made him join me at the doctor's office, since I hadn't predicted we would be there for three and a half hours. We were to give her the nebulizer every four hours for the next five days, or something ridiculous, in addition to another round of antibiotics for her forever infected ears. (We normally don't give her antibiotics for ear infections, since they don't bother her and eventually clear up, but we were feeling a little vulnerable on this visit.)
That afternoon was the worst, with Naomi half asleep and half awake, feverish, breathing fast and shallow. She got used to the nebulizer, thankfully, so we didn't have to wrestle every time. After she went to bed that night, Jim went to the airport to pick up his sister and her hsuband, who were coming for Christmas. We had been so excited about this visit, because we hadn't seen them since our Malaysia trip in early 2004, and they had never met Naomi. Now we were just worried that it was going to be the biggest letdown for them, as they sat around the house watching us blow our noses and give nebulizer treatments to their lethargic niece. Augh!
Naomi got a little better each day, and after one more day of fever, seemed to be over that part of it, thankfully. Because her cough was so terrible, though, she woke up every two hours or so during the night. We were reminded, and not happily, of the olden days, when little baby Naomi needed to eat every two hours or whatever. Zzzz. Needless to say, I got what she had, and as we got closer to Christmas, and I got sicker and sicker, and more exhausted, and I had a very strong feeling that I needed to leave my home and go to the hospital and just check myself in there and sleep for twelve or fourteen hours, and then come back. I skipped church on the morning of Christmas Eve and went back to bed. Because I could not get it together to make hot pot (our Christmas Eve plan), we just went out to Szechuan Chef, where they have hot pot (and everyone there had ordered it!). It was only so-so, but I loved it because... I didn't have to put it together!
Naomi betrayed her kid tribe by sleeping in very late on Christmas morning. When she got up, we opened our stockings and presents, ate some really wonderful banana bread that a neighbor had brought over to make up for missing our little cave party, listened to Christmas carols on Jim's fancy Mac Mini jukebox setup, cooked up a massive brunch, and did nothing for a few hours. There may have been napping- I can't remember. In the afternoon we went to our friends' house in Seattle, where they treated us to more presents, awesome tamales, and these little white chocolate pretzel clusters that are my coveted Christmas treat and that I was unable to find this year. Unfortunately I was not able to taste the food, however, I was assured that some of these little pretzel jobbies will be saved for the day when I can, again. Hooray!
So, Christmas turned out swell after all, despite all obstacles. The best and worst part of tribulations is the realization that you really don't have it so bad. We kept talking about the people in Iraq who get by on one hour of electricity per day (in addition to, you know, the even worse parts of living there!), and when Naomi was sick, I thought, geez, what if I had a really sick kid? One that really did have to go to the hospital regularly? Man oh man! Of course that detracts from the delightful experience of feeling sorry for ourselves and complaining, which believe me, we did. But our gifts are many, and we know it. As I was getting Naomi ready yesterday, I asked her who she was going to see that day at school. She said, "Baby Jesus!" Heh. I said what I always say when I am using my feeble don't-squelch-the creativity approach. "Yeah, maybe!"
Friday, December 29, 2006
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
NYC, The Rest of the Story
(I'm just cramming the rest of my NY trip into one long post. Set aside a minute for this. Or don't- your choice.) Friday...after an unexpected but lovely sleep in and some tasty oatmeal, we boarded the subway for another day in Manhattan. I should mention that although the first day was surprisingly warm, the second day was not just surprisingly cold in comparison, but surprisingly, health-threateningly cold, (my Minnesota-thickened blood has thinned down after just one winter away!), with a brutal wind. We braved the temperature (along with a huge mob of other teeth-chattering merry-makers) to admire the Christmas display windows outside of Macy's. Then it was off to H&M for a cold weather shopping spree. Liv got a winter coat for $50, I a terribly cute hat for $10 (we had one good day together, the hat and I, until I lost it somehow that night between the coat check at the Met and the subway ride home). Our wardrobe sufficiently bulked up, we headed toward Bryant Park, which not only had a cute ice skating rink and a little Christmas market (full of really, really devoted merchants, who probably each lost a toe or more to frostbite that day), but also is directly behind the gorgeously amazing New York Public Library. The lobby of the library was beautifully decorated for Christmas, as was, curiously, only about half of the grand light fixtures in the reading room.
After the library, we shivered our way to Grand Central Station for an admiring look around and lunch in the dining concourse. Afterwards, off to the gallery on Madison Avenue where Liv's friend D. works. The gallery is a single small room, covered floor to ceiling with frames. In each of the hundreds of frames is a photo or drawing of a famous person (famous enough where there was no one I didn't recognize), and framed in the same mat, some document that the person had written or signed. My favorite was a simple typed letter, presumably in response to some exuberant fan mail. "Dear Sir," it read, "Thank you for your enthusiasm. Sincerely, Katharine Hepburn." There was a letter written by Winston Churchill, a full page and a half, to a man who was procuring faucets of some kind of him. The last line says "I would not shrink from using (whatever variety) of faucets." Hee! If I had a great deal more money than I do, I would have brought home for Jim the original decree confirming certain land grants that had been made to the Knights Templar. And D. showed us a page of musical manuscript with a few notes on it, written by Mozart. Apparently when Mozart died, there was a scene similar to something out of the movie, a room with pages and pages of musical manuscript strewn about, and whenever another bill came due, Mozart's son or someone would sell a few pages to hungry collectors to settle the debt. This page, with its few little notes? $175,000.
Liv and I headed next to Central Park. Did I mention how cold it was? There was a handful of truly intrepid New Yorkers strolling briskly, and even a group of kids playing soccer. But I had my fill of Central Park, regrettably, after ten or fifteen minutes. Fortunately, our next target, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was in sight. We had cake and scalding hot tea in the American Wing Cafe, saw the Chinese art, including some calligraphy scrolls that were amazing not only in the obvious variety of styles, but also in the explanations for why these style variations were so significant. One big set of scrolls from the 1400s were a gift from the artist to his friend, and he jokes in the writing about how his friend's habit of heavy drinking can be considered a form of political protest. As is, ahem, mine. Somehow. We also saw the incredible Temple of Dendur, strikingly displayed in a specially built wing and carrying its own history of political intrigue. It's also covered with the graffiti of British and American tourists from the early 1800s. Quite the human drive, to leave one's mark, it seems.
Every Friday night at the Met, they place tables around the second floor balcony of the great hall and open a little wine bar, complete with a string trio. Here we met up with D. for cocktails and several small bowls of the free snack, olives, which, there in the heady surroundings of the Met, seemed to me for the first time ever to be a tasty and agreeable food. After drinks, it was back to the museum for a tour of the medieval faces exhibit and a quick breeze through some of the painting galleries. D. pointed out the Drue Heinz gallery, funded by the ex-husband of John Kerry's glamorous campaign-bankrolling wife. I particularly liked a Vermeer I had never seem before, of a woman dozing at her table. Liv particularly enjoyed showing off her knowledge of ancient buildings by pointing out which paintings of classical scenes were anachronistic in their inclusion of some arch or column that was actually constructed one or two hundred years after the event. D. told us which of the medieval heads she and her colleagues had picked as likely fakes. Sometimes you just need to know who to go to the museum with.
After some engrossing subway dish on a wealthy book collector D. had dealings with, we parted ways so Liv and I could get a train back to Brooklyn. We stopped off at a very nice little restaurant for Mediterranean food, where I continued my unbroken streak of eating moussaka that just isn't very hot (though it was certainly tasty). We finally returned to Liv's apartment, where I had a short but glorious fantasy that she was roommates with the Chinese foot rub guy. Oh well. Off to a sleep well-earned.
Saturday, we walked to a Brooklyn neighborhood called Cortellyou Road for brunch with Liv's lovely friends Luke and Willow. The restaurant was called "The Farm on Adderly," and according to the owner, this referenced a funny South African saying one uses when referring to a something that is a long shot, as in, if that works, I'll buy you a farm on Adderly. Ok? Ok. The brunch was tasty and everyone but me seemed to have a crush on the owner. Afterwards, Liv graciously agreed to let me lie around for a while, and I treated myself to a rare nap. When it was ended by a call from an old grad school friend I had been trying to see, who gave his regrets that it probably wasn't going to work out, as well as a little disappointment in my clumsy failure thus far to adopt "texting." Whatever.
We got our coats back on, headed back to the subway, and rejoined the fray in Manhattan once more. First we hit a flea market that sets up each weekend in a mercifully heated parking garage. There we saw many interesting things, but the most interesting by far was...the same kooky little old lady from the kitchen shop, using her same bargaining wiles, such as they were, on the flea market vendors. I don't need to tell you, there are a LOT of people in Manhattan. And there is a lot of Manhattan, for that matter. Nevertheless, we found her. It was a little piece of weird NY magic. After the flea market, we went to an architectural salvage place with amazing huge light fixtures and staircase bannisters and fire places that have been saved from demolition, as well as the usual assortment of ten zillion doorknobs and hinges and whatnot. Neat!
We needed to find some dinner, and after blocks and blocks of fruitless searching, we stopped at an "Irish Pub" and decided to just brave whatever was inside. If you find yourself in an Irish pub in NY that is brightly lit, crammed with tourists, decorated by the good people at Denny's, and staffed by a depressive Irish waitress whose Paxil prescription has run out and whose benefits have not kicked in yet, friends, you are not as hungry as you think you are. Take my advice, wander a few more blocks, and settle on something else. Learn from my mistake.
My next piece of advice: Stay out of Macy's at the holidays. Maybe even all year round? But for sure at the holidays. It's worth it to go to Macy's to see the fantastic window displays, but do not be tempted, even by the promise of the famous wooden escalators, to go inside. Because first of all, it is a crazy mob scene. And second of all, it's just a Macy's. You want it to be all historic and graceful and marvelous, but it's not. On the scale of Macy's' I have known, it ranks between ratty and decent, with both extra points and demerits for having so many floors (demerits because when one of those famous wooden escalators stops working, the ten thousand people who are trying to go down them at the same time start to pile up tremendously between floors six and seven).
After struggling through the sweaty masses at Macy's, it was time to hit the subway again for a trip to Harlem to attend a party at Liv's friend's apartment. She had a wonderful view of the city, but no elevator, so I found the good-sized Christmas tree in her apartment all the more impressive and festive when I learned that she had carried the thing up the six flights of stairs herself. I ate too much cheese and crackers, and too many cookies, as well as fulfilling my big party fear of saying something...stupid.
Girl I don't Know: I am so jealous of this big fridge!
Me: Oh? Do you have a small one?
Girl: I have this tiny studio in Chelsea, so my fridge is the kind that fits under the counter, with the tiny freezer that doesn't freeze anything.
Me: Where you, like, can't even fit a ben and jerry's in there?
Girl: Exactly.
Me: Huh. I live in Washington. State? And, uh, I have a pretty big refrigerator.
Girl: (Walks out of the kitchen).
Ah, parties. Back on subway, change to other subway, walk past OTB and storefront church, back to apartment, throw up party food, bad fish and chips, go to bed.
The next day, Liv had terrible news- her tutor, mentor, and friend from Oxford had passed away. We talked about it for a while; she had been planning a book and a conference in his honor, and fortunately had told him about it just a few months before. Isn't it great when you don't miss the chance to say something important to someone who is important to you? Anyway, then I had to get into the town car for the long ride back to La Guardia. The driver, in a barely intelligible (to my untrained ears) Carribbean accent, chided me two or three times for not being more talkative. Which seems like a weird thing to get in trouble for with a town car driver. I had time to get a ben and jerry's cone in the Minneapolis airport (though my preference would have been for someone to meet me at the airport with a Byerly's Killer Brownie). The highlight of my travel day was seeing Jim and Naomi waiting for me by the baggage claim, and seeing the crazy-ass outfit that Jim had put our innocent toddler in. I should have taken a picture of that!
That was my trip. What did I learn? I am not the tireless young traveller I once was, but it still felt great to be in an amazing new place, soaking up the sights and sounds and (subway) smells. Best of all, of course, was catching up with Liv, who appears to be rapidly aging in reverse, and despite recent stresses, has her life beautifully put together. Shout out to Liv! NY agrees with you, sister. Thanks for a wonderful visit.
After the library, we shivered our way to Grand Central Station for an admiring look around and lunch in the dining concourse. Afterwards, off to the gallery on Madison Avenue where Liv's friend D. works. The gallery is a single small room, covered floor to ceiling with frames. In each of the hundreds of frames is a photo or drawing of a famous person (famous enough where there was no one I didn't recognize), and framed in the same mat, some document that the person had written or signed. My favorite was a simple typed letter, presumably in response to some exuberant fan mail. "Dear Sir," it read, "Thank you for your enthusiasm. Sincerely, Katharine Hepburn." There was a letter written by Winston Churchill, a full page and a half, to a man who was procuring faucets of some kind of him. The last line says "I would not shrink from using (whatever variety) of faucets." Hee! If I had a great deal more money than I do, I would have brought home for Jim the original decree confirming certain land grants that had been made to the Knights Templar. And D. showed us a page of musical manuscript with a few notes on it, written by Mozart. Apparently when Mozart died, there was a scene similar to something out of the movie, a room with pages and pages of musical manuscript strewn about, and whenever another bill came due, Mozart's son or someone would sell a few pages to hungry collectors to settle the debt. This page, with its few little notes? $175,000.
Liv and I headed next to Central Park. Did I mention how cold it was? There was a handful of truly intrepid New Yorkers strolling briskly, and even a group of kids playing soccer. But I had my fill of Central Park, regrettably, after ten or fifteen minutes. Fortunately, our next target, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was in sight. We had cake and scalding hot tea in the American Wing Cafe, saw the Chinese art, including some calligraphy scrolls that were amazing not only in the obvious variety of styles, but also in the explanations for why these style variations were so significant. One big set of scrolls from the 1400s were a gift from the artist to his friend, and he jokes in the writing about how his friend's habit of heavy drinking can be considered a form of political protest. As is, ahem, mine. Somehow. We also saw the incredible Temple of Dendur, strikingly displayed in a specially built wing and carrying its own history of political intrigue. It's also covered with the graffiti of British and American tourists from the early 1800s. Quite the human drive, to leave one's mark, it seems.
Every Friday night at the Met, they place tables around the second floor balcony of the great hall and open a little wine bar, complete with a string trio. Here we met up with D. for cocktails and several small bowls of the free snack, olives, which, there in the heady surroundings of the Met, seemed to me for the first time ever to be a tasty and agreeable food. After drinks, it was back to the museum for a tour of the medieval faces exhibit and a quick breeze through some of the painting galleries. D. pointed out the Drue Heinz gallery, funded by the ex-husband of John Kerry's glamorous campaign-bankrolling wife. I particularly liked a Vermeer I had never seem before, of a woman dozing at her table. Liv particularly enjoyed showing off her knowledge of ancient buildings by pointing out which paintings of classical scenes were anachronistic in their inclusion of some arch or column that was actually constructed one or two hundred years after the event. D. told us which of the medieval heads she and her colleagues had picked as likely fakes. Sometimes you just need to know who to go to the museum with.
After some engrossing subway dish on a wealthy book collector D. had dealings with, we parted ways so Liv and I could get a train back to Brooklyn. We stopped off at a very nice little restaurant for Mediterranean food, where I continued my unbroken streak of eating moussaka that just isn't very hot (though it was certainly tasty). We finally returned to Liv's apartment, where I had a short but glorious fantasy that she was roommates with the Chinese foot rub guy. Oh well. Off to a sleep well-earned.
Saturday, we walked to a Brooklyn neighborhood called Cortellyou Road for brunch with Liv's lovely friends Luke and Willow. The restaurant was called "The Farm on Adderly," and according to the owner, this referenced a funny South African saying one uses when referring to a something that is a long shot, as in, if that works, I'll buy you a farm on Adderly. Ok? Ok. The brunch was tasty and everyone but me seemed to have a crush on the owner. Afterwards, Liv graciously agreed to let me lie around for a while, and I treated myself to a rare nap. When it was ended by a call from an old grad school friend I had been trying to see, who gave his regrets that it probably wasn't going to work out, as well as a little disappointment in my clumsy failure thus far to adopt "texting." Whatever.
We got our coats back on, headed back to the subway, and rejoined the fray in Manhattan once more. First we hit a flea market that sets up each weekend in a mercifully heated parking garage. There we saw many interesting things, but the most interesting by far was...the same kooky little old lady from the kitchen shop, using her same bargaining wiles, such as they were, on the flea market vendors. I don't need to tell you, there are a LOT of people in Manhattan. And there is a lot of Manhattan, for that matter. Nevertheless, we found her. It was a little piece of weird NY magic. After the flea market, we went to an architectural salvage place with amazing huge light fixtures and staircase bannisters and fire places that have been saved from demolition, as well as the usual assortment of ten zillion doorknobs and hinges and whatnot. Neat!
We needed to find some dinner, and after blocks and blocks of fruitless searching, we stopped at an "Irish Pub" and decided to just brave whatever was inside. If you find yourself in an Irish pub in NY that is brightly lit, crammed with tourists, decorated by the good people at Denny's, and staffed by a depressive Irish waitress whose Paxil prescription has run out and whose benefits have not kicked in yet, friends, you are not as hungry as you think you are. Take my advice, wander a few more blocks, and settle on something else. Learn from my mistake.
My next piece of advice: Stay out of Macy's at the holidays. Maybe even all year round? But for sure at the holidays. It's worth it to go to Macy's to see the fantastic window displays, but do not be tempted, even by the promise of the famous wooden escalators, to go inside. Because first of all, it is a crazy mob scene. And second of all, it's just a Macy's. You want it to be all historic and graceful and marvelous, but it's not. On the scale of Macy's' I have known, it ranks between ratty and decent, with both extra points and demerits for having so many floors (demerits because when one of those famous wooden escalators stops working, the ten thousand people who are trying to go down them at the same time start to pile up tremendously between floors six and seven).
After struggling through the sweaty masses at Macy's, it was time to hit the subway again for a trip to Harlem to attend a party at Liv's friend's apartment. She had a wonderful view of the city, but no elevator, so I found the good-sized Christmas tree in her apartment all the more impressive and festive when I learned that she had carried the thing up the six flights of stairs herself. I ate too much cheese and crackers, and too many cookies, as well as fulfilling my big party fear of saying something...stupid.
Girl I don't Know: I am so jealous of this big fridge!
Me: Oh? Do you have a small one?
Girl: I have this tiny studio in Chelsea, so my fridge is the kind that fits under the counter, with the tiny freezer that doesn't freeze anything.
Me: Where you, like, can't even fit a ben and jerry's in there?
Girl: Exactly.
Me: Huh. I live in Washington. State? And, uh, I have a pretty big refrigerator.
Girl: (Walks out of the kitchen).
Ah, parties. Back on subway, change to other subway, walk past OTB and storefront church, back to apartment, throw up party food, bad fish and chips, go to bed.
The next day, Liv had terrible news- her tutor, mentor, and friend from Oxford had passed away. We talked about it for a while; she had been planning a book and a conference in his honor, and fortunately had told him about it just a few months before. Isn't it great when you don't miss the chance to say something important to someone who is important to you? Anyway, then I had to get into the town car for the long ride back to La Guardia. The driver, in a barely intelligible (to my untrained ears) Carribbean accent, chided me two or three times for not being more talkative. Which seems like a weird thing to get in trouble for with a town car driver. I had time to get a ben and jerry's cone in the Minneapolis airport (though my preference would have been for someone to meet me at the airport with a Byerly's Killer Brownie). The highlight of my travel day was seeing Jim and Naomi waiting for me by the baggage claim, and seeing the crazy-ass outfit that Jim had put our innocent toddler in. I should have taken a picture of that!
That was my trip. What did I learn? I am not the tireless young traveller I once was, but it still felt great to be in an amazing new place, soaking up the sights and sounds and (subway) smells. Best of all, of course, was catching up with Liv, who appears to be rapidly aging in reverse, and despite recent stresses, has her life beautifully put together. Shout out to Liv! NY agrees with you, sister. Thanks for a wonderful visit.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Thursday in New York
Last Wednesday night, I took the red-eye to New York City to visit a dear friend (shout out to Liv!) and explore the big apple at Christmas time. After a night on two airplanes, the morning cab ride from La Guardia to Liv's apartment in Brooklyn seemed to last forever, but it was still exciting to be in the city, and passing countless weirdly named small businesses and churches (my favorite of course being the Christ Alive Flower Shop). The cabby looked at the map I had given him about every forty seconds. Hardly reassuring, but we found it.
It was strangely warm when I arrived, and as we planned our first outing, down to Brighton Beach, I debated leaving my coat. I was grateful that my hostess had convinced me to bring it, when, after purchasing our requisite Russian pastry from one of the many, many pastry-selling Russian ladies on the sidewalk and heading out to the strand to commune with the gulls, the sea breeze asserted itself with one endlessly vigorous gust. We walked down to Coney Island to admire all the seasonally abandoned rides and attractions (as well as one intrepid burger/hotdog/buttered corn/kebab/cold beer/pretzel etc. stand that was open, though it didn't appear to have any customers).
When we had our fill of Russian pastry, seagulls, and sandblasting, we took the long subway ride into Manhattan. In Soho, we wandered into bookstores, shoe stores, and a kitchen shop, where we encountered an unusual little woman, older, with a longish gray buzz cut and a nice looking coat, practicing an unorthodox method of bargaining with the staff of the store. Seems she wanted a $70 copper-bottomed saucepan for twenty dollars. She was relentless, and had this distinctive, nasally plaintive (and loud) voice. "You don't like old ladies? Why don't you give it to me? I want to buy it! I have the money! I have the $20! Why won't you let me buy it?" We left the store before we got to find out the resolution. From the way things were going, though, I'm pretty sure they didn't give her the discount.
For dinner, we settled on Lombardi's, which claims to be the oldest pizzeria in the city. Perhaps to emphasize their historical position, they accept no payments but cash. However long they have been at it, they seem to have the pizza part down. Yum. After pizza, it was off to the Chinese massage place for a ten minute back rub (Liv) and a ten minute foot rub (me). If you are looking for a good way to spend $10 in Manhattan, and there are many, you could do worse than a ten minute foot rub at the Chinese massage place. I'm just saying. Rejuvenated, we headed to a dessert place that combines the fat and sugar of ice cream with the carbohydrate punch of a plate of fried rice. "Rice to Riches" offers something like 30 flavors of...rice pudding. We had chocolate hazelnut topped with cherries. My Swedish Grandma would have been proud. And probably a little confused.
Next time: Freaking Cold Friday...
It was strangely warm when I arrived, and as we planned our first outing, down to Brighton Beach, I debated leaving my coat. I was grateful that my hostess had convinced me to bring it, when, after purchasing our requisite Russian pastry from one of the many, many pastry-selling Russian ladies on the sidewalk and heading out to the strand to commune with the gulls, the sea breeze asserted itself with one endlessly vigorous gust. We walked down to Coney Island to admire all the seasonally abandoned rides and attractions (as well as one intrepid burger/hotdog/buttered corn/kebab/cold beer/pretzel etc. stand that was open, though it didn't appear to have any customers).
When we had our fill of Russian pastry, seagulls, and sandblasting, we took the long subway ride into Manhattan. In Soho, we wandered into bookstores, shoe stores, and a kitchen shop, where we encountered an unusual little woman, older, with a longish gray buzz cut and a nice looking coat, practicing an unorthodox method of bargaining with the staff of the store. Seems she wanted a $70 copper-bottomed saucepan for twenty dollars. She was relentless, and had this distinctive, nasally plaintive (and loud) voice. "You don't like old ladies? Why don't you give it to me? I want to buy it! I have the money! I have the $20! Why won't you let me buy it?" We left the store before we got to find out the resolution. From the way things were going, though, I'm pretty sure they didn't give her the discount.
For dinner, we settled on Lombardi's, which claims to be the oldest pizzeria in the city. Perhaps to emphasize their historical position, they accept no payments but cash. However long they have been at it, they seem to have the pizza part down. Yum. After pizza, it was off to the Chinese massage place for a ten minute back rub (Liv) and a ten minute foot rub (me). If you are looking for a good way to spend $10 in Manhattan, and there are many, you could do worse than a ten minute foot rub at the Chinese massage place. I'm just saying. Rejuvenated, we headed to a dessert place that combines the fat and sugar of ice cream with the carbohydrate punch of a plate of fried rice. "Rice to Riches" offers something like 30 flavors of...rice pudding. We had chocolate hazelnut topped with cherries. My Swedish Grandma would have been proud. And probably a little confused.
Next time: Freaking Cold Friday...
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Dear Diary,
A problem with waiting so long between posts is that you then hardly know where to begin with all the minutiae that has (have?) accumulated over the past month. The only November post was about Halloween, thus technically an October post. And now we are in December, and a fair way in at that. So there is nothing to do but throw in everything I can think of and hope the feeling of being somewhat caught up inspires me to a little more diligence. Or not.
So, the “morning after” exhilaration of the election has faded, but I will still cheerily submit that I hosted a “call for change” party the Saturday prior, wherein a handful of local lefties came to my house and used their cell phones to get out the local vote (when did air quotes become real quotes?). We lost the battle (sorry, Darcy), but I really didn’t mind too much considering the nation-wide results. The next day, very unshowered, I was chasing Naomi as she demonically pushed the teeny kiddy cart around the produce section of the Whole Foods when a man came up with a notebook and started asking me questions about the election. In a display of really shameful political self-aggrandizement, I told him that when I was calling voters just yesterday, it seemed that they WERE unclear on what Darcy stood for, though I also had just seen some of her newest tv ads that seemed to try to take that on, blah blah blah, stem cell research, blah blah blah. He took my name, and told me his- Bill Y., a reporter for… wait for it…the New York Times! Yea, baby! Of course, when I looked up his article a few days later, it was three short paragraphs and did not contain quotes from anyone, let alone a disheveled mother of one in the Whole Foods produce department. Still, neato!
On the work front, we are coming to the end of the moving walkway. The big project that we have been working mandatory 45 hour weeks to finish is…finished. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I really like to be busy, and having a frantic, coming up on a deadline kind of work experience is enjoyable to me, in some ways. Now, I’m back to the point where I do… I am not sure what. Think about the big picture and sign up for training, or something. Work is going very well for Jim- he is starting to work on creating schedules for his small team’s part of the project, and that means he is learning new skills and also showing his handsome, capable face in meetings with muckety mucks. He will probably censor this paragraph after he reads it (so humble is he), but in the meantime, I will confide that I am proud of him. Even more so this week, when, despite being famous (around our house) for taking a sick day when he so much as feels a cold coming on, he went to work so sick that even I conceded that he could have used a sick day, loaded himself up with dayquil, and stayed the whole day. Way to go, man.
Naomi has been hard at work herself. Just last night she came home from her sweatshop job with glue in her hair. When I dropped her off this morning I got to see why- she had been gluing toothpicks to a little construction paper hedgehog, of course. Last week things seemed a little off with her- she slept an extra one and a half to two hours a day, woke up grouchy, seemed out of sorts. After about three days of this, she seemed to be shining more brightly all of a sudden. She talks more articulately, in longer sentences. She can sing nearly entire songs that we haven’t heard her sing even parts of before. Everything is pretty and beautiful, too, including the “Chrisums tree”, the picture of Gramma, her tiny transparent plastic purse with a flower on it, and mommy and daddy. In the car on the way home from school, she said, “My miss Mommy. My love Mommy.” Aww. My miss you too, cute little Frankenstein talker.
And now I will close with an anecdote that illustrates just how big a dope I can be, like you didn’t know. The weekend of the 15th I had a trip planned to NYC to visit my friend the urbane professor, and bask in the joyful holiday goodness that abounds in that city. Hooray! So this weekend, on the 9th, I planned to throw a little holiday open house. There are still a few neighbors we don’t know, and a few we’d like to get to know, so on Monday morning I sneaked around in the pre-dawn darkness and delivered all the invitations (that is, stuck them on everyone’s front door). Two hours later, I got to work, checked my yahoo mail, and saw the note from Expedia with my itinerary for my December 7th trip to NYC. Wha, wha wha? That’s right, I had the dates wrong. And had already invited neighbors, most of whom I don’t know, to my house on the Saturday I’ll be watching the ice skaters at Rockefeller Center (is that where they ice skate?) Shit. So today I have to go around and un-invite everyone, hoping they can make it the following Saturday. Fun! And I had planned to have a four to five day word of mouth campaign to convince Naomi that it was going to be so neat to have Daddy take care of her for four days while Mommy visits aunty urbane professor, which must now be compacted into two days. Rats. But still, NYC at Christmas time! More on that in an upcoming post.
So, the “morning after” exhilaration of the election has faded, but I will still cheerily submit that I hosted a “call for change” party the Saturday prior, wherein a handful of local lefties came to my house and used their cell phones to get out the local vote (when did air quotes become real quotes?). We lost the battle (sorry, Darcy), but I really didn’t mind too much considering the nation-wide results. The next day, very unshowered, I was chasing Naomi as she demonically pushed the teeny kiddy cart around the produce section of the Whole Foods when a man came up with a notebook and started asking me questions about the election. In a display of really shameful political self-aggrandizement, I told him that when I was calling voters just yesterday, it seemed that they WERE unclear on what Darcy stood for, though I also had just seen some of her newest tv ads that seemed to try to take that on, blah blah blah, stem cell research, blah blah blah. He took my name, and told me his- Bill Y., a reporter for… wait for it…the New York Times! Yea, baby! Of course, when I looked up his article a few days later, it was three short paragraphs and did not contain quotes from anyone, let alone a disheveled mother of one in the Whole Foods produce department. Still, neato!
On the work front, we are coming to the end of the moving walkway. The big project that we have been working mandatory 45 hour weeks to finish is…finished. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I really like to be busy, and having a frantic, coming up on a deadline kind of work experience is enjoyable to me, in some ways. Now, I’m back to the point where I do… I am not sure what. Think about the big picture and sign up for training, or something. Work is going very well for Jim- he is starting to work on creating schedules for his small team’s part of the project, and that means he is learning new skills and also showing his handsome, capable face in meetings with muckety mucks. He will probably censor this paragraph after he reads it (so humble is he), but in the meantime, I will confide that I am proud of him. Even more so this week, when, despite being famous (around our house) for taking a sick day when he so much as feels a cold coming on, he went to work so sick that even I conceded that he could have used a sick day, loaded himself up with dayquil, and stayed the whole day. Way to go, man.
Naomi has been hard at work herself. Just last night she came home from her sweatshop job with glue in her hair. When I dropped her off this morning I got to see why- she had been gluing toothpicks to a little construction paper hedgehog, of course. Last week things seemed a little off with her- she slept an extra one and a half to two hours a day, woke up grouchy, seemed out of sorts. After about three days of this, she seemed to be shining more brightly all of a sudden. She talks more articulately, in longer sentences. She can sing nearly entire songs that we haven’t heard her sing even parts of before. Everything is pretty and beautiful, too, including the “Chrisums tree”, the picture of Gramma, her tiny transparent plastic purse with a flower on it, and mommy and daddy. In the car on the way home from school, she said, “My miss Mommy. My love Mommy.” Aww. My miss you too, cute little Frankenstein talker.
And now I will close with an anecdote that illustrates just how big a dope I can be, like you didn’t know. The weekend of the 15th I had a trip planned to NYC to visit my friend the urbane professor, and bask in the joyful holiday goodness that abounds in that city. Hooray! So this weekend, on the 9th, I planned to throw a little holiday open house. There are still a few neighbors we don’t know, and a few we’d like to get to know, so on Monday morning I sneaked around in the pre-dawn darkness and delivered all the invitations (that is, stuck them on everyone’s front door). Two hours later, I got to work, checked my yahoo mail, and saw the note from Expedia with my itinerary for my December 7th trip to NYC. Wha, wha wha? That’s right, I had the dates wrong. And had already invited neighbors, most of whom I don’t know, to my house on the Saturday I’ll be watching the ice skaters at Rockefeller Center (is that where they ice skate?) Shit. So today I have to go around and un-invite everyone, hoping they can make it the following Saturday. Fun! And I had planned to have a four to five day word of mouth campaign to convince Naomi that it was going to be so neat to have Daddy take care of her for four days while Mommy visits aunty urbane professor, which must now be compacted into two days. Rats. But still, NYC at Christmas time! More on that in an upcoming post.
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