NYC Day 2

So, our first whole day in NYC was supposed to be all about Uptown--5th Ave., the Met, walking through all of Central Park, eating up near Rockefeller Center--but our earlier flight in the day before meant that I missed a hair appointment in Chicago.

But as it turns out, a hair appointment in the middle of the day means that you squeeze even more New York into your day. Uptown in the morning, hair cut/record store hunt afternoon break, then down to the Staten Island Ferry at sunset and back up to Uptown in the evening for Time Square gawking and yummy dinner.

It was a big day. So, this post covers right up until the break for hair cuttery.

Yum, breakfast at Karen's a few blocks from the hotel on Astor Place.


Best lox/cream cheese/cucumber/tomato bagel I've had. (Though why are there so few egg bagels left to be had in bagel shops nowadays!?!?)

Beaver in the Astor Place stop on the #6.

There's a car in there.

Throughout these NYC posts, there will just be random shots of my dream homes sprinkled liberally. They range from the very grand to the medium grand and then to just apartments that I think I might love. . .

I know it's weird that I took a picture of the coat racks in the Met. . . but they're beautiful and ingenious. Just because the rest of the building is filled with gorgeous art, doesn't mean the good design of the coat racks shouldn't get a little nod, too.

So, I get that there are experts who are professional museum and gallery designers and curators, but the Met still amazed at every turn. Pretty eye-catching colors on the galleries themselves? The buttery wood floor, the deep grey of the walls, surrounded by a light yellowish gray that pulls floor together with the walls. The collection was amazing, but I also want my home to look like the empty rooms.

Hey Liz, we saw the show you curated. The security guard outside made me nervous, so this is a terrible picture. . . but it's proof that we made it and saw that amazing beauty and weirdness of the photo albums of yore. Just as amazing as we expected from your descriptions!

The Bethesda Fountain (and I had to look the name up. I've been thinking of it as simply the "Tony Kushner" fountain for years) was gorgeous in the snow. Sort of forlorn and lonely and lovely.

Why sled the stairs?
Just because you can.

Giving the thumbs up maybe to convince myself?
Most of this trip was amazing, and D and I agreed that we were lucky to see NYC in the deep snow because it happens so infrequently. But the last 20 minutes in Central Park, the snow started pouring down and blowing directly into our faces. There was no sun out--those sunglasses were just the closest things I had to goggles. Our least favorite 20 minutes of the trip by a long shot.

The view from our hotel revealed during a short break in the storm. We could see the Empire State building AND the Chrysler building from our room.

NYC Day 1

We flew JetBlue, so we got to watch President Obama's Health Care Reform Summit. A surprising number of our fellow passengers were doing the same.

old JFK

A familiar face just off the F train in the East Village. Hey Chicagoans. . . is this or is this not Uncle Fun?

I want this chair. . . but the nice people at the Cooper Square Hotel wouldn't let us have it. Whatever.

View from our hotel room on day 1.
(In successive posts, you'll see that once the blizzard clears this view gets decidedly more spectacular.)
Thanks to MandC, I think we lucked into a hotel that would ordinarily be a bit above D's and my pay grade. We couldn't have asked for a more beautiful or convenient location for exploring the city. And situated right next to Cooper Union, I felt right at home. . . almost like I'd never left Columbia's campus.

Dan checks out our crazy shower stall.

After slogging through the slush and puddles of the start of the blizzard with suitcases in tow, we only really had the energy to walk a short way to the Strand and then to hunt down a decent sushi dinner.

Something so pretty and filled with promise, these rows and rows of stacks of books. If there's something after life, I hope there are a few rooms that look like this.

Dinner. I'm not sure it was better than sushi in Chicago, but we were so cold and wet and hungry that it was pretty darn good.

I just liked the wrought iron on this door. This is what all security measures should look like.

Crazy red cross a block up from the hotel. I can imagine it being comforting. . . like a beacon in all of that cold for believers.

Gah! Saw this shop after it was closed and I wanted to check it out the next day, but we had so much going on that I forgot about it until I unloaded my pictures after the trip was over. Poo.

Oldest pub in America? That's what they say. . . We didn't go in, but the color of the facade and the light on the street looked like one of Hopper's paintings of city night scenes.

NYC--Just By the Skin of Our Teeth

So, we had a trip planned to NYC this past weekend for my good buddy, Mitra's wedding to one Mr. Christian Amestoy. . . And we almost didn't make it. But after gentle threats from Mitra about our non-attendance being unacceptable, we were able to find an earlier flight that squeaked us in right before Manhattan got pummeled by another 18 inches of snow on Thursday and Friday. As usual, Mitra's loving meanness was the wind beneath my wings (literally this time).

We were incredibly lucky. Lucky because we got there despite the weather and lucky because it was one of the best weekends I've enjoyed for quite some time.

Dan and I touched down in JFK around noon on Thursday, took a giant bite out of Manhattan, went to a splendidly gorgeous wedding (and I have the weird almost fetishy photos of ladies' dresses and shoes to prove it--yah, wedding guests, I was the creep-o who was taking pictures of your feet and shoulders and skirts all evening. Deal with it. You were too pretty not to capture, so put that compliment in your fabulous pipes and smoke it) and rolled out again on Sunday. It felt like a little 2nd honeymoon in NYC. So, the following pictures, spread over a number of posts will show you how lovely it all was.

Thanks, Mitra and Christian, for a splendid weekend!

Fingers Crossed for the NYC

Mitra is getting married. She's one of my best and oldest friends. And if a snow storm gets in the way of my sharing her big day (and having a romantic mini-vacation with my darling husband), I'm going to lose my mind.

But this past week in Chicago has been pretty--look at the city at dusk, in the rain and the fog and the cold.

This has always been my favorite neon sign in town. I am not much a religious person, but this sign--in its size and clarity--seems filled with hope and promise. I am quite positive this is a beacon in other people's lives.

2nd Favorite sign? The Congress Hotel.

Quinn and his Monster!

Unbearadorable.
This is my good friend Alex's (and Jeff's!!!) little son properly enjoying a gift from fivetrees.
Is anyone else trying hard not to chew their own arm off at this cuteness?

Snowy Day

So, obviously, nothing at all to compare to my friends on the East Coast. President Obama has had to wade through far more snow to get to work than us folks in Chicago. But I have fourteen inches of snow in my backyard.

On Wednesday morning, we were awakened at 4 AM by an earthquake--so we're one up on the president in that regard. Luckily, it was a mild earthquake--somewhere in the 3.8 to 4.0 scale--so there's no way to prove its having happened in pictures.

Mabel has a new buddy

Mabel has a new little friend named Dolores. She's tall for her class, but Mabel doesn't mind. As long as she's willing to hold hands, Mabel believes that Dolores can be as tall she wants to be.

Gwendolyn

A new bun for the fivetrees shop--little Gwendolyn.

Getting Out of the House II

Yesterday, in the late afternoon, I decided I needed fixins for Curry Laksa. But there's no purveyor of lemon grass or fried tofu puffs on the westside, so in to town we went. And it wouldn't have been fair to go that close to the dog beach and not take the schnoodle with us for a little fun by the lake.

But it was just as cold as this picture makes it look. A wind so biting and mean, that even with silk long underwear (tops and bottoms) and several layers over that, the cold just sliced right through. We lasted a scant 30 minutes.

It was a beautiful day, despite the cold. The sky looked like a sky from a Georgia O-Keefe painting. It doesn't show up perfectly in these photos, but it was really striking.

The sun came out for just a sec and lit up an old apartment highrise upshore. Proof that everything is beautiful in the right light.

All in all, we were pretty lucky that no lemongrass could be found near our house. We would have missed all of this loveliness.

Zapruderpoint at Uncommon Ground

Dan was awesome on Friday--and so was the first guy, Alain de Courtenay. They were a good pairing. Two acoustic guys with voices like angels performing in front of a warm brick wall, making the whole room forget about the cold and the snow and the ice outside.

Dan was funny, too. Here's some proof:



This is one of my favorite Zapruder Point originals, "Good as Gold":



Thanks to everyone who came out--lots of my peeps from work. Tim, here's "Common People" just for you.

Good Week

It was a busy week and so I am exhausted. But the work week was sprinkled with social events and yummy food that made it all worthwhile.

First was dinner at Tank on Broadway and Argyle--with a big group of friends.

I don't think I've ever had Vietnamese food before. I've meant to--I think. But I'm crazy picky about Asian food. I love Japanese and Thai, am only mildly interested in Indian food, am apathetic about Chinese and can't stand Korean. And so, I'm a little nervous of trying new Asian cuisines. My working philosophy has been that having Japanese and Thai might be enough culinary interest in my diet--fun to eat out, fun to cook. . .

but Tank was awesome. I was a little under the weather and had a giant bowl of shrimp/pork/scallop in a yummy chicken broth over noodles. (And yes, Eunice, even though I'm not a huge fan of the wrappers, Tank's spring rolls are second to none).

It was full on comfort food and I will go back regularly.

Here's my food:

Here's Dan's food (his included tripe. . . ew. . .):


Later in the week, lunch with Kari at Eleventh Street Diner on campus. And I saw this--one of the snow sculptures from the little winter festival Chicago threw last weekend. We don't go to the winter festival here and it's kind of fun finding these, after the fact, out of context--as if they just sprung fully formed out of a bank of super bored AND super industrious snow.


I should go to Eleventh Street Diner to eat more often (though, I should also pack lunches for work more often as well). But Eleventh Street is a traditional Jewish Deli (and they have all of the back issues of Heeb to prove it). I miss that food from home. Cincinnati has a much larger per capita population of Jewish folks than Chicago does. And as a result--despite Cincinnati being so much smaller, it has always had a much more frequent appearance of lox, bagels and cream cheese with capers, tomatoes and red onions on menus and a much freer use of sarcasm and humor in conversation than does Chicago.

Eleventh Street Diner feels a little like home, plus, check this out:


And then we wrapped up the week with Dan's show at Uncommon Ground. . . next post. I promise.

Zapruder Point at Uncommon Ground 2/5

So, my honey is a one man band of awesomeness. He plays the guitar and sings, mostly original stuff, but probably a few choice covers as well. And he's got a show at Uncommon Ground this coming Friday.

Here are the deets:

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 5TH
Uncommon Ground (Wrigleyville)
3800 North Clark
Free / $5 Suggested Donation

10:00 - Alain De Courtenay
11:00 - Zapruder Point

Check out his website to hear snippets of his music to see if he's your cup of tea or not. And know, too, that there's some strange rule about reserving tables in the music space at Uncommon Grounds. So, if you want to go AND get a seat in that actual room where music is happening, you should probably check that out.