Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

 Here's the deal - the Swedes are really into moonshine. They're all down in their basements the whole long winter tinkering around with their witches' brews -- which they will unleash on guests and I can tell you from personal experience. You must drink the concoction. It is super rude to refuse.  It's all very complicated the whole what-do-you-call the-moonshine. The most known example is Aquavit but Aquavit is moonshine flavored with caraway or dill as the "dominant flavor." Then there is "brännvin." Best I can gather, if the spices are not caraway or dill, then it's not Aquavit, it's brännvin. Which brings us to snaps. Not schnapps, that's a whole other conversation, we're talking snaps. I'm pretty sure snaps can either be Aquavit or Brännvin. It's any varietal along these lines with one distinguishing feature-- it is potent enough that it must be served in very small glasses.  This is my understanding.  Which may be hilar...

 My dad left his sunglasses at our place. These are the shades that he just learned are  worn by celebrities and fashion fiends  so forgetting them here could definitely be a blow to his sartorial reputation. He'll need to keep a low profile until Christmas when he'll get them back.  In the meantime, let me bring you Tom: Tom in Pop's shades

  There are 100 pictures just like this in the dusty and slightly damp photo album I just found in the basement from when I was an exchange student in Stockholm.  I spent a lot of time in clubs that year surrounded by fantastic amounts of very stiff Swedish hair.  I scanned the whole photo album and sent the scanned pages to some of the individuals pictured. Then I spent half the day pretending I remembered way more than I actually do about the events depicted. For example, Annika texted, “OMG! That was Eva’s birthday party. She's not in any of the photos because she got really drunk and spent half the night throwing up in the bathroom!” Umm yeah, haha. So funny…, Not sure if it speaks more to the sad state of my memory, or, the metric ass ton of nights I was out at a club with Milla until 4am, thus rendering any and all individual goings-on fairly indistinguishable.  I remember Swedes passed out drunk on tables, like a lot. Some tall skinny blond kid lying on a tabl...

First of all, I got this new CO2 measurer thing. It tests the air quality so you can see how much of other people's breath you are probably sucking in directly. The C train uptown scored an orange, which is why I wear a mask on the subway and will continue to do so ad infinitum because why the hell not. We are adventurous, so at the Met, we decided to see if we could make it into the American Wing from European paintings upstairs. This involved a complicated journey through arms and armor. Then we went back upstairs to the Balcony Lounge through Asian art, just to really lock in the win. Balcony Lounge Air Quality Check. Not bad.... But waffled into the yellow periodically. Yech. Why do I always forget that the mixed drinks at the Met truly suck and I'm not even talking about the shitty little ice cubes. Wise words to my future self and anyone reading this: Do not be fooled by the interesting-sounding cocktail names on the menu. They pre-mix everything in vats downstairs in the...

  Every time I am walking across Central Park and happen to catch these roller skaters doing their discorama, I am inspired to find my roller skates and head on over there. I think they do the skate every week, so this could be my new thing. I think I'd have a little performance anxiety since, you know, I was a pretty spectacular roller skater back in my day and thus have high expectations of myself. I can skate backwards and do some very noteworthy spins.  The last time I roller skated, however, may have been at my 40th birthday party at the roller rink. Yes, my most amazing husband planned my 40th Birthday party at the roller rink. It was me and some 9 year old who also had a birthday party the same evening.  We shared our glow sticks with the kids if I recall correctly. It was kind of epic.

The Hydrow Rowing Machine Jack rowed on the Hydrow today under my username. I have the leaderboard set to compete against other women in my age range. Jack skirted with first place for awhile but then AnnaBT started pulling ahead. Then others started to catch up. It was a valiant effort but Jack finished in 11th place just after Skolsister. Which was about 100 places ahead of my typical showing.  Ella started teasing him about not winning and he squawked, “some of those old ladies are really fast dammit!” Made my Thanksgiving and also my lifetime Hydrow average just got a lot better.  

At Friendsgiving, Stacie asked what the name of my old band was and I told her: Fred's Been Shot.  Stacie asked if there's a Fred... I said, yeah, my Pop. Was he shot? she wondered. Well... I had to tell her the whole thing. Pop was a volunteer park ranger in Hawaii. He was out in the park picking up something on the ground and he stood up really fast. He scratched his head on a low-hanging tree branch. He didn't realize the cut was bleeding, especially because he was all sweaty. As Pop started back along the beach (he was in Hawaii so odds are there'd be a beach), he encountered one of the other park rangers leading a group of tourists.  The other park ranger shrieked, "Fred's been shot! Everybody get down!" And they all hit the deck. Meanwhile, Fred was very confused. I told this story I guess to my bandmates and they laughed as hard as Stacie and somehow that became the name of the band. 

 Tom saw this article in the NYT and I texted it to my pop: Pop's been wearing wrap around shades for, idk, 30 years? Instantly, I get a reply: My favorite part is the "trending" comment he included with the photo.

  Can never get enough of this town.

 Yesterday it was Friendsgiving in Queens and also the first time in 2022 that I met my step goal before I got up in the morning. Yes, there are certain advantages to galavanting around in an outer borough well after midnight. Such a pretty table ready for friends. Also, excitingly, we managed to get on an LIRR train from Monahan station, meaning the new side of Penn Station.  It has been disconcerting lately when in Penn, which I used to know like the back of my hand. Right now, it's all ripped up and turned around. While wandering around looking for my train, I spend the whole time muttering about what I think used to be where I currently am, and how exactly the new situation is possible unless they moved an escalator or something that you'd think they would not have moved. Anyway, it requires way more brain power than I am used to exerting in a station I have traversed, conservatively, 4 million times. But there's new very clean stairways down to the LIRR platforms with ...

  A Blueberry in the bottom of my coffee cup What are the odds I'd find a blueberry in the bottom of my coffee cup?! Pretty high actually since I was eating blueberries with my breakfast. Day 19, in the can.

Yeah, Elon's back on the block, probably building and coding the internet with his bare calloused hands. He's gone from the office already in this photo. That's a news crew over there doing a little after hours reporting.  When we came home after the play at 59E59 we got a full reckoning of the goings on over there. The doorman has been Eyes On all day. First of all, like a squadron of police are on call to escort Elon from Twitter's office door to his waiting Escalade. The doorman counted how many there were so that he could estimate the cost to the city. He complained that Elon, a billionaire, is not paying for all this security and WTF really.   Also Elon's Escalade sits there idling the entire day emitting combustion engine fumes. So weird the dude owns an electric car company and he rolls around in a giant Escalade. I suggested to Tom he do that thing where you take a video of an idling vehicle and submit it to the city and they pay you $50 and the vehicle'...

 Never had I ever had a phone stand of any kind until I got one as a thank you for speaking at a conference over the summer. Wow, what a revelation! You can prop up the phone and it stays in that position! It doesn’t slide over or tip backwards like it does if you just lean it on a pile of socks or a water glass or something.  Who knew?!

From a NYT article about bikes in the city with huge speaker systems I guess it's unsafe to ride bike wearing headphones in the city. Safety concerns must be why there's many bikes cruising up and down the bike lanes in the city with boomboxes. The boomboxes might be bungee corded to the back or strapped to the handlebars in the front. Or both. You might think I meant to say "bluetooth speaker" and be picturing something petite and aerodynamic. But no. It's a boombox at a minimum. Sometimes I think they're carting around an entire stereo system. They are loud AF. Sometimes, the rider also has a microphone is sings karaoke, but this usually only happens in the park. Because safety concerns most likely. Yesterday someone rode by on volume 11 and I was like, huh, this song might be good for the gym. It definitely was an older song, I remembered it. Couldn't place it. At some point I slapped my forehead in recognition. It was a Nickelback song. I'm getting...

Sometimes when playing the 'bee, like Tom and I do every evening over dinner, you get a little desperate.  I mean, there's sirloin and many other loins. Why not dogloin? idk about this game. It also didn't take dogfood. And it didn't take beachball yesterday.

I was talking to somebody the other day and the topic of gross kitchen floors came up because, you know, I am a scintillating conversationalist. Obviously, I had to relate the whole incident when I went to visit my brother in college. This was years ago now because we are old.  I parked the car and gingerly teetered up the rickety wooden outdoor stairs leading to his apartment. Every step could have easily been my last. These things were held together with rusty nails and way too much duct tape for my comfort level when three stories above solid earth. I opened the screen door to his place, probably with a handkerchief, and stepped onto the linoleum floor in the kitchen. That first step went ok, but the second one did not. Because my sandal stuck to the floor and suddenly I only had on half a shoe on one foot. I had the balance of goddamn ballerina in that moment let me tell you because my life probably depended on it. 

 It felt auspicious when I went to renew my membership at MoMA. A lovely gentleman in the member services booth noticed that we both have the same hometown and he gave me a discount. I don't think museums often realize the loyalty that is generated by random acts of kindness such as this. I often let my MoMA membership lapse. Maybe I won't next year.  MoMA- All new with no member lounge. However: MoMA needs a member lounge. Super bizarre that they rebuilt their whole joint and didn't include a member lounge. I never let my Met membership lapse because damn I love a lounge that not everybody can get into. And when I say "not everybody" I mostly mean the tourists.  Don't get me wrong, in general, I have nothing against tourists. It's just that they mostly have no idea what they are doing or where they are at any given moment. Sometimes, you just don't want to get bodyslammed *again* by someone abruptly spinning around in the middle of a crowd and chargin...

 Bruce really wanted to go to see this Wolfgang Tillman show at MoMA and of course I was up for it. Our first attempt to see the exhibition was a total fail. Somehow we just circled one small corner of the show and then we left, heading for the escalator. Luckily, someone got on the ball at that point... someone besides me I mean. It occurred to Bruce that there must be more to the show than what we had just seen, given all the hoopla. So we went back in and, like a revelation, discovered the 90% of the exhibition that we had completely missed. I could not have loved the show more.  This Wolfgang Tillman exhibit is amazing. The exhibit itself is part of the exhibit, which I'm not sure I've seen before. Wolfgang and his team selected exactly the images and the sizes of the images and the placement of the images so that the whole thing functions on a micro-level (ie each individual work) but also at a macro level (ie you can step back and just take in the whole thing.)  Eve...

Elon got rid of the verified Twitter accounts with the blue check marks. Now anyone who pays $8/month can register for whatever name they want and get a blue “verified” (except not verified) checkmark account. I first realized this whole thing was going in an amazing direction when I saw three George W Bush verified accounts casually chatting.  Then there’s tweets like these: I will be up all night I fear.

I was telling someone the other day about how my grandpa was a dancer at the Savoy Club in Harlem. He had a Savoy Club jacket and one time he danced with Ella Fitzgerald.  It reminded me about how at our wedding, the two of them, Grammy & Gramps, got out on the dance floor and cut a major rug. They were stunning. Hit all the notes, remembered all the steps, were perfectly in sync.  I was so proud of them. 

 At the beginning, I was sort of keen on establishing habits. There’s apps for this, you know. Like if you want to do something every day, you log how successful you’ve been at so-called “habit stacking.” See, I know all the lingo.  Fast forward idk four years and I gotta set time aside for all my things. Cannot break my streaks! This is vital shit! First, and probably most excruciatingly, we have the Duolingo Spanish. I’m on a 250 day streak so you can immediately see the catastrophic consequences of missing a day and blowing it.  After this I have to log in exist.io a whole string of things I like to keep track of, for example whether mold allergins were high because turns out, there’s no API and such tracking must be manual.  After that, I make a note or two in my journal because next year I like to check out what I was doing at this time last year.  And finally, I’m on an 1850 day streak logging my outfit so I can amortize my wardrobe.  Add to this dail...

We just finished reading the book Pachinko which reminded me of playing Pachinko in the basement of Grammy’s house. We, the grand children, sat down there cross-legged on the white linoleum floor, smacking the lever on that machine watching that ball bouncing off the pegs. For literally hours. Third generation of Pachinko playing in the basement at Grammy's house. I don’t know where that machine came from or where it ultimately wound up… I think at some point it broke. 

Today Tom and I walked 5 miles along the path by the Hudson in the late afternoon. A guy walking the other direction had his marathon finishers medal around his neck. Tom said, "Congrats on your race!" The guy's face lit up like a thousand watt bulb. He was grinning from ear to ear. He replied, "Thanks so much!" Meanwhile, uptown, Bruce said that Gaucho was still trying to lick all the marathon runners when they walked past. Everybody has their own way of showing some New York spirit.

 Aimee’s car wouldn’t start. It also stank. Turns out rats chewed ate every wire in the entire engine. It cost $12,000 to get fixed. Good news is insurance paid for it. Also good news the mechanic in Brooklyn was super familiar with the problem. He’d seen it before. Seen it before enough to know that the rats love the wires in Hondas, Toyotas and Hundais especially. These three are like the Neapolitan of car wires.  For rats.  We also heard about Trey’s mom who rehabbed a raccoon and this raccoon, Beauregard, lived with her for 18 years. He would hang out and swing around on the curtains. He had his own jar of jam in the fridge. Beau would open up the fridge and open up the fridge with his opposable thumbs and stick his paw in the jam and lick it off. Then he’d go wash shells in a bin full of water like it was his job.  Anyway. We had a great time at Danielle and Nicks.  Not sure why we talked about rodents for a hour  

  An innocent looking place setting Look, there are unexpected challenges with the Invisaligns. Consider that when you eat something, you have to take them out and you're supposed to clean them. I like to put mine in a glass of water with some dish soap to soak awhile.  Maybe I take the glass of soapy water and Invisaligns and put it on the table where I'm eating, you know, conveniently nearby. Danger Will Robinson.

 Look, I'm really busy right now. I have a million things going on at the office and I've been asked to do some speaking and some other things that are quite flattering and also time consuming. So this year, the NaBloPoMo theme will be: short.

Kids are smart these days. Some of them, anyway. Since we would be at the Halloween Parade, Tom set up a plastic pumpkin filled with candy right in front of our Ring doorbell camera. He put a sign by the pumpkin that instructed, "Please take one candy!" A couple of kids in costumes roll up. A little boy says, "I'm going to take more than one candy!" The little girl with him screeches, "Bobby!" and points at the doorbell. She whisper-yells, "We're on camera!" Bobby looks around confused. The little girl looks directly into the camera and states, casually, "Oh goodness, here we are taking one candy each." There's a lot of scuffling and it's pretty clear that both of them made off with 2-4 pieces of candy. I'd post the footage here but these two are somebody's little kids, so no. You don't get to see this video gold.

  They were really tight, this marching band doing their thing on 6th Avenue in the middle of the NYC Greenwich Village 49th Annual Halloween Parade. Watching the parade from Wanda and Derek's window is really very civilized. So many demons and assorted warlocks and an occasional Anna Delvey or a sexy taco just... out on a Monday night screaming. It's hard not to get caught up in the turmoil and just glee of it all.  My favorite moments were the neon body painted crew voguing their hearts out on a float. Also, a guy dressed up as a gore-covered surgeon came strolling by under the window from one direction while, approaching from the other direction was a woman in an indeterminant jungle dweller outfit. Jungle woman was hawking quarts of fake blood. She had a rolley cart with a whole cooler of blood pouches. The surgeon halts mid-stride and purchases two quarts of additional blood, which he immediately opens up and splashes on himself.  I couldn't have loved both of them m...

Tom was walking down the street on the way to his breakfast place when he dropped his Airpod case. It landed closed, so he just picked it up.  (hmm, this sounds vaguely familiar .... :-) And only noticed after he had his plate of scrambled eggs that the Airpod case was empty. The case had obviously opened up midair, threw up the two earbuds and then closed again.  Hashtag oh shit. Tom raced back to the scene of the crash. He poked around on the sidewalk and discovered one (1) earbud.  These days, maybe unbeknownst to some, the Airpod Pro earbuds have little trackers in them so if you go on the iPhone and tag it as lost, you can see a map of where your earbud currently finds itself. Immediately Tom snaps into action. He cannot come with Felice and I to the Hopper exhibit at the Whitney because his earbud is headed down 6th Avenue. He sprints over there, and then runs into Academy Music because it seems his earbud went into that building. The guy at Academy Music said he ha...

 We flew to Chicago last week because I had a work thing and Tom tagged along because... he's retired so why not. The first and most important thing to mention is that I did probably one of the best jobs ever packing for the trip. For once, I didn't arrive with seven pairs of pants and one shirt and like 5 socks. Every single day I had something seasonally appropriate to wear that mostly matched. Now, don't get me wrong, my preparations were extensive. I practically made flowcharts. The stakes were high because, due to this work thing, I needed to bring two (2) suits. WTF really.  The only good news is: because I existed pre-pandemic back in the olden days when people dressed up to go to client meetings, I have like 20 business jackets to choose from.  The not so good news is: I hadn't even looked at these jackets for three plus years. Unfortunately, I forgot my favorite dress-up work jacket was missing a button. I also forgot all about the all the other jackets stuffed...

'For the young the days go fast and the years go slow; for the old the days go slow and the years go fast.'   —   Anna Quindlen   I totally get this quote now that I have Invisaligns. And am old. Invisalign "tray." You get a whole bunch of them. You start from "1 of 43" (or whatever) and  slowly level up as your teeth move. I'd rewrite the quote though to include something about how long it seems to take to level up to the next Invisalign tray thingo and how long this whole process is going to take... But then how fast time flies after you take the damn thing out of your mouth when you are eating lunch. Or breakfast. Or day drinking. Or snacking on delicious grapes.   There is an immediate and consequential problem with the fleeting nature of time while stuffing your face: You feel like you should wait a day or two past the appointed "time to switch the Invisalign tray" just in case you f*ed up your progress by not having the Invisaligns in for...

  A birthday cake that barely fit in the back of my brother's car Was Pop surprised? He says not really. He says there were clues. First, my Aunt Edith texted my mom a question about the party.  You might be wondering, rightly so, why texting my mom would result in pop learning about his surprise 80th birthday party. It's because the two of them, ultra-annoyingly, share an Apple ID and therefore, if you text one of them, both my mom and dad get it.  (This is not relevant to the birthday party but let me make it known that also, if one of them texts you back, the text may or may not look like it comes from the person who actually texted it.  So you get a text "from your dad" about vintage elbow length gloves or going out to the cute breakfast place for a chocolate croissant with Ruth and Phyllis and oh by the way, Marge from the library just had a hysterectomy. Anyway, eventually you realize the name on the top of the text is the wrong parent but it's a rough minut...