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

A mail truck. So yeah, many work-from-home afternoons, I try to do a loop or two around the block. I have several goals besides taking in some fresh air.  One of my goals is to observe the neighbors and see who drives like a maniac. I have conducted studies to determine the most effective methods to encourage safe driving. And look, I'm not even necessarily talking about my own health and well-being, there's little kids and dogs all over the place.  Here's my conclusion. The best way to get people to slow the fuck down is to wave at them all friendly like. That might be how the whole thing started with the new neighbors . Most normal people will wave back and honestly it's turned into a kind of nice neighborly ritual over the years. So anyway, I was out the other day hauling ass around the 'hood because I needed to get back for a meeting. I must have waved at the mailman because why not? Much to my surprise, he pulled over. He said to me, "You're just walki...

  Weighing all the things on the bread scale Tom was texting with Matt about baking bread. We were headed up for a weekend visit, with a plan for Tom to demonstrate the bread making process. Tom said to make sure there's a scale. It is essential to weigh flour and other ingredients if you want a loaf that actually is edible. Matt says they do not have a scale, and Tom says he'll bring ours. Tom starts reading the texts aloud to me. I hear: Matt says when I bring up the scale he's going to use it to weigh flour. I'm like, right. To bake the bread.  Tom says, no. Because he wants to double check what they tell him at the dispensary. Me: ??????????? Tom: Oh, flour is a slang word for weed. Me: oh. right. The flower you don't put in bread.  Tom; ??????????

My Met membership expired. I could certainly have renewed online but I never renew museum memberships online. I membership-max. This means that when my memberships expire, I let 'em be expired until the next time I go to the museum. Then I renew at the membership desk. Why pay for a month or three months of zero museum visits? Might as well just start the new year of membership at the most optimal moment, ie when I need a museum membership because I am physically at the museum entrance looking to get in. The only time this calculous changes is if you get a discount for auto-renewals and/or I'm guilted into it. A patron of the arts such as myself is susceptible to such mind games. Anyway, I had an appointment on the upper east side the other day and wound up literally walking by the Met on my way back. So I decided to pop in to see this Man Ray exhibit I kept hearing everyone talking about. Which meant I had to renew my membership. Which I did. It was really not at all exciting....

  We got a lovely card in the mailbox from our neighbors we never actually met. In my opinion. The new neighbors moved in 7 years ago and we never, not even once, spoke with them. I'm not saying we were blameless in this whole affair, it's not like we sent them a basket of tea or some kind of welcome offering. But yeah. We never met them. But we did have many many interactions.  I walk around the neighborhood. It's my thing. I get steps in. And every single time one of them would drive by in their car, I waved. At first, they just stared at me like I was a lunatic. So I waved more aggressively. It became kind of a game for me to try to get right in their line of sight with a gigantic aggressive wave. After about five years of this hyper friendly waving, they started to, very tentatively wave back. A tiny finger gesture became a lackluster hand flap. I think that's where progress ended. Fast forward to when they moved out a few weeks ago and we find this note in our mail...

  I think this is the program from a play at SoHo Playhouse that someone in my bookclub enjoyed. "Check out this bleeding heart radish" Right? I'm always up to check out a radish. Bruce is in Santiago Chile.

  Vacuum sealed bags and my Brother PTouch These are a few of my favorite things. I don't know how I lived before I got the label maker. And then after I got a whole bunch of those vacuum sealed bags, wow. What a powerful combo. Feeling really productive in my pursuit of maximum density living.  Carole would be proud of me. I've seen her watch someone put left overs into a tupperware container and then after they put their tupperware container in the fridge, she takes it out again and finds a more compact container with less air space. She's an unsurpassed master at spacial relations. I can't compete at that level but yeah. I'll undeniably give you a little stink eye if you throw a few fluffy things in a rubbermaid tub and call it good.

 I had a really nice lunch with Kerry and Lynnie the other day. So probably that's why I got to be the proud recipient of a pocket text from Kerry this morning.  No worries, I was right on it with my reply: you will never beat me in a game of these kinds of photos! Look friends, I'm masterful at accidentally taking photos. Half my camera role is shots like this. I'm unstoppable.

There was this first floor commercial/retail location down the block from us that sat empty for a hella long time. Like five years or more. At one point, someone wanted to put in a private club of some kind and host private "parties." I've never seen our block come together faster to make sure "parties" didn't happen. Nothing like an alcohol-infused late night "parties" anything venue to instill a sense of community. So fast forward at least a year and signs appeared announcing an art gallery was moving in. Exciting!  I swear two years later, the "coming soon" signs were still on the windows.  But then, at long last, the art gallery opened. Tom and I buzzed by on their opening night and the show and saw: it's certainly a sculpture. Although the inaugural exhibition in the gallery really did not careen down the middle of my lane, it still was definitely cool to have a gallery across the street.  A couple weeks ago, I noticed that the e...

 Not just a baby goat, this goat was 4 hours old. Literally this goat had been in utero until like just after lunch.  Mom and the goat. We were vacationing in Ocean City Maryland when this photo was taken. These people renting an airBnB down the block from us said they had to take the goat with them on vacation due to it being born while they were packing up the car to leave.  I don't fully understand this. We failed to ask sufficient questions. For example, no one asked where the Mom Goat was and why she was deemed incompetent.  Hopefully mom goat was home in the barn getting some much needed R&R, and this was not a scenario where the people down the block had just made off with a goat infant, 911 style. I bet AirBnB rules don't specifically forbid goats, so at least as far as AirBnB is concerned I'm sure these people down the block are in the clear. 

  Check the box for monstrous. What is this thing? Not all that helpful as far as signs go, honestly. Here's the description of this exhibit : Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie  radically reimagines the story of European porcelain through a feminist lens. When porcelain arrived in early modern Europe from China, it led to the rise of chinoiserie, a decorative style that encompassed Europe’s fantasies of the East and fixations on the exotic, along with new ideas about women, sexuality, and race. This exhibition explores how this fragile material shaped both European women’s identities and racial and cultural stereotypes around Asian women. Shattering the illusion of chinoiserie as a neutral, harmless fantasy,  Monstrous Beauty  adopts a critical glance at the historical style and its afterlives, recasting negative terms through a lens of female empowerment. Admittedly I had to read this like nine times to catch the gist of this whole thing. Is it me...

 It's 11|11, otherwise known as the Corduroy High Holiday because it's the day that looks the most like corduroy. Yes, even though the Corduroy Club has been defunct since 2011 (because once you celebrate 11|11|11 you kinda can't come back from that, honestly) I still am one of those who celebrates. And so: This is how many blog posts I have written. This is the time. This is my place during a Peloton class. I just looked back through the blog archives here and although I've written a sparse few posts about corduroy club in general, looks like I did not, in fact, document the 11|11|11 extravaganza.... which was quite something. Maybe I was blinded by the light, it was such a thing to behold. But I also didn't write anything about any of the lead-up events... we went every year starting from like 2007 or so. But anyway, Happy Corduroy Day to all those who celebrate!

  Breakfast from room service at the  Ritz Carlton in Philly After Davie's funeral, it was weird to realize no one we know still lives in my hometown. My parents moved to a nearby retirement community, but they were traveling and their apartment is pretty far out of the way. It felt completely suboptimal to drive the whole way over there and figure out all the logistics just to stay in an empty place. Also, it's like a three hour drive from the city and thus super taxing to go back and forth in one day. So we decided to see if there might be a nice place to stay in the vicinity. Call it a mini-vacation. Turns out, there's nowhere nice to stay on or about my hometown. We wound up in Philadelphia. At the Ritz Carlton because why not.  It's a pretty building and the restaurant was surprisingly good. View from the room: Does this room overlook the street? Oh why yes it does. Thank you motorcycles at the crack of dawn. Tom and I decide that our main endeavor is going to be t...

  I don't judge.

My pop, a former elementary school principal, had a longstanding tradition of not giving out candy for Halloween. Yup, he was that guy.  One year he gave pencils to the trick-or-treaters. He never did that again.  Pop pivoted to what might be considered a truce— he started handing out plastic spiders. He bought the spiders from Oriental Trader in packs of one million. Growing up you could never celebrate a holiday or birthday without a few dozen spiders showing up as a gift, a decorative element on a gift, a cute napkin ornament, centerpiece detail, chandelier dangle, or if you looked closely at the Christmas tree you could probably find forty spiders tucked in the boughs.  So when I first took this plastic pumpkin out of the basement to fill it up with candy and saw this: I spy something inside this pumpkin. My first instinct was to just leave it in there and maybe give it to a kid who looked like he/she might have a preference for a plastic spider. But then I switched u...

We stayed over at my friend Melissa's new condo at the beach. This was over the summer after our friend Suzanne's big party, so call this post a NaBloPoMo sandbag. I kept it at the ready for four months just lying in wait for this NaBloPoMo moment.  So we stayed over at Melissa's new beach condo. Unfortunately, Melissa had an early flight to Florida at the crack of dawn the next morning, so she was gone by the time we woke up. Tom and I arose after the sun had fully risen; it was a late night in our defense. Melissa texted and asked how it was going. I sent her this photo and said I love your new bedside tables with the little pull outs! So handy! Little pull out shelf so convenient for coffee cups! I thought Melissa would take this as a compliment on her decor choices. Not so much. She replied something about whether I noticed the white carpet right underneath that big old cup of unfettered black stain-my-new-white-condo perched there on that little pull-out. Oops. Stick t...

Ok well this Poster Museum is idk less than 10 blocks from my apartment I've been living in for decades. I never knew it existed prior to two weeks ago when Bruce stumbled on an exhibit of Italians for Fascism posters and decided we definitely needed to go.  I for sure walked by this Poster Museum who knows how many times without noticing it. This is a really striking exhibit, the Italian Fascist posters: This red is not your usual museum beige. Huge Props. gotta love a skull. ...and no more posters after this. We went down in the basement past this hallway of music posters: Pretty cool. Then there was this really nifty design your own poster interactive thing. We poked away at for probably way too long. It might have been for children, but yeah. I make no excuses. you pick different styles and themes and it makes you a poster. Oh, here's some more posters: I mentioned to my book club that I went to the Poster Museum, and said something like, who knew there was a Poster Museum!...

I don't know why I just didn't take a video. I went with a series of live action photos instead. But yeah. Here's our ensuite while we were on vacation in Banff. We had a nook for a bathroom. No door. It went down like this: Walking toward the bathroom nook. No door, mind you, just change of flooring. Rounding the corner into the bathroom nook. Yup! It's a full bathroom in this nook around the corner! In the nook. Exiting the bathroom nook. Kent said that the builder probably saved tens of thousands of dollars not having to pay for doors on every bathroom in this condo complex. Meanwhile... idk. It was fine.  A little fresh air never hurt anybody... in the bathroom. Anybody in the next room, however... no comment. I say all this to say, in sum, it was a weird choice.

So when Eric stayed overnight at our place a couple weeks ago, he needed to go to a hospital on the Upper East Side the following morning to visit his wife, aka the patient. Tom and I took a pulse on his subway skills as the first step in our "giving directions" process. We've learned this is vital. Eric said flat out he wanted the simplest route, so we didn't need to ask casual subway knowledge level assessment questions such as, "Define Uptown" or "If a train car is empty would you go in?" ( answer: hell no ) We told Eric to just take the F. He could walk over to the 14th street stop and get off less than 5 blocks from his destination, so. Not the fastest route for sure, but we were confident he wouldn't wind up in the Bronx by mistake. The morning of Eric's "commute" he took the elevator downstairs and said hi to Nachi the doorman. Naturally, Nachi takes the opportunity to ask Eric where he's headed.  Eric says Upper East. ...

Was talking to Mom & Dad the other day and Pop starts talking about how, one time long ago, they were in Ireland. Pop chatted up a farmer and asked the guy to teach him something in Irish. The farmer said, well you should learn   Póg mo thóin which means "Kiss my Ass." And sure, you could see how that would come in handy. Fast forward and it's raining. So Mom & Dad go to a pub to dry off. Pop sits down at the bar and tells the bartender he's learned a couple words in Irish. The bartender is game. He says, what'd you learn? Pop says, " Póg mo thóin" The bartender says, "oh yes, that means Thank you."

A long long time ago, in 2013 to be exact, Tom and I babysat my 6-yo twin nephew and niece for an entire day. I wrote about it here:  https://waitingtogetthere.blogspot.com/2013/06/uncle-tom-and-aunt-stacey-best.html One of our activities that day was to rehearse a skit and then perform it for my brother and Mary when they returned home. Our inspiration was a dramatic rendition of this scene: It's from the movie Rushmore. The kids have, apparently, no recollection of their theatrical debut but I remember laughing so hard I could barely say my lines. "I like your nurses uniform, guy." Today is a big day because we are hosting a Rushmore watch party. Tom will make spaghetti and meatballs, we'll have popcorn and left over halloween candy. We'll all watch the movie and then. If all goes according to my nefarious plan, we'll perform an encore version of the skit in question. Call it a 12 year anniversary redux.  I'll let you know how it goes.

On a drive to New Jersey, I was doing the thing where I regale Tom, somewhat endlessly tbh, about some incident that has transpired. This time, the incident requiring endless regaling happened to be my most recent visit to the newly reopened Frick museum with my friend Bruce.  Sidebar: Journalists and tourists have recently taken to calling the newly renovated Frick the "jewel box" of midtown. The conservatory in the middle of the Frick Mansion. Sure. It's very lovely even though, according to Bruce, "it smells a little funky." A pretty room in the "jewelbox" And right? The place is top trim don't get me wrong.  Yet, turns out, this multi-year, hundreds of millions of dollars remodeling triumph is nothing in the face of this fact: Bruce and I had to show our tickets three (3) times to the ticket taker. OMG Right?! Luckily I'm a member so we skip the line, I would never go there as a non-member. I do not stand in lines. But line or no line, when...