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

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At lunch with the bike club, Dad got some spinach lodged between his front teeth. He chiseled away at it with his fingernail. Finally, success! The spinach rocketed through the air and landed in Scott's coffee. Plunk. Scott didn't notice. Dad didn't mention it.

One mumble from Jennifer about maybe slightly possibly kind of thinking about taking up running after Gavin was born and Tom immediately bellied up as Coach. He snapped into action about a half hour after Jennifer's obstetrician gave the all clear on exercise. Coach Tom fired off a series of running route maps, conveniently located around Jennifer's neighborhood and complete with mileage and topography notations. Tom followed up with advice on proper sneaker fitting and how not to look like a roadnoob. A liberal sprinkling of phone consultations ensued, topped off with the proclamation that his protege would race in the spring. Jennifer was to pick a 5k out of the race forum and Tom would run with her. Wax off, Jennifer-san! Race day finally arrived last Saturday. The turnout was big. Eric showed up with Nabeela, Adison, Gavin and a Camera as big as Gavin. Donna and Bob were also in attendance. Although Jennifer's First Five Kilometers was, of course, the main event, the se...

If you are interested in the real Cher's indian heritage, click here . What follows concerns a really fucking awesome party: There was electric in the air at the recent Lip Synco DeMayo competition. Against the backdrop of a construction worker, a grease monkey, a cowboy and a nurse, the Indian was as tall as a five foot five inch tree. Her headdress was mighty. So was the ensuing rendition of YMCA. It was a hightest fantasmo right through the last verse where the young man does it all by himself and puts his pride on a shelf. I thought the Indian looked sort of familiar, but I didn't connect the dots until she took the stage again four acts later, this time decked out in a reckless black body suit and platform space boots. Yes. It was Cher. She is really an Indian. This heritage has never come out, even during the Insider Star Club luncheon at the annual Cher Expo where such intimate topics as Cher's six tattoos have been reviewed in excruciating detail. Congratu...

Most partygoers are familiar with the moderately lewd 1969 Rolling Stones song in which singer Mick Jagger boasts of getting forcibly laid by a divorcee in New York City who covers him in roses prior to blowing his nose and then his mind. Whenever asked, I recommend "Honky Tonk Women" for wedding reception set lists. On one hand, you are cheering about being heaved across a barroom queen's shoulder and taken upstairs for a ride. On the other hand you have just celebrated the sacred vows of marriage and: All the flower girls in their sweet taffeta dresses are shakin' booty The bride's boss, rigged out in pearls and sensible low heeled pumps, sashays through what could only be described as high energy square dance. The bestman is out there boogying with his sister. It is discovered that strappy sandals and ruffled gowns are not the best outfits for grinding. My other mofo favorite nuptial tunes include: "The Stroke'" by Billy Squire and "You Shoo...

At first, I fancied really going back to basics for my birthday. Maybe spend the day fasting on nothing but dark green leafy vegetables and little scraps torn from the bible. It would be all like zen and I would rediscover my inner child. But then we decided to go to the Village and look at real estate and I glimpsed this in a window: I think it's some sort of B-movie martian in a decorative saddle. It changed my perspective on the day and I decided to live life to the fullest because you never know when a lead pipe will fall from a scaffold and clock you right in the bean. We enjoyed five hours noodling around in other people's closets and wrestling with the "why" in the question of The Legion Action Figures Posed in Mock Battle Inside Somebody's Kitchen Cabinets. Subsequently, it being my birthday and all, I decided I was keen on a delicious snack of my choosing. I had 2.5 cups of coffee, spoonfuls of brownie and a lovely lump of seaweed. Then we spent about hal...

I don't regularly fling myself around the kitchen to the frantic and thunderous beat of my new favorite earcandy for no particular reason. I am building stamina for the brutal Lip Syncho De Mayo annual contest at Tracie and Andrew's. Unfortunately, such high-level competition requires more than stamina. People come to play. Yet the voting pool is a fickle fickle mistress. In a shocking turn of events, the Dirty Love number was passed over for a place on the podium. The routine, which defied all reason and social order, lasted approximately four and a half minutes. Marc presided over the Frank Zappa ruckus with Bacchanalian charm, a fuzzy black headsuit and a dragon air guitar. Claire, obviously corrupted by dangerous peer pressure, sported black tights, frisky gold sandals and a brazen poodle fetish. She worried that her children would find out she was out after midnight drinking beer, socializing and shakin' her money maker unsupervised. She commented, "My kids kee...

"Thank you, I've had a pleasant time."

So feast your eyeballs on my eight-passenger spinch leaf. Spawn of the Flower House in the middle of the front yard. (For full appreciation of the scale, please remember Tom has a giant head.) So let's caucus people. Do we all finally agree that the Flower House is, and always was, a veritable hurricane of inspiration and foresight?

I'm back at kung fu at the YMCA dojo. I know it's exciting to dream of a brilliant Lord Voldemort-y nemesis because it challenges you and all that, but I have a few hypermobile vertebrae. So I'm training for a nemesis likely to hoist himself on his own petard. My sensai told me if I don't want to take the throws, I can be excused. Nonetheless, she invited me to the class Bar-B-Que this afternoon at her house. This kind of lifestyle - hard drinking, hand-to-hand combat, Benadril - takes its toll on your body. The antihistamine only came into play because about 10:30am, a yellow jacket infiltrated my sweatshirt and stung me seven times about the neck and shoulder region. It was harrowing. But I'm white belt tough. I grabbed the yellow jacket in between my bare fingers and squashed it like a bug. My sensai lives next to an illegal daycare. They put a trampoline out in the mini-yard and let the kids jump on it from the roof. Keeps 'em occupied for hours. Although at...

Beantown goes recklessly patriotic for Patriots Day. The citizenry celebrates the vision and fortitude of our founding fathers with all the usual fanfare, like beer in plastic cups at 10am. There is also a lot of flinging one's self around and shrieking encouraging words into an endless expanse of multi-colored, spandex-clad marathon runners. They don't call it The Poeple's Olympics for nothing. Just like you have to qualify to run the race, I think you have to qualify to spectate the affair. You can't just stand there like a googly-eyed lump, as is so prevalent amongst lesser crowds. You need spirit fingers, bullhorns, sharpie markers, balloons, drum sticks, pompoms, and maybe a good high kick. Bib #6739 trotted in to the finish with no orthotics and one massive blister. Yet despite defeating Heartbreak Hill and 26.2 miles without an iPod, Tom was frisky enough to immediately deck himself in a new Boston Marathon 2008 windbreaker.

My Grammy R has been known to tell other people's relatives that their liver patê could be better. She has been known to do this at soaring volume in the middle of Tom's and my engagement party. But my Grammy has wrapped her head around more than just liver patê. Yesterday she clued me into some ancient family wisdom. She said that a husband and a wife need to work as a team to make a house a home. She passed on to me her home improvement strategy, which she has perfected over her sixy-five year marriage: Decide what you want to do. Discuss with your husband. Go out and buy whatever you want.

Nothing says Friday Night like hoofing around the Village at 4am in pursuit of a public defender and an Ethiopian, aka Kerry's sister and her sister's boyfriend. We found them at the Little Branch Bar, a cross between a crowded speakeasy and your mother's basement with a lot of people in it. I drank a rum buck made out of real ginger and real ginger juice. It was good. I love ginger. One time, I loved ginger a little too much and ate an entire jar in one sitting. (Please keep in mind that what may seem like an assbad idea to some people may seem like a genius move to other people, especially if they have had between three and seven beers.) How it became 4am confounds me. One minute we were circling the block between 59th and Tenth searching for a bar actually located on 53rd and 9th; the next minute it was three hours later and we missed what could be considered the entire set of the band my friend's friend's friend was fronting; and then suddenly we were downtown l...

"Can I get a hit?" - College freshman kid to a girl at the show on Monday night. A wild girl, brazenly sucking a toke. On a Marlboro Light.

I went to college with more than a few Arab sheiks' sons, an Argentinian blue blood and a truckload of your everyday heiresses. They all had rooms in the dormitories. With no beds. They slept off campus in palatial apartments on Rittenhouse Square chockalot with hot tubs and full maid service. But for those awkward hours between classes, the richlings all held onto their conveniently located pied-a-terre dorm rooms. Which they pimped out with fluffy hand-tooled oriental rugs, sectional couches, big TVs and refrigerators filled with beer and spicy finger food. The Really Rich get complete and entire new wardrobes every season. If you say you like their shirt they will take it right off and give it to you. There's more shirts where that one came from. The Really Rich go heliskiing and think if you don't go it's not because you can't afford to rent a helicopter for the weekend, it's because you're busy. The Really Rich don't quite comprehend any other stat...

I have informed Tom I would appreciate either a flypress or a chipper shredder for my Birthday.

Antiperspirant is up to no good. Behind its happy-go-lucky holocaust on sticky pits, there is danger. Namely aluminum. Which leaches right into your blood and shrivels your brain cells. So I have put my lingering smells in the hands of your standard old-school deodorant. Not without its own challenges but I would choose stink over drool any day of the week. Cluelessly, I attempted to go about deodoranting with an antiperspiranting approach. Kerry set me straight: The key to successful deodorant use is the reapplication. Keep some in the car. Keep some in your desk drawer. Hide some under the sofa cushions in the homes of your relatives. Wear undershirts.

To: Agency Staff From: Stacey Subject: I'm BACK! Got in at 4:30 am last night after two late flights and one missed connection (arrgh!!). Needless to say, after 35 hours in airplanes or sprinting around airports, combined with some magnificent jet lag, Tom and I are in slug mode today. I'll be in tomorrow. To: Stacey From: Eric Subject: I'm BACK! Barry and I noticed that the Def Leppard/Whitesnake tour kicked off in New Zealand last week – hope you were able to get tickets!

Buscot Station Lodge is the love child of a cozy retreat for backpackers and the aspiring set of a horror film. Check it: An isolated homestead packed with stuffy furniture covered in doilies, a collection of fragile china tea cups, thick oriental rugs and a lot of tiny blood-sucking insects. The proprietor, a deep-voiced sixty-something slow talker heavily into monotoning 24/7 political discourses and snapping at his house boy. The house boy, a skinny Jewish (but not from Israel) high-pitched switch-hitter twinkling about in short short shorts and dark sunglasses asking all the girls what games they played as children and surreptitiously taking time-lapse pictures of his favorite ladies while they ate dinner. People taking really long showers. Rusted scythes and heavy farm machinery strewn around a decrepit garage. The midnight drone of immense harvesters tirelessly circling the farm house. A dormitory above the garage overflowing with pubescent teenage boys in their perpetually damp...

The whole New Zealand experience locks down a simple truth : Humans are wee little cocky ass pantywaists. What kind of idiot fucks are we to presume our tyranny over Mother-Earth? Carelessly polluting, eroding, mining, draining, paving, killing. Papatuanuku will squash us with a glance. She has pulled towering black mountains from the depths of the sea. She has yanked entire continents asunder. She has strewn billions of white-hot stars into the milky way, hurling them across distances our tiny crazy brains cannot comprehend. She reigns at the speed of light; dominates with infinite time. Our entire species is lost in the trace of a single teardrop. Moss and ferns and milky white ice will cover our selfish dead bodies, strewn over the poisoned planet we begat.