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

Let's hear it for NYC. David was talking about how excited he was to move to San Diego when he retired (granted from Miami, he's never lived here) and Bruce is all about Spain and Helen and Matt are looking to cruise in the Caribbean for a couple years and rent out their place in Harlem. Sometimes (ok, often) this town is a rough place to be, to work, to just deal with.  And then you have a week like I just had. Maria was in from Stockholm and we took this city by storm.  For example, on Thursday evening, on the way to the train, I took this golden photo and that's kind of when my whole OMG I will never leave this place kicked in full gear: Not even sure what caption to write. This view shows the site of where the WTC used to be if you weren't aware. I mean, literally two hours earlier: Hanging in the park by the river watching the sunset and Leela James and objects are much closer than they appear in the viewfinder, I just feel the need to mention. This is after seeing...

So we're hiking this trail along the Oregon coast. When we set off, I decide my new thing is going to be to document a "Fern Life List" because Helen has a Bird Life List and I'm intrigued by the list but not by the birds. So I begin to take photos of all the ferns I see.  I will do this until I have seen all the ferns in the world!!! Some Ferns Some more ferns which at a certain point I realize are the same kind of ferns. My full attention on ferns lasts until we hit the views of the coast, which are undeniably spectacular! I also realize we are very high up and the trail edges a cliff that is a straight shot into the sea: Approximately right then, some guy hiking the opposite direction with his wife/girlfriend does a weird backward step just as he comes abreast of us and he topples off the side of the precipice. He falls backwards and luckily gets tangled up in a bush and therefore does not immediately plunge to his death. Time halts as we all stand there staring at...

 We stopped on the drive to the Oregon coast to pick up a can of fireworks, because yeah. Ever since Matt originally procured such a can  a couple years ago, we've been all in.  So we got our can of fireworks, but then the problem became where to light it, because the rental agreement of the place we're renting had some pretty strict "please don't blow up the house" clauses and also the dune grass surrounding the place looked pretty flammable and you know, we'd hate to lose our rental deposit. Therefore, someone came up with the pretty great idea to light up the Fireworks Can on the beach. Except: hmmm, this could be a decision-making factor re: our plan to light up a can of fireworks on the beach. On July 3rd at dinner, we asked our waiter if people were lawless enough to set off fireworks on the beach despite the clear signage. He kind of smirked and said oh no, absolutely not. Hindsight revealed the extent of his sarcasm. Spoiler alert. Helen mused about th...

Incident #1: We went to see Home on Broadway with Casey who had gotten tickets at an exteremely affordable price. She's excellent when it comes to getting tickets at an extremely affordable price. Usually the deal involves making yourself available with correspondingly extremely short notice... like the tickets are for a show that starts in three hours. But yeah. That's why I heart living in NYC. Anyway, Tom and I go to the show. It's good! Casey goes to lots of shows and has a clear plan for how to properly commemorate the event: Casey's photos of Home on Broadway In contrast, here's the photo I took: Photo I took to commemorate the evening   Clearly one of us is better at commemorating Broadway performances we have seen.  You be the judge. Here's the main point of all this: During the curtain call, I notice that the older gentleman in the row in front of us crying real tears. He's wiping his face. And my heart went out to him because I could see how the pe...

 Tom and I are watching Hacks. We're not done with Season 1, and I'm happy to report I'm not bored yet. I get bored extremely fast. So I guess this is quite the recommendation in my world. It's a pretty good show! Anyhoo, at one point the young writer and I forget what her name is... so... maybe this recommendation of mine bears taking with some salt. But the young writer drunk-dials the boss and leaves a dumbass voicemail message.  Ok now I'm rethinking this whole recommendation thing and contemplating some additional decision-making factors. Is it believable, the whole young writer leaving a voice mail message (or two)?  The young writer is twenty five. Would she even know how to talk on the phone? I guess FaceTiming requires talking but all I've ever been privy to Gen Z doing anything but texting. In fact, I hear they make fun of you if you even voice dictate your texts, which frankly I do all the time. *In my defense*, so do many of my fellow New York City G...

  Happy Hour with some hip cognoscenti. For one of the first times since the pandemic, I went to a happy hour in the West Village. It was at one of those subterranean joints that is 900 decibels and shadowy, as the underground often is.  I sat down next to a guy from Japan. I had been told he was "the one to talk to for insight into topics of interest." Topics of interest to whom I remained unclear on. It should be noted he had practically no spoken English.  Look, I empathize. To not be a native speaker on top of too loud music and ambient screaming is really hard. I tried desperately to understand him and visa versa and I think we both mostly failed.  We finished up our exchange that may or may not have been a conversation by standing up and executing an extended series of bows. We bowed at each other really fast multiple times. But not really bowing because who bows at a happy hour in the West Village? Also I really really don't know anything about bowing culture ...

  the image google returns when you search for "sofa in a small salon waiting room" I go to the salon on 20th Street the other day. I sit myself in a chair in the waiting area nook. The only other seating is a small sofa. I say this to highlight there is room for three, max. (This might make your brain quake as much as mine because the photo above is of two sofas. This photo is therefore not representative of the actual situation. But I'm way too lazy to find a more accurate representation. So. Yeah. Here we are.) Right after I sit down, a young woman plops herself into the sofa across from me and casually tosses a large metallic silver weekend bag on the other end of said sofa. Hopefully no one else needs to sit down because the angle of the toss effectively takes up the entire other end of the sofa. Intentional? Not intentional? We shall never know. One of the salon assistants comes over and places a cup of hot tea on a saucer in front of the woman. He says, "here...

Honestly I missed the whole thing. I was literally in the closet -- picking out a pair of pants. Maybe because the closet is small and everything is packed in there like the softer side of expert level Tetris, it was the safest place in Manhattan in the critical 4.8 Quake moment. However, the reason I was scoping out a set of trousers was because I had an appointment in midtown. It only occurred to me while I was sitting in the subway train uptown that possibly taking the subway thirty minutes after an earthquake might not be the smartest idea I've ever had. But, ya know, I was already on the train so at that point, might as well go for broke and continue my travels, as planned to Bryant Park. Eight minutes after I got off the subway, I had the exact same mental dialogue. Except this time I was in the elevator riding up to the 33rd floor of a skyscraper. My entire morning could be entitled : Safety First? Wait what? Anyway.  Tom felt the earthquake. First he blamed the upstairs nei...

We dropped by Savannah when we were down south attending my nephew's Marine boot camp graduation ceremony. Savannah is surprisingly close to Parris Island so it made sense to make it a long weekend. We got upgraded to a suite at the hotel.  the suite! bless my heart! Savannah is on the tiny side... I guess I say that as a New Yorker so keep this perspective in mind. It's a very walkable place and they have this amazing free bus that goes around in a big circle. You can hop on/hop off and manage to get yourself in places that you probably shouldn't have bothered with.  We successfully located this Alley Cat Lounge  fancy cocktail establishment which Scott had highly recommended. We went by at like the crack of 4pm or something on a Thursday -- which turned out to be maybe the only time we would have ever gotten in without a reservation. We sat at the bar and had an lovely time chatting up the bartender, who turned out to be the bar master and an expert in Japanese Whiskey ...

Have you seen this thing with Flaco the Owl who escaped from the Central Park zoo going on a year ago? If you haven't you obviously don't live in New York City. At least in Manhattan, this owl has become our crowdsourced pet.  When I just wrote "crowdsourced pet" it reminded me of an embarrassing error I made once while reading a Swedish article. The article, written in Swedish, talked about a guy who crammed, what I read to be "the crowd's cat" in his pocket. I thought it was an article about animal cruelty or something. I mean, he jammed a cat in his pocket?  But when I mentioned this whole cat shenanigan to a Swedish friend of mine, I found out the hard way (ie when she laughed uproariously at me) that it was an article about a guy embezzling tax dollars. IN MY DEFENSE, the Swedish word for tax is "skatt" and the word for cat is "katt" so if you put the word for "crowd" in front, you can very easily see how you'd go f...

  my nephew graduated from the Marines 80% of the fambo flew down to Parris Island to see the nephew graduate from Marines boot camp. It was touching really to see my nephew leave as very much a kid and come back a soldier. He got whipped into shape physically and also mentally... which I hope serves him well long term.  But that's not what this post is about. This post is about Family Day. The very very first thing my nephew wanted to do was go to the fancy commissary and buy... cologne. He wanted the brand of cologne that his drill sergeant recommended because his drill sergeant knows a lot about cologne. The drill sergeant is 26 years old and an expert in the olfactory arts. Believe me, we heard a lot about it. Let me tell you, these boys smelled good. Even from a distance. Moderation of smell is clearly not part of their training. It took me a while maybe to figure out that everything about their whole life is regimented and completely impersonal. You look at these guys an...

  So true! Look, in the dead of winter such as we are, I need to get myself all psyched up to go outside. That's the bottomline. I'm not out for a stroll any day of the week. (I'm also not writing in this blog apparently. But in my defense, I had a rotten case of Covid AND it was the holidays and the end of the year AND I wore myself out with the NaBloPoMo.) Back on track now. January. Going outside. The problem is, my step count plummets and my watch beeps at me alerting me about this travesty. YOUR STEP TREND is WAY OFF, SISTER. Then there's also the problem of me wishing to become a Flaneur when I grow up. To really qualify as a Flaneur, I feel one must have a lifetime of practice. So my personal strategy to get my ass up and out for a wintertime walk is to engineer a series of destinations forming roughly a circle and then set off with this checklist, an adequate scarf and a lot of fortitude. My first stop this past Saturday was at the NY Showplace Antiques on 25t...

  I took this picture a couple weeks ago at the Ed Ruscha exhibit at MoMA. Tom and I went to the opening mid-day on a random Tuesday.  I liked this painting and it seemed like a good way to say sayonara to this year's NaBloPoMo. This, right now, is the moment when "won't" turns into "will." As in, I will finish this thing with a flourish. Thanks to all approximately 10 of you who have been with me on this journey (according to the blogger stats page).  Whew. It's a thing to write a post a day for 30 days.  But yeah, will do. And now we're at... Done!  

 On this penultimate NaBloPoMo - I have nearly succeeded in posting a post a day for one full month on this National Blog Post Month, yeah, my inspiration is waning. So I was planning on just posting this picture of some of my money plants:  Some of my money plants At one point I had probably 20 gorgeous money plants. The deal is that the money plants have baby money plants and then I feel bad about squashing them so I wind up with a Dugger family of money plants.  It was just too damn many money plants so I gave a bunch away. I felt very charitable when I did so since my mother saw money plants not half this nice for sale at Giant for $9 each.  Right?! Just another reason why my house is actually a farm. Anyway, this was going to be the entire post, but then, when I was looking for a great picture of the money plants, I ran across this photo in the photo library: Tom with a knife and his brother. It is a photo of Tom wielding a knife. Shirtless. With his brother in ...

Here's the entry in my alumni newsletter in the "alumni news" section: "I am thrilled to report that we have published a special edition of my very successful journal. Our contributors include top thought leaders from around the nation. Here's the link.... " Yes, this cat is actually using the alumni news section of a college newsletter to: 1. Shamelessly promote his shit 2. Not be humble, even in a coy way Ok let me just add some context: One time I met this guy in his office. This was years and years after college. I walked in all friendly like with a colleague of his and I said to him, "Oh, you have the same last name as my husband does! It's such a small world, maybe you are related!" And this guy goes, "No. We are not related." Anyway, this was the most noteworthy thing that happened today -- the spark of pure WTF that is reminiscent of my last interaction with this asshat. 

Look, not to brag about my amazing prowess at sussing out the art that will be critically acclaimed just as soon as the critics get their shit together, but yeah. Bruce and I have done it again. We were at the Whitney at the crack of 11am during member previews of the Henry Taylor show. I was smitten just looking at the advertisement for the opening.  Also, I'm kidding here. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then is probably the most accurate way to put it. Anyway, I’m planning to go back, but now that it’s all popular I will need to time my arrival with some precision given the hoi polloi and all. I loved this one. It wasn’t Bruce’s favorite.