Family

Last Week Delight 7/18/2022

Hey it’s been another week. Let’s see what good we can find in it.

  • Arabbers. Arabbers are a long Baltimore tradition and something that at least as far as I’m aware don’t exist anywhere else. I like things like that that are so specific to a place. If you’re not from Baltimore you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. Arabbers are vendors who walk around the city selling fruits and vegetables from a horse drawn cart. They have a certain cry that has been passed down to try and draw people out from their houses. There is one that visits my neighborhood and my street seems to be on his route back to the stables. So often in the evening I hear him going by. I like hearing the cries and the jingle of the bells on the horse as he rolls down my street.
  • First images from the James Webb Telescope. NASA released the first images taken by the James Webb Telescope this week. They were very cool looking. I know nothing about space and have no idea what any of it means, but it’s remarkable feat of human achievement. Also, I know several people who have worked on the project over the years, so mostly I’m happy that they finally got to see their work come to fruition when there are so many things that could have gone wrong along the way.
  • Reunion video. My mom’s side of the family had a reunion last weekend with her three brothers and their kids and grandkids. My sister and I were the only slackers that weren’t there. She because she couldn’t get away from work and me because with COVID I was not prepared to fly across the country to Washington state and then hang out with a large group of people. Even though I wasn’t able to make it, my mom asked me to put together a video slide show with photos of everyone plus my deceased grandparents and great-grandparents. I was very pleased with how it turned out, so hopefully everyone who was actually at the reunion enjoyed it.
  • Krispy Kreme donuts. I love me some Krispy Kreme donuts, but there aren’t any particularly close to where I live and I’m not interested enough to drive a half hour just to get one. One of my co-workers brought a box into work this week, so that was a nice yummy surprise.
  • No storm damage. This one probably feels a little bit like rubbing it in to some people, but we had some nasty storms blow through last week. I don’t know anything about weather patterns, but there is obviously something that tends to send the worst of storms north or south of the city. There are many times I look at the radar and see nastiness north and south of us, but the city being in a hole in the middle where we get light rain or nothing at all. That was again the case this past week where we barely got anything in the city, but there were crazy storms all around us that caused a lot of people to lose power for days due to all the downed trees. I’m glad we got to escape it and didn’t have to live without power for any amount of time.
  • Found Charmery card. The Charmery is a local ice cream place in my neighborhood. They have a stamp card that once you get 10 stamps you spin a wheel and get some free item. Most of the spaces are for a free cone, but you can also win some of their more expensive items like milkshakes, sundaes, and floats too. I walk by it every morning on my daily walk and the other morning I found a stamp card that someone had dropped the night before. So free stamp card to me that already had six stamps on it. It was almost like finding money on the sidewalk.
  • Hopkins Farm Brewery. There have been several farms in one of the counties north of Baltimore that have partially or wholly turned into breweries. Hopkins Farm Brewery is in Havre de Grace and not that far for my friends that live up in Harford County, though it’s a trek for us from the city. My friend’s birthday was on Friday and she wanted to meet up there to celebrate, so we braved the rush hour traffic and went up. Luckily there are scenic back road ways to get up there, so we didn’t sit in much actual traffic, but it still took an hour and fifteen minutes to get up there. Luckily with no traffic and the ability to take the highway on the way home it was just over 45 minutes, which is still long but better. That’s all to say that I very much enjoyed the atmosphere, but won’t be making a regular habit of hanging out there. They have lots of tables set up in the field next to the bar where you can get drinks. They also usually have a food truck or two on site, though you’re also welcome to bring a picnic just not any outside alcoholic drinks. There was a pizza truck and an asian noodle/rice bowl truck the night we were there. They also had some live music, which was just what you want for this kind of setting. Someone playing cover songs loud enough to hear but not so loud that you have to shout to hear the people you’re with. I always think it must be a little demoralizing to be the musical performer in that kind of situation, but that’s how a lot of people play live music for money as background noise. It was a really pleasant evening and something I totally do more often if it weren’t so far away.
  • And for your musical delight this week I have the first listen of Delta Rae’s Southern gothic music, The Ninth Woman. Delta Rae is a band I love from Durham, North Carolina. They did a Kickstarter a few years ago that went way beyond their wildest imagination and became the highest grossing indie band Kickstarter in history. They met their initial goal in under an hour, so they kept adding stretch goals over the course of the month that the Kickstarter was live. Their biggest stretch goal was write what they called a Southern gothic musical. They did a live event last Thursday night to share 8 of the 26 songs that will eventually make up the musical. It takes place in the lost Roanoke colony where children have been disappearing and the townspeople have attributed it to witchcraft. They have already condemned 8 women to death for witchcraft and now the titular ninth woman has been accused and turned in by her brothers, but it turns out in this case she is in fact actually a witch. I very much enjoyed what they shared during this first listen and am definitely looking forward to hearing the full thing and hopefully one day actually seeing it performed as a theatrical piece. I expected the live event to just be live, but it looks like at least for now you can go back and watch a recording of the event. So go have a listen if you’re interested.

Family Reunion

I promised in a previous post that I would be writing about my recent trip to Massachusetts. I almost forgot to do it, but even though it’s a little delayed I’m finally getting around to it. For the most part I hadn’t seen any of my family since Christmas of 2019 before COVID. As you may recall my mom and sister did drive down from NJ and surprise me right before this last Christmas. I only got to spend about 90 minutes with them though and they were the only family I’d seen for a year and half.

My sister recently took a new job and moved back to Massachusetts with her family. Since all the adults and my eldest niece were vaccinated my husband and I decided to go up over my sister and my’s birthday (yes, we do have the same birthday one year apart). My parents decided to fly out from Arizona and we also got my cousin and her husband to come from St. Louis.

It was really great to get to spend time with my family again. My sister has a really nice pool and backyard area in her new house so we spent a lot of time hanging out by the pool. We also went hiking in a place called World’s End one day. I expected there to be some really dramatic vista or something given the name, but there wasn’t really. Although at some point you do get a nice view of Boston from across the water. My husband looked it up and apparently at one point they were planning on building a nuclear power plant there, so maybe that’s where the name comes from. We stopped on the way home at some place called the Lobster Pound and got lobster rolls. Being my family we also played a lot of cards while I was there.

My nieces are getting older and are now at the age where they don’t care that much about hanging out with me while I’m there. They were mostly off doing their own thing. I know it’s an inevitable part of growing up, but it’s still a little sad.

One day we’ll probably fly up when visiting, but I’m still not ready to get on a plane so we decided to drive up. It took us around 7 and a half on the way up with two stops and about 9 on the way back. My nephew once told me that Connecticut is the worst based on drives they used to make between NYC and Rhode Island. I am now inclined to agree with him. Connecticut is the worst. It’s long and the traffic is terrible. Also if you want to easily get food and use their service centers your choices are pretty much McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts at every stop. For the few places that had additional offerings it seems like they didn’t survive the pandemic as the Qdoba at the one we stopped at on the way up was closed and the Sbarro at the one we stopped at on the way back was closed.

I would up eating McDonald’s for the first time in 16 years and remembering why I never eat McDonald’s. It only barely has a resemblance to actual food. It was not good at all. Coming home I decided to just get a milkshake and I couldn’t even drink that. It just tasted like chemicals to me and I thought it was disgusting. If you like McDonald’s I guess you do you, but I honestly don’t know how people eat it or why they choose to go there when they have literally any other option. We’ll probably be driving back up there at Christmas this year as well and I might pack myself food because it seems like all my other options on that drive are terrible.

I’m very happy that we’re finally at a place where I feel okay seeing family and friends again. I hope it stays that way.

11th Anniversary Celebration

My husband and I always buy each other gifts based on the traditional or modern gifts for each anniversary year. Usually they aren’t anything big, but we try to be creative and get something the other one will like. Sometimes more successfully than others. The traditional gift for the 11th anniversary is steel. It is also apparently the year where we almost wound up giving each other the same thing. The only reason we didn’t is because I was waiting closer to our anniversary to order my gift and when we got home from some trip and were going through the mail I saw the return address on the package. I immediately opened up my computer, spun it around, showed my husband the tab that had been sitting open my browser for weeks, and said I guess I know what I’m getting for our anniversary. Sorry for the terrible pic, but I couldn’t find a way to take it without the shadow in it. It’s a map of Baltimore cut out of steel. He also threw in an ornament of Maryland.

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Since I didn’t think we needed two steel cutout maps of Baltimore I had to come up with something else. I wound up getting him an engraved spatula. I couldn’t resist using one of the silly puns I had seen on keychains replacing the word still with steel.

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To celebrate our anniversary we went out to dinner at The Black Olive. Somehow even though I’ve lived in Baltimore for over 19 years this was the first time I’ve been to The Black Olive. I mean when I first moved here and I was a poor twenty-something grad student it made sense, but now I go to plenty of restaurants at this price point. I guess there’s always been something newier and flashier that I wanted to try, but I finally decided it was time we made our way to The Black Olive.

It’s a Greek restaurant known for it’s fresh fish. They prepare whole fish that you can see in their fish case beforehand if you want. They then filet it at your table for you. I kind of wanted to try the lamb chops, but I figured on my first visit I should get some sort of fish since that’s their thing. I went with the bronzini, which is a Mediterranean sea bass. I suspect it was prepared in a way that I was supposed to eat the skin as well, but that creeps me out so I didn’t. It left the fish kind of bland even with the added sauce they poured on for me. If we go back again I’ll definitely try the lamb chops next time.

My husband had the veggie combo. I’m actually not entirely sure everything that was on it. There were definitely some mushrooms and a piece of village pie along with some other veggies and something neither of us could identify but almost seemed like a slice of baked stuffing. He really liked it. We started with saganaki plate which contained pan seared, paper-thin zucchini, tzatziki, two Greek cheeses Kefalograviera and Haloumi. It was all delicious. I would go back just to eat that again. For dessert we had baklava and a tarte tatin. They were both delicious as well. It was a nice meal, well paced with good service. I would definitely go back again at some point.

February in New Jersey

My sister and her family moved from Arizona to New Jersey at the end of last year and they finally moved into their new house a couple of weeks ago. We hadn’t had a chance to get up and see them yet, but President’s Day weekend was the perfect opportunity. We were already in New York for a few days prior to that, so it was easy to hop across the river on the train to go visit. My parents were in town from Arizona as they had been out to babysit my nieces for a few days, and some of my sisters college friends who have become good friends of the whole family were up from South Carolina for the weekend with their two kids.

It was a great weekend spending time with everyone. Mostly there was a lot of card playing as that is what my family does when we are together. I also got roped into taking Year of the Cookie on the road and making chocolate chip cookies for everyone. I enlisted a few little helpers and baked cookies with my youngest niece and my friends kids. My mom of course made everyone happy making her homemade pizza. My sisters, our friends, and I have all tried to make it but none of us can get the dough right. In case you were wondering if this pizza is serious business our friends even flew with pizza pans on the plane to make sure my mom had enough pans to make pizza for everyone.

On Saturday night we got a whole lot of snow at my sister’s house. Depending on the forecast you looked at they were supposed to get either 3-5 inches or 4-8 inches. They got just under a foot. This year (at least so far) and last year in Baltimore haven’t really seen any large snow storms, so it was kind of nice to have a big snow. Even nicer because I had zero responsibility for shoveling, and got to leave before dealing with the icy, slushy, gross aftermath that always seems to linger for weeks on end and which is what really makes me hate snow. The kids of course were seventh heaven with all the snow. There’s a nice hill in the backyard for sledding, though we managed to make our sled path end so that you basically slammed into a tree, which we stuck a raft in front of to soften the blow. They’re going to have to work on that in future. I haven’t been sledding since I don’t even know when. Probably when we lived in Massachusetts, which we moved away from when I was 15. It was probably not the best for my still somewhat jacked up back, but it was fun and worth it.

We got dropped off at Newark Airport to catch the Amtrak train back to Baltimore on Sunday afternoon. It’s only a three hour drive (assuming traffic cooperates), so we’ll probably drive in the future but this time the train made sense since we were in NYC beforehand. It’s going to be nice having my sister and her family so close now. When they were in Arizona it took us a 5 hour plane ride, plus the extra time you have to allot to deal with airports, and then a 1.5 hour drive from Phoenix to Tucson. Three hours is practically nothing compared to that. It will be great to be able to see them more than once or twice a year.

 

NYC Weekends

I spent the last two weekends in New York City. As we often do we went up to the city for Thanksgiving with my sister-in-law’s family. The day after Thanksgiving we did a number of things around the city. We started off by visiting the Intrepid museum, which was my niece’s vote for what to do. We decided she made a good choice because the weather was actually pretty nice, but the museum wasn’t overly crowded.

As a perk from his company my husband gets into a number of New York museums for free along with a guest. This is the first time we’ve really gotten to put that into practice, since a lot of times I go up to New York without him and can’t take advantage of his discounts, or we’re up there with his family and aren’t going to the places where he gets a discount. He got the two of us into the Intrepid for free.

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I feel like we spent a decent amount of time there, but with two six year olds we didn’t really spend much time looking at anything and we certainly didn’t have to the chance to really stop and read anything. This was a good for a first pass, but some day I’ll probably go back and actually spend time looking at and reading the exhibits.

After the Intrepid we took the twins bowling for the first time. With all the back issues I’ve had over the past year I decided to sit out doing any bowling myself because I didn’t want to screw it up any more than it already is. I decided tossing heavy balls around was not the best idea. The kids did pretty good for their first time. My nephew even managed to get a strike in which the ball didn’t even bounce off of the bumpers on the way down the lane.

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Paul giving our nephew some sage bowling advice.

Friday night Paul and I headed out on our own. We ate dinner at Chai Thai. I’d eaten there with a friend before, and knew Paul would like it so I decided that would be a good place for us to grab dinner before our show. After that we had time to kill so we wound up walking over the Schmakery’s for cookies.

Our show this trip was The Band’s Visit. I had been waffling on what to see because I wasn’t super excited about anything, and there were several things that were possibilities but hadn’t been reviewed yet because they were just in previews. This show got a rave review in the New York Times when it opened a few weeks before Thanksgiving, so I finally decided on it. By that time tickets were few and far between, so Paul and I actually didn’t sit together. We sat in mirror image seats on the right and left sides of the theatre.

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I’m not actually sure how I felt about the show. I think Paul liked it more than I did. I know the New York Times reviewer definitely liked it more than I did. I didn’t dislike it, but I also didn’t love it. Even weeks later I’m trying to even figure out how to describe it. It’s a very sedate musical about an Egyptian Police Band that winds up accidentally stuck in a small town in Israel overnight. The experiences the band and the townspeople share that night seemingly both affect their lives while changing nothing about them.

Saturday before we headed home we took advantage of Paul’s work discount again and went to the New York Historical Society museum. I’m definitely glad we got into this one for free because I didn’t see anything aside from the children’s area in the basement.

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My niece’s favorite part of the museum was reshelving all the books in the kids’ part of the museum. A future librarian in the making perhaps?

I headed back to New York again a week later just for a day trip to meet up with my sister. She just moved to New Jersey, and while she’s waiting for the rest of her family to join her, she asked if I wanted to meet up with her to see The Rockettes’ Christmas Spectacular. As many shows as I’ve seen in New York, I’ve never been to the Rockettes so I said sure.

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We had lunch at Brasserie Ruhlman down the street from Radio City Music Hall. The food was really good, but it was definitely a splurge as it was quite pricy. I don’t know if they’ve added new security to Radio City Music Hall since I’ve never been before, but I suspect that may have been the case and they didn’t anticipate how much it was going to slow down people getting in. They do 4 shows on the weekends and there is definitely not enough time in between them to turn the theatre over. We had tickets to the 2 pm show and after 45 minutes in line just barely made our seats right as the lights were going down. There were still a ton of people in line behind us, which was annoying because for the first part of the show you still had lots of people blocking your view as they found and got into their seats. I would have been even more annoyed had we had been one of the people who didn’t get inside before the show started. They definitely need to space the shows out another 30 minutes.

I can now say I’ve seen the Rockettes. I enjoyed it well enough, but I don’t think I probably ever need to see the show again. I mean if my nieces or nephew wanted me to go with them, I would. It’s definitely aimed at kids, but as an adult without kids I see no reason to go again.

After the show we just wandered around the city. Since we were right there and it was almost unavoidable we saw the tree in Rockefeller Center, which is something I once vowed I would never do again. Luckily this time it was a much less terrifying experience. The first time I went to New York with Paul after we started dating it was this same exact weekend, which is the first weekend the tree was lit. The crowds were insane and I got smashed in between so many people I literally got lifted up off the ground and was being carried along by the crowd. I had no control and had I fallen I would have been trampled. This year we were there before dark, so I suspect it was slightly less crowded than it might have been a couple hours later. At any rate, it wasn’t nearly as crowded, and I got to see the tree without thinking I might die.

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We did give up on walking down Fifth Avenue though because it was just too stupidly crowded full of people. Same with the Christmas Market in Bryant Park. We sort of looked at the Macy’s windows from a distance over the heads of the crowds of people. So basically we sort of did all the touristy Christmas things that the movies and tv make you think are so great, but are really terrible because they are way too crowded.

The weather was pretty good for this time of year though, and it was a pleasant day to walk around the city and catch up with my sister. It will be really nice to have her and her family so close by so that I’ll be able to see them more than the once, maybe twice a year I normally did when they were all the way out in Arizona.

Happy 9th Anniversary to My Husband

Nine years ago today I made one of the best decisions of my life and said, I do to my husband Paul. I am grateful every day to have him in my life, and not just because he cooks dinner and does the laundry. That certainly doesn’t hurt though. I love how he makes me smile, and how we share the same clever sense of humor that may amuse only us. I appreciate that he puts up with me and lets me drag him to tons of concerts he doesn’t care about because he knows that I love them. He’s the best husband I could ask for and the perfect mate for me.

Unfortunately, due to a family emergency we aren’t spending our anniversary together this year, but I raise my glass to our nine years of marriage and look forward to celebrating many more in the future. Cheers!

 

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Cape Cod

After finishing up my conference in Chicago, I flew to Boston and headed out to Cape Cod where my sister and her family had rented a house for the week. I had mentioned I had a lot of vacation time to use by the end of June so she said why don’t you come to the Cape. We have plenty of room, and indeed they did. It worked out well for the rotating cast of my brother-in-law’s family who came in for a day or two from Boston while I was there.

My nieces are 8 and 5 now. It was good to see them since it had been six months since the last time I had seen them. They had lots of cousins coming in and out to play with though, so Aunt Danielle was much less interesting.

The house was really nice. It was about a half mile walk to the beach, which was a little farther than one might have wanted especially with kids but it worked out okay. I didn’t mind the walk and the kids were mostly troopers about it. We didn’t really wind up spending that much time on the beach anyway as it was chilly. The temperatures were only in the low 70s and with the strong sea breeze blowing in on us it was cold to sit out there. We never spent more than two hours down there on a given day and most days we were only out there for about an hour. This is why I don’t normally take beach vacations in New England.

One morning we also went on a seal cruise on the Monomoy Ferry. That was very cool in all senses of that word. We got to see a lot of seals and our guide was very informative. I learned a lot about seals, sharks, and the way the coastline changes in that area according to a specific pattern.

We were staying in Chatham, so a couple of days we went into the downtown area and walked around the shops on Main Street and let the kids play on the playground down there. It was a cute little area full of things I’m too poor to buy. I looked at one dress I liked and immediately put it right back on the rack when I saw the price tag reading $268.

We also went mini-golfing one afternoon. I am decidedly terrible at mini-golf, but I love it. I don’t do it nearly enough. It’s been years since the last time I went.

I also enjoyed our delicious seafood dinners with seafood from the fish market in town. We had some great salmon, halibut, shrimp, scallops, and of course lobster over the course of the four days I was there. I wish we had a really great place to buy seafood. I usually wind up getting it at Whole Foods for a billion dollars.

It was a lovely trip and much better than going to roast in Arizona to see my sister and family in June like I normally do.

Conferencing in Chicago

Last week I set out on a trip that took me to Chicago for a conference and to Cape Cod for a short vacation with my family. I’m going to write about Chicago in this post and Cape Cod in the next one. This year’s annual American Library Association conference was in Chicago. As I am sure I’ve probably mentioned here before, I hate Chicago for this particular conference. Chicago is a fine city, but its convention center is in a terrible location not near to anything. You have to rely on shuttle buses to get back and forth from hotels as it’s not walkable to anywhere. After my last experience doing this a few years ago I decided I was going to skip the conference this year, but then an opportunity for me to be on a panel at the conference came up so I wound up going anyway.

It turned out to be a lovely conference, and I’m glad I went despite my still existing hatred of the logistics of the convention center. Luckily this time everything I had to be at and most of the stuff I wanted to be at was either scheduled in the convention center or the hotel attached to it, so I was able to just go over there in the morning and stay through the afternoon instead of trying to maneuver back and forth between the convention center and hotels for meetings multiple times per day. I also learned from my last trip and made reservations at a hotel that made it more convenient to get back and forth on the shuttle buses than the one I stayed at last time while also still leaving me walkable to lots of things to do in the evenings.

I had a great time at the conference. It was productive in that my panel went well as did the other program one of my committees was involved in planning. I’m not sure that I wound up going to anything that was super enlightening to me, but I left feeling good about my profession and my place in it so I’ll count it as a win.

The weather while I was there was pretty good. Friday night I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to play with me. My hotel was very close to Millennium Park where they were having a free Stravinksy concert, so I grabbed some take out and went over to listen to it. It was a lovely evening sitting outside in some beautiful weather listening to music.

Saturday night I got to meet up with an old friend who I used to work at Barnes & Noble with in Baltimore, but who moved to Chicago a number of years ago. It was great to catch up with her face to face rather than just over Facebook for a change.

I got to do the same on Sunday with another friend who just left Baltimore six short weeks ago for a job after finishing her masters at Hopkins. When she told me she was moving to Chicago, I told her I was going to be there for a conference and we should get together while I was in town because she wasn’t getting rid of me that easily. It hadn’t been that long since I’d seen her, but I got find out how she’s faring in her new life and then be sad all over again that this person I like very much is now so far away from me.

Sunday afternoon I also got to finally put a real face to a Twitter pal over lunch. She is also a big music fan like I am and we’re always making each other jealous of the concerts we’re at from across the country. Of course she lives in Colorado so always gets to pull out the Red Rocks card. One day, Red Rocks, one day. It was fun to meet up with her and chat in real life for a change.

I wasn’t really looking forward to this conference at all, but it wound up being a good time and I’m really glad I wound up going.

Thanksgiving 2016

For the past several years we’ve done Thanksgiving in New York with my husband’s family and Christmas in Arizona with my family. This my sister is going to her in-law’s in Boston for Christmas, so we decided to switch things up and go out there for Thanksgiving. The only way to make the trip affordable was to take vacation time on Monday and Tuesday and fly out the Saturday before and then come back the day after Thanksgiving.

My nieces are 8 (as of December 13) and 4 1/2, which are really fun ages. I spent a lot of time playing with them and thank god didn’t have to play Barbies one single time. The only time they were playing Barbies while I was there my youngest niece told me to go away and I gladly did.

On Tuesday while my husband and sister were working and my nieces were at school, I went on a hike in Catalina State Park with my parents. We did the Romero Pools trail, which was definitely one of the more difficult trails I’ve hiked between the rise in elevation and how rocky it was. We were kind of lame and turned back probably about .2 of  mile before we got to the pools. Once we reached the top of the ridge and realized we were going to start going down the other side of the mountain and thus were going to have to hike back up it again we decided to turn around. We had already hiked 5 miles, so I didn’t feel too bad about it. My husband, father, and I also did a quick 3 mile hike nearby where they live on Thanksgiving morning. It was a piece of cake compared to the other one we did.

Wednesday we took the kids to see Moana (or rather I really wanted to see Moana and suggested that we go). I enjoyed it and could definitely tell that Lin Manuel Miranda wrote the music for it, which was really the best part of the movie in my opinion.

We had a delicious Thanksgiving dinner for which I was roped into making a pumpkin carrot cake. Since I’m more likely to make a cake than a pie, I decided to make straight up pumpkin pie my dessert and only tried a bite of the cake. It pretty much tasted like carrot cake for the most part, which is not a bad thing since it’s one of my favorite desserts. I’m not sure I’d bother with the pumpkin version of it again. There was lots of other delicious food and fun times with my family and friends.

It was a fun trip and it went by way too fast.

Me in NYC

As is probably apparent by now I travel up to New York City fairly frequently. Usually I’m going up with my husband and we’re visiting his sister, her husband, and our niece and nephew. We usually take in a show while we’re there too, but the rest of our activities on those trips are rightfully dictated by what will keep two small children entertained. If I happen to be there not visiting family I’m usually doing the slightly crazy trip to see a show with friends in which we go up in the morning, get up to the city in enough to time grab lunch, see a matinee, grab dinner, and then head back to Baltimore. There’s not really much time to do anything else in those ventures. So there’s just a lot of things that the city has to offer that I never have a chance to do when I’m there.

Now that my husband’s office is technically in NYC even though he works from home it now makes sense to occasionally go up so he can go into the office and I can tag along and play by myself in the city. Our holiday plans got all switched around this year, so we’re not going to NYC for Thanksgiving like we normally do. I really wanted to see Sweet Charity, which has a limited run, so I told my husband we needed to go up another weekend in November. He said if that’s the case let’s go on a Friday so I can go into work and you can do whatever you want.

After I derided it in my post about London, New York decided to finally offer me a beautiful fall weekend while I was there. We took the train up on Friday morning. The first thing on my agenda was an exhibit at the New York Public Library’s Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center about shows that have won both Tony Awards and Olivier Awards (London’s West End equivalent to the Tony’s). Since the weather was nice I decided to walk up to Lincoln Center from Penn Station.

The exhibit was great. It’s not crazy huge since it’s in a library not a museum, but I’m glad I went. They had lots of things from shows including footage from them and interviews with actors playing on televisions, lots of costumes, stage notes, production designs, etc. If you like theatre and you have a little time to kill I’d recommend it.

After that my plan was to head over to the Upper East Side to the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I don’t think I’ve ever been to. Though it’s possible I went as a kid with my family and I don’t remember. Getting there involved walking across Central Park, which wound up being slightly more complicated than I anticipated. The New York marathon was this weekend, and knowing nothing about it I managed to walk across the park at pretty much the exact spot where the finish line for the course is. This was Friday and the actual marathon wasn’t until Sunday, but apparently there were some kind of kids events going on Friday and a ton of kids were running to the finish line right when I got there. Getting through the crowds to get on the opposite side of the finish line so I could continue across the park was really annoying.

My plan was to eat lunch before going into the museum, and I almost stopped and outdoors at a Le Pain Quotidien in the middle of the park. They had a nice little patio I could have sat on and stared out at the park on a lovely fall day, but I decided I would prefer to find something non-chain to eat at. Big mistake! I wound up coming out of the park much farther north than I anticipated due to my race detour, and there was pretty much nothing around in terms of places to eat. I had one option, which was E.A.T., which I guess is fairly well known restaurant that I had no idea about and in retrospect I was annoyed at having to eat at. If there was literally anything else around I probably would have gotten up and walked out after I was handed the menu and I saw the prices. Those fancy pants Upper East Side New Yorkers might think it’s reasonable to pay $24 for a grilled cheese sandwich, but I do not. Aside from a small bowl of soup that cost $12 everything else that was literally just some regular types sandwiches were $22 or more. At least the soup came with a basket of bread, so it did wind up amounting to a decent lunch even though I was annoyed by the whole experience.

I spent the next four hours wandering around The Met, which is really, really large. I didn’t even come close to seeing everything. I specifically wanted to see the exhibit they had on Jerusalem: 1000-1400, which had a lot of artifacts from the city in that time period most of them having to do in some way with the three major religions that consider that city their Holy Land. There were a lot of illuminated manuscripts, but also all kinds of other stuff including pieces of buildings, weapons, pottery, tapestries, and other artwork. The other exhibit I didn’t set out to see but wandered into was Valentin de Boulogne, who was a French painter in the 1600s. Turns out I really like his work, so I’m glad I got to see that exhibit. I didn’t make a good plan for the rest of the museum, and I always get so confused in museums because there are entrances and exits on 3 or 4 sides of every room and I never know which way to go. So I saw a random amalgamation of things ranging from Egyptian artifacts, literal rooms from houses and hotels with fancy furniture and decorations that were removed from their original locations and installed in the museum, and I think most of the modern art.

After the Met, I met up with a friend who lives in New York for dinner before meeting up with my husband to see Sweet Charity. It’s not particularly one of my favorite shows, but this off-Broadway production is starring Sutton Foster who I really like. I knew from having seen a previous production of the show that there were a lot of instrumental interludes in the music that involved a lot of dancing. In my memory, which we have recently established is very faulty, I thought there was a lot of tap dancing which I love and which Sutton Foster is great at (I probably shouldn’t tell you how many times I’ve watched videos of her tap dancing in Anything Goes on YouTube). I don’t know if this production is just different or I remembered wrong about what kind of dancing was in the show the last time I saw it, but there was only one really short tap number this time though of course still lots of other dancing. I’ve never been to an off-Broadway show before, so that was kind of fun and it was nice to be in such a small house and be so close to the stage. I’ll never be rich enough to afford tickets that close on Broadway, not even in Baltimore really. It’s still not one of my favorite shows, but I definitely enjoyed it more this time than the first time I saw it.

On Saturday we took my niece and nephew to the National Museum of Mathematics, aka MoMath. It seemed like they had a good time, but as an adult I can tell you it’s a pretty lame museum on top of which half of the interactive exhibits were broken. There were an awful lot of out of order signs on things in a place that isn’t all that big to begin with. For the things that did work their signage did not really give very good explanations about what you were supposed to go or what mathematical concept was being applied. I’m glad the kids had fun, but overall I give two thumbs down that museum and would not recommend it. We then had to race back home to get the kids to their swimming lesson on time. After that we took our niece to one of those paint your own pottery places. Then it was pretty much time for us to catch our train home. All in all an excellent couple of days in New York doing some things I don’t normally do.