Saturdays

Thank the universe for long weekends. Somehow it's already Monday night (Labor Day) closing in on 5 p.m. and I don't know where the time has gone! It speeds by. Friday night we ordered Chinese and drank nice wine and watched a movie. Saturday we woke up, both went for haircuts (Jose, my stylist, didn't speak a word to me except for the occasional question about the hair - I enjoyed the silence) and then met back at the apartment to head out for our "Billyburg" -Williamsburg, Brooklyn - pub crawl. We kicked it off at the "tour" of the Brooklyn Brewery. Seeing as the facility is fairly small, the "tour" consisted more of a 20 minute explanation of the history of the brewery while we stood in the one room of the production area. But, we got to sip a beer while we listened to the history. We then headed in the direction of Bedford Avenue, where we began crawling. We ducked into quite a few fun places, several of which I found the bathrooms most interesting. It was such a fantastic day - beautiful weather, fun with just Craig and me.
Some of the bars had so much character. We shot like fifty pictures of each other because our goal this year is to take ample photographs for our Year 2 in the City photo album. Our first year's book is pretty decent, but I want Year 2 to be even better since we've lost so much weight and feel confident in ourselves again.

Nice tagging found in Brooklyn somewhere...
Funny, the signs you see in New York...this one is wholly untrue, of course!

So, we decided long weekends is like having two Saturdays. Sunday morning we woke up and went to brunch at an over-rated place called Panorama Cafe (or maybe we just ordered the wrong thing?) Craig was dissatisfied after brunch so we crossed the street and wandered into a sinful Hungarian bakery, where Craig convinced me to indulge, with him, in cheese and apple streudel (we brought it home to sample it). Good pastries are just wasted on me, I told him. I don't know good from bad really. Then we came home and at 4, we met up with our new very good friends Laura and Brian (book club members). We started at Swig, which is owned by the guy who owns our favorite watering hole, Biddy's. Swig is nice, too. Then we headed to Don Pedro's for dinner, and afterwards met up with Lauren, Jeff, Eric, Shavonne, Amanda, and Megan at Cilantro for drinks and to celebrate the departure of Lauren and Jeff to Long Island City (they are moving into a posh brand new apartment with unbelievably hot amenities which include such things as rooftop pools and dishwashers and a gym and so forth - fun!) Drinks led to pizza, of course, so tonight, to get us back on diet mode, I'm making Campanelle with Salsa Arrabbiata - a recipe I found through Cooking Light. Ages ago (months, rather) I wouldn't have paired a green vegetable with a pasta dish - it would have been salad with Ranch Dressing and garlic bread - but nowadays I freely serve a green side such as green beans or asparagus. I'm looking forward to trying this new dish. The sauce has pepperoncinis in it. And I bought a wedge of Romano so that I can grate it myself.*I have to mention this movie we watched this afternoon. I headed to Blockbuster this morning and to my dismay, every single movie either of us would want to see was out. The place was like a ghost town. So, anyway, I wound up with two movies that I wasn't sure would be worth anything, only one which we watched and I positively loved it. My favorite girl Maggie is in it, so I should have known it would be good, right? It takes place in the City and story revolves around two couples, Julianne Moore and David Duchovny and Maggie and Billy Crudup. The script is really intelligent and all of those characters were so good. It particularly hit home for the fact that Elaine (Maggie) and Tobey (Billy) have been dating for 7 years (Craig & Kristin, anyone?) and he has no seeming intention of proposing to her or starting a family with her...anyway, I loved the movie and Craig got several good laughs out of it, too. I need to buy it. Trust the Man, it's called (kind of a bad title for a good flick). Anyway, off to throw together Salsa Arrabbiata. Tomorrow night is our Yankees game with Alison and Scott. Ah, the work week.