Crawls

Another weekend has flown by too quickly. It's only 3 on Sunday but the next 7 hours will fly past me so fast and then it's back to work and then time slows back to unfathomably snail-like speeds. Oh, well. Friday we traveled home together (I love when we do) and he stopped at Hallmark to pick up Auntie Lenore's birthday card and a card for Timmy and Angela who have a healthy baby boy as of this week...congrats to them! I headed to Key Food to pick up ingredients for my first attempt at homemade pizza. The above shown is the result, with homemade marinara sauce (all thanks to Cooking Light, of course!), red and yellow bell pepper strips, mushrooms and chicken sausage. Well, of course there was also Provolone and mozzarella. It tasted really very good, except that the Boboli crust didn't get as crispy as Craig prefers. My baking sheet is 10x's the size of my oven, so I had to improvise and use a foil-covered broiler plate. After dinner I was in the bathroom and I heard a loud shatter followed by a shout from Craig. I came out and there he was, kneeling on the floor collecting shards of glass in his palm. The overhead light's globe shattered when the two bulbs simultaneously went out. He said, "KB, I am so glad you weren't standing here when it happened...you stand under this light all the time!" So true! Damage control complete, we wrapped up the leftover pizza and played Play Station 2 until we were both so tired (before 11!) that we went to bed early. Saturday morning we woke up fairly early and got a good handle on our day. We cleaned together, organized, sorted through some drawers/papers, got things tidied up and headed to Ace Hardware together for odds and ends for the apartment. Then we came home and headed out on our Craig-designed New York City pub crawl. We jumped on the 5 train with our Best Bars of New York book in my backpack-purse and traveled to Brooklyn Bridge, where we were disappointed to see that the first designated stop, the Bridge Cafe, was closed! It doesn't open until 5 on Saturdays. No worries - we headed over a few streets to The Paris Cafe. There we cheered the kick off to our pub crawl with Hoegaardens, a Garden Burger for me, and a Paris Burger for Craig. After two beers and grub we headed to an extremely pathetic and funeral-home feeling Fraunces Tavern in the Financial District. Craig loudly voiced his distaste for this place, which boasts historical happenings such as meetings held by George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and a string of other governmental celebs. Even the Yuengling on draft tasted like old age, so we got out of there, fast! We jumped on a train and traveled to Canal Street (via the Q, which I hereby dub "New York's Slowest Subway Line".) We walked to O'Nieal's, a very nice Nolita bar, where I broke the seal while Craig chatted up the bartender. Craig was sitting there with our Best Bars of New York book, sans the jacket, which we left at the apartment, and the bartender was like, "Are you guys doing a Best Bars of New York crawl?" Craig, entertained at the fact that this bartender gathered this on his own, was like, "Yeah! How'd you guess?" The bartender pointed to the shelf behind him. There, leaning, was a copy of our book! Very nice.
I joined their conversation just as the bartender was telling Craig that O'Nieal's (yes, spelled ever-so-weirdly) is a Sex and the City bar, and that 20 minutes from then, a group of screaming women would be dropped off from a Sex and the City tour bus and as he told us this, he began to pour a whole bar full of bright pink Cosmopolitans (of course, the cast's drink of choice!) So there we were and the room did, indeed, fill with a bunch of tourist junkies, who all did, in fact, order Cosmos from our friend Dennis the bartender. Craig and I, meanwhile, stuck with beer - I drank Peroni and he drank an IPA. After high-fiving Dennis the bartender, we traveled on foot to Milano's, not to be mistaken with a chain Italian restaurant. This bar definitely stunk of local dive character, but we enjoyed a brew there and then headed to Molly's Pub and Shebeen. By this time, the beer was at my head. I think Craig was feeling a bit buzzy, as well.
(Above pictured is Craig at Milano's and peculiarly enough, the guy at the bar looks to be checking Craig out but I really don't think he was!) We had been keeping notes in the front cover of our book, and about Molly's, Craig wrote, "sawdust on floors, smells funny, friendly Irish staff. 'sister' bar to Paris Cafe. Round 7: Murphy's Stout - CB, Murphy's Red - KB." That's fairly the best summary of Molly's. Finally, we hit our last bar from the book of the afternoon, The White Horse Tavern. This is what I call a literary bar. Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and Anais Nin hung out here, to name a few star elite. While I did enjoy being at a historical literary hot spot, I believe the amount of beer consumed prior to stopping here obstacled my ability to really love it, so I would definitely return to this place. And following that, we went to Vento in the Meatpacking District to eat dinner and drink wine. Yes, we also ate dessert. And yes, following dinner, around 9 pm, we were both annihilated and jumped in a cab to head home. Our age is showing through our thin skin. We aren't exactly cut out for crawls anymore, not ones so lengthy in nature, anyway! But it was such a great, great time. I really, really love being with him. He makes me laugh, he treats me perfectly, and it was really just a great day for us to have together. The climate was fall and crisp. The sky was blue. Pictured here is me, with New York
blurred through our cab window. This was approximately 3 hours before we cabbed it home. I'm definitely looking wary at this time!*Today, since we went to bed so very early last night, we woke up together at 7. We started the day by playing Play Station together. I simultaneously browsed a Cooking Light magazine and some recipes for ideas for the week. After an hour of video games, I was 100% bored with it (gaming, not with Craig!) so I wrapped up the grocery list and went to get us bagels and coffee. Our bagel place now carries Scallion Cream Cheese in low fat, not just veggie, so I opted for that! We adore the Everything bagel...so good...then I grocery-shopped and stocked the fridge for the following dinners this week: Roasted Red Pepper, Zucchini and Tomato Soup with Fusilli, Turkey and Bean Chili, Penne and Chicken with Spiced Tomato Sauce and Spinach Stuffed Shells (to use up the rest of my homemade marinara from Friday)...it's fall! It's soup weather! Chili weather! I'm happy to invite fall into my kitchen. After organizing my miniature refrigerator, I left for Barnes and Noble. I searched high and low for blank recipe cards but instead left the store with The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton (when studying poetry as a woman, there is no better teacher than Anne or Sylvia, or both at the same time...) and then I went to Orva (my neighborhood department store that eats much of my money) and bought a few new items of clothing to fit my new (old) body. I swear, Good Will or Housingwares needs to come to my apartment and strip my closet clean of what's in it, because none of it fits anymore. Replacing clothing is going to be a slow and painfully expensive process. It's not like I can run to Kohl's or Old Navy, because neither are near, and I refuse to waste precious time traveling to shop. I hate shopping enough as it is. Walking 10 minutes to Orva, Banana Republic or the GAP is the best I can offer. After finding a few quick things, I went to Scott J. to get my eyebrows waxed (they sprout wildly out of nowhere after months of looking clean) and then I came home. Now, it's time for Anne to walk me through some good words. I've got poetry plans for the next two hours, dinner, and then we're going to purchase our Mexico trip. Then I will work more on the poetry. Then to bed, probably before 10, considering it's been such a long, eventful, and happy, happy Sunday.*