Years

Happy New Year! The inevitable has arrived: our last day off before it's back to the grind. While I feel well rested and ready to throw myself back in head first, I'm also regretting the many pages I did not write while in flight, by the pool, here at home...and now I've procrastinated myself into a corner with only hours remaining to work on that dreadful story. No matter - I figure I will mix things up a little by posting more about Mexico, and about our recent few days, and in between I am preparing "snacks" for Craig while he bellies up to football today. We've so far had a lot of vividly-colored vegetables (healthy) and a spicy pork sausage dip (not the healthiest), but I will balance that out by making a new baked spinach parmesan dish later. We're not really eating a meal today, rather just grazing. Fine by me!*So, the above captured photo of Mexican food away from the resort might be one reason why the past four days have been a painful recovery attempt for my stomach. Thankfully, I think I'm quite back to normal. But the food there, moreso away from the resort than at it, was pretty good (at the time, at least.) We ate out a couple of times - one meal shown above at Tobasco Beach, where Craig was sorely disappointed to find out we had just missed breakfast - and another time at Pancho's downtown. We found Pancho's through our friend Al's ability to speak Spanish very well to the taxi driver (Al is a new friend who lives with his wife Michelle in Jersey, and Al is from Spain, so his Spanish, needless to say, far and away exceeds Craig's and my abilities to say "uno mas," "gracias," "no gracias," and "muy bien"). Al, who was accompanying us to Cabo with his lovely wife, requested that the taxi driver deliver us to a very authentic Mexican eaterie, and Pancho's was second to the first place he tried to take us, where lines of people waited out the door. All dining outside of the resort was good, however the buffet within the resort really got to Craig. I snapped a quick photo of the butter sculpture at the buffet shown here, and trotted it back to
the table to show Craig, who replied, "Maybe they should work less on butter sculptures and more on the food itself." Too true. But it's an all-inclusive resort - food isn't their top priority, I suppose.*Music was another thing that left me a little empty. We're both self-appointed music snobs, and while I guess we could have listened to our iPods by the pools, that would indeed take away from the overall social atmosphere. Therefore we were subjected to early morning Mexican music medleys, which I didn't mind because they were appropriate and festive, followed by Christmas songs of varying degrees of excellence, topped with American pop that neither of us really go for ever, and mixes were rounded out with that Four Non Blondes song called "What's Up" which must have blasted from the speakers at the pool at a minimum of every five songs. What's up is right. But really, again, we weren't there for the music, or for the food. We were there for the sunshine, and the beach, and the Pacific, and to get away. Added bonuses included but were not limited to...
pelicans...

large crustaceans...
and the mystery cot. Every other day in Cabo we left the "Do Not Disturb" sign hanging on the door to let the staff know that they need not enter and clean each day (that would have been wasteful and quite unnecessary as Craig and I were hardly ever in the room, much less are we dirty humans.) However, on the last night, the night we spent out late dancing at Cabo Wabo with the whole group of friends we'd made, the night we wound up talking to Al and Michelle at the resort Sport Bar until young hours of the morning, we entered our room and discovered the above shown cot. Craig and I looked to the cot, looked to one another, looked around at the otherwise unkempt room (we had left the "Do Not Disturb" sign our last day) and Craig said, "Did we come into the wrong room?" I stared at the cot like it was going to grow teeth and attack us and I said, "We didn't order that..." but it was easy to quickly laugh off such a very bizarre incident after such a luxurious and enjoyable trip. Craig won't let me post any of the above shown photos on our page, including the mystery cot!, therefore I took the liberty to post them here. We have many, many, many more, too many to share because they become redundant (repeat of our London trip circa January 2007) but for now, that's Mexico in a nutshell. Fun, relaxing, hilarious at times, and downright memorable.*Meanwhile today marks the 4th New Year's Day I've spent with Craig as his doting roommate. These past 4 days home have been wonderful. We spent a lot of time just staying home and recovering, cleaning the apartment, unpacking, eating bagels, eating at Yura, taking it generally easy...then yesterday, New Year's Eve, we headed out to a neighborhood that hugs SoHo, in the vicinity of West 4th, and wandered the streets enjoying the mild skies and brisk day. We ducked into the SoHo Room, a nice cozy bar, then happened upon an awesome bar at W. 3rd and Sullivan Street, my favorite in the City so far no kidding! called Shade (or, The Shade Bar). They serve crepes (jokes could be heard at neighboring tables about the "little tiny pancakes" reference from Talladega Nights!) but I guess Craig and I stupidly assumed crepes to be desserts filled with gooey chocolate or heavy cream and powdered with sugar, but no, were we mistaken...the waiter came over and informed us that the lunch special was any item off the menu, crepe, salad, sandwich, soup, plus one 10-oz. draft beer, for $9. Of course, intrigued at the idea of eating crepes, we scanned the menu to find that crepes can be filled with anything! Anything! And we could even request multi-grain crepes as an alternative to the greasy unhealthy regular ones! (As if I have any previous experience with crepes to know what they're really like!) So Craig ordered roasted red pepper, mozzarella and ham and I ordered brie, ham and roasted garlic. Oh, they were yum! And where we sat, near the kitchen, smelled amazing. And through the heavy velvet curtains leading to the kitchen Craig noticed that crepes can be purchased from the street through a window! It's such a totally cozy warm inviting place, and the crepes' filling options had us both positive we will return again and again. In fact, there was discussion, and has been ongoing, that we should move into some other Manhattan neighborhood (not knocking ours, of course, because I love it for what it's worth) like maybe the one where we hung out yesterday. Maybe Manhattan is authentic Manhattan whatever corner you find yourself in, but in bars like that, where we sat breathing in the warm scent of crepes, where we listened to mellow Bob Dylan from soft speakers overhead (real Bob Dylan - positively 4th street old school Bob Dylan, the stuff I wouldn't know where to find if I tried! - I said, "Craig, where do I get this Bob Dylan??" the kind where it's mostly harmonica and a few guitar chords and breathy lyrics not sung in iambic pentameter but in a haphazard old school Bob Dylan kind of way - the kind you can't really hum in your head later because it's not catchy)...and tin pan ceilings and exposed brick and mismatched throw pillows in the windows...the place seats 20 maybe...anyway, I fell in love with it. I told Craig it felt like the kind of place where I could sit with a notebook and no one would look twice at a girl with a notebook daydreaming out the window.*Moving on, we also had a beer at a totally weird bar called The Slaughtered Lamb (going in we had English pub-feel hopes and coming out we were just perplexed at the Wolf-Eats-Flesh theme throughout!) and we finished the day at Vol de Nuit, which at one time, my friend Lauren explained to me, was called Belgian Bar. It's lit red and serves such Belgian beers as Leffe and Chimay and Delirium Tremens. Craig called Kara and wished her a happy new year and then we headed back home to rest for our continuation of a Belgium New Year theme. We had reservations at B. Cafe at 75th and 2nd, where we ate mussels for his 31st birthday earlier this year. The dinner was a pre-fixed 5-course meal, with champagne toast, hors d'hoeurves of cubed pickled beets, cubed cheese and olives, a smooth potato soup with truffles and chives (our fave of the meal), lobster cocktail, a lemon sorbet dunked in a shot of vodka (Craig said, "to cleanse the palate??") and our main course of angus prime rib - mine with bernaise and his with red wine - and finished off with a chocolate-on-chocolate log draped in silky chocolate sauce (Weight Watchers would gladly dock me 1,000 points for dessert alone!) Near the end of dinner we were feeling a little rushed. We had so much fun eating like that but we had decided to head to a party at our friend Sharon's on the Upper West Side, and by dessert and coffee time, it was nearing 11. We had no idea what the cab scenario would bring, and while we weren't traveling too far (Sharon is at W. 100th) we wanted plenty of time to get there, pour a drink, greet our friends that we knew (Lauren, Jeff, Amanda, Megan, Shavonne, Sharon) and meet those we did not already know, and yet ring in 08. It all worked out just fine, and in fact we were glad we went to the party - everyone raved about our tans (which are on the road to fade but that's ok! It's fun to be tan briefly!) and the brand new 100th anniversary ball was dropped as scheduled and Times Square on tv looked like a mess but it's so fun being near for it! and we wound up staying at the party until 4-something, before catching a cab with Lauren and Jeff to head to the East Side before they continued on to Long Island City. Shew. It's been nice, this whole thing, this whole time off. Craig is more relaxed right now than ever, and it contributes a really sweet sentiment to his personality. It isn't that he doesn't try to accommodate always, but when he's happy, it glows on him, the same as for anyone. And I like to be around any Craig any which way, but relaxed Craig is particularly an enjoyable one! I have promised him, and he has promised me, an absolutely amazing 2008. We're closing in on a lot of things. It's nice - it feels good to accomplish.*Happy New Year! Hope for the best.