Thursday, July 28, 2011

Bucket Lists

I randomly decided today to start my so-called bucket list.

The one item that I have on my list is to travel the blue ridge parkway and skyline drive by bicycle.
570 some miles. Not necessarily in one day. maybe over the course of a week or 10 days.

For a non-biker, am I nuts?

What's the term for the pipe-dream objectives like a bucket list, but there's no realistic way of achieving them?

Like driving to Prudhoe Bay, AK? Starting from the contiguous 48?
That, even to me, is a little crazy.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Resurrection

April 13th, huh? That makes 84 days since the last post.

Microrevolt - my keyword as of late. How to change something that you feel like requires a monumental effort to change. Change something tiny. Shake it up just enough. So far, it's working. I mean, look! A post!

What has happened in the last 84 days?

A trip to New Jersey for a cousin's wedding. That incurred a pair of 4 hour plane rides. The outbound flight was less then spectacular. Emmett had a 20 minute meltdown, which felt like hours. Our fellow travellers were beyond compassionate, with some newly appointed grandmothers even volunteering to hold him and walk with him. Some humanity remains in the world, it seems. The return trip was even better, with no meltdowns at all.

In between was a whirlwind of activity, including leaving him with a previously unknown sitter for the first time ever. Faith was the daughter of a coworker of a cousin of mine, not the one getting married. (My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother knows this guy who knows this kid...) Between family visits and rehearsals and rehearsal dinners and a wedding and a reception, we managed to squeeze in 4 trips to Manhattan. Having not used it much when I lived there, I was pleasantly surprised at just how efficient public transport in the area is.
Note to those considering travelling with an infant. If at all possible, staying in a hotel that has a suite arrangement (Embassy Suites, e.g.) would be ideal, as having a separate room that you can close the door to makes life a lot easier.

While we didn't get to have dinner at our favorite restaurant in the city, we did have a lovely sampling of places new and old. Empanada Mama and Gray's Papaya made return appearances, and Bombay Talkie made an debut. We saw the Harry Potter prop exhibit, which I thought was a little over priced for what it was, but that's just my opinion.

We toured the Highline Park, had a fabulous lunch from the gourmet trucks at the lot at 30th under the highline, buzzed through Chelsea Market, and, of course, whisked our way through central park, seeing the carousel, the zoo, part of the lake (not the meer, not the pond, not the pool, not the reservoir, the lake.) the Conservatory Garden. There was a brief stop in the lobby of the natural history museum, and a longer traipse through the Met. There was a wander through Zabar's, and a dash through Times Square. We saw the backside of Lady Liberty, albeit from a distance. And we STILL didn't do everything we wanted to do. We did get a brief glimpse of 41 central park west, where I've imagined we could see ourselves..  once we win that powerball thingy.

Emmett actually handled our marathon touring quite well, and got a good amount of tan on his legs. (Shame on us forgetting the sunscreen!) Our backs did not fare as well.

Speaking of Emmett, he's 8 months old as of Sunday. He sits up so well now, taking a good long while before he topples over, unless he's reaching for something. He still hasn't quite mastered the art of crawling, instead preferring to slide along on his head while his legs do the pushing. When he's not scooting along thusly, he holds his head up quite nicely on his arms, though. Just needs to coordinate the two.

June 30th was our 10th wedding anniversary. It's kind of hard to fathom that, but here we are, and quite pleased with ourselves, to boot. Sadly, there were no blue boxes with white ribbon involved. I did, however, abide by the traditional wedding gift material of aluminum, surprising Laura with a Dell XPS 15z. despite being the same screen size as her old Studio 15, it's a wee bit wider. The resolution on the screen is higher, which is taking her some getting used to, but the processor is both faster and cooler, resulting in quieter use that doesn't shut down randomly due to overheating. It says it's 5 pounds, but it certainly feels heavier. While there have been some complaints on the net about finish quality, so far, it's held up nicely. Then again, it's only been a week.

That's been the two major events recently. Minor events include finally getting some mulch on the gardens (thank you to the black forest slash and mulch program), filing a claim for hail damage on the roof (no estimate yet though), discovering a leak in our plumbing causing a drip in our garage (haven't fully explored the extent of the leak at this point), and attending the Cherry Creek Arts Festival, which is much nicer than some of the other street 'art' festivals we've attended in the past, in that there's actually ART there, and a good amount of it.

Festival Anecdote: we attended a cooking demo where the guest chef was demonstrating making sausage. After hearing her say 'intestines' for the ump-teenth time, we established that it would make for an interesting, albeit liver-unfriendly, drinking game, taking a shot for every utterance of 'intestines'. There would have been no survivors.

Finally, my brush with blogdom. Helping some friends pack up their condo to move back to Ohio (I know, I don't understand it either.), a long time friend of theirs, Ashley, popped in to shoot some pictures. I just had to be a blog nerd.
 <-aforementioned blog nerd.

We are at 0 consecutive days of blog posts! Let's keep the streak going!
Reminds me of a witty response to 'how are you doing?' "I've beat my previous record for consecutive days alive!"