Long Awaited?

Yeah, yeah. We’ve been very neglectful of the blog since I went to NYC and brought my husband home with me. I had every intention of writing up a big detailed post about my trip to NYC, but it seems so far back in the misty past now that I probably couldn’t remember everything we did anyway. But since that probably isn’t good enough for our rabid blog fans (heh), here are a few highlights:

The Met, the Cloisters, and the Frick, Revisited: Still no Madame X at the Met, and the lovely Ingres portraits of the Princesse de Broglie and the Comtesse d’Haussonville (from the Met and the Frick respectively) were also gone, but at least I got to see the latter two in October. The Cloisters was very busy the day we were there, and since we hit the Met the same day, it was more of a refresher visit than anything. There were street performers doing acrobatic tricks outside of the Met, and I had my first fizzy Izze there.

MoMA and the Neue Galerie: I had never been to visit these before, and Jeremy hadn’t been to the Neue Gallery either. We went to MoMA during their free Friday evening, and although it was very crowded, I’m glad we didn’t have to spend money for tickets. They had one floor with a large number of famous and/or important paintings (Dali’s Persistence of Memory, Matisse’s Red Studio and Dance, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, to name a few) and the rest of the museum we ran through almost without stopping; I’d take the Met over MoMA any day. The Neue Galerie was of course much smaller, even more so because they were currently between special exhibitions and only one floor of permanent collection was available to us. We went there with Jeremy’s friend Bain, at his suggestion, and saw some interesting pieces by Klimt, Schiele, and Kokoschka.

Upright Citizens’ Brigade: We got tickets for this show and it’s a good thing we did, because the place was packed, probably beyond capacity. There were people sitting on the floor at the edges of the stage, and standing behind the back seats. But it was a great show, with—count ‘em—three familiar faces on the stage: Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers of SNL, and Stephnie Weir of MadTV.

Seeing Mandy Patinkin on Broadway: Literally. We walked past him on the sidewalk, talking on his cell phone and looking just like Jason Gideon in Criminal Minds. Since The Princess Bride is one of my favorite movies of all time, that was pretty cool.

Central Park: I finally got to see more than the edges, as we walked across it about three separate times. Also, there were vendors selling chocolate éclair Good Humor bars, which I haven’t seen in the store for years, so I got one and was very excited about that. Totally made my day. Well, that and going to the Frick.

Strand: We spent a lot of time here looking at books, and I don’t think we actually bought any. That was probably a really good thing, considering the volume of books and other packages we had to mail home as it was. Jeremy’s amassing quite the art book collection. At any rate, I did get a little canvas satchel with the Strand logo, just the right size to hold a hardcover book and my water bottle, and maybe a sock-in-progress.

Restaurants: Even though we only hit a fraction of the places on my list, the ones we did get to were all very good. Just to name a few:

-Fried egg sandwiches (twice!) and graham cracker ice cream sandwiches at ‘Wichcraft
-Pesto pasta at Ruby’s Café
-Roast chicken at Ouest
-Devil’s food cheesecake at Junior’s
-Ricotta and roasted pepper pizza at Lombardi’s
-Everything at Good Enough to Eat (with all the restaurants in New York City, Jeremy still contrived to get us there twice more before leaving!)
-Roast chicken at Pio Pio (but sorry, honey, I still think the yucca frites tasted like fried blocks of starch. And by the way, don’t walk there after spending an entire day wandering around the Met and the Cloisters—my feet were dead).

A special mention goes to the chocolate chip cookies and hot chocolate at City Bakery, which, in combination, nearly sent us into a sugar coma. It was the homemade marshmallow (put in our hot chocolate unrequested, so no charge) that pushed us over the edge.

Hope that satisfies for the time being. I need to post a knitting update as well: yes, more socks, but something infinitely more interesting as well. Also, we’ve been diligently documenting Jeremy’s rapid progress with artisan bread-baking over the past month, so perhaps he can be persuaded to write about that sometime soon.