Getting from Boston to New York City is obscenely easy. It is also affordable. Of course, staying in New York City is the opposite of affordable, so we never want to go. However, we bit the bullet a few weekends ago and spent a night in Manhattan.

I wish that I had a ton of pictures to share with you, but The Boy is the designated picture-taker when we travel, and it seems that he did not tend to his duties during this particular trip. This is not a complaint, because when we travel, I am the designated worrier, arguer, stare-vacantly-into-the-abyss-out-of-stress-er, and am generally a nuisance. I do enjoy traveling, but only about six months after I return from a trip.

New York is especially bad, I think – I can handle the noise and the chaos and getting around town, but there is something about that city that just puts me on edge. There is nowhere to sit down, nowhere to relax for just a minute, nowhere where you aren’t aware that you are in NEW YORK. Argh.

My shoulders retracted themselves from my ears for about one hour over the course of the weekend, but I was three cocktails into dinner.

Moral of the story: be more drunk.

Anyway, since The Boy is opposed to planning ahead of time, and I am the Queen of Planning Ahead of Time, grumpy old me got to set the day’s agenda.

So we took a tour of the NYPL’s Schwarzman Building, bought a couple paperbacks at Books of Wonder, and spent an hour or so at the Strand. Naturally.

For The Boy, I made a jazz brunch reservation, and he bought a Wynton Marsalis t-shirt from a vendor on the High Line.

For exhausted, grumpy old me, we paid 10 bucks to hop on an earlier bus home.

 

 Otherwise, a nice weekend.

1. I sat around for most of the day thinking “Why in the world is this my SECOND hurricane in just barely over 3 years in Boston?” Not to mention the earthquake, the tornado, the blizzard… did I accidentally move into Life As We Knew It?

2. The Boy and I were both granted days off of work. I would say it’s sometimes nice to be a civil servant, but this city pretty much shut the heck down.

3. I read a book:

It wasn’t great, but I need to review it, so it felt nice to get things done.

4. …because most of the day, I played The Sims. Urgh.

5. I also did the dishes and vacuumed and put away my laundry, so that is worth something.

6. I checked the weather report, the news, and the view outside my window often. It was windy and somewhat rainy and my house creaked a lot.

7. Mass amounts of kitty cuddles

8. I roasted a chicken.

9. I watched Call the Midwife

9. I worried for my friends and folks in NJ and NY.

10. I got terribly indignant when The Boy earned a second day at home, and thus left him the dinner dishes, and also thus won Future Wife of the Year.

11. In the morning, we discovered that a branch broke our car’s windshield… a car that we were about to take to the shop to determine if it was driveable, and even without a broken windshield, we can’t afford to fix it/it’s more than the car is worth. Le sigh. C’est la vie. Something else French.

October 14 – October 20

Social Butterfly Jessica outdid herself this week.

Sunday afternoon: Bowling

Did I mention that  The Boy and I have joined a bowling league? Oh yes, we are that cool. For what it’s worth, we joined with some of our friends, and we had a Groupon. The league is six weeks long, though, so you get 90 minutes of bowling for 6 weeks, no additional fees, free shoe rentals, etc, for 45 dollars a person: a good deal. I was skeptical, but yeah… it’s fun. I like that it doesn’t take that much time, I get to see my friends, and I feel like I’m actually improving my game. Against my better antisocial instincts, I’ve been looking forward to Sundays.

Wednesday after work: Drinks and bar food to celebrate finishing Whole30

We met up with one of our friends after work to mingle with his new law school buddies and indulge ourselves for finishing 30 days of health and happiness. I managed to keep myself to a Blue Moon, a moderate amount of nachos, a cheese stick, and a few pieces of boneless chicken wings, and went home feeling fine.

The rest of the week, not so successful. See: Chipotle, a Reeses peanut butter cup pumpkin, and a Greek salad at lunch. I’ve not been feeling so hot…

Thursday after work: Free movie screening

The boy met me at work at 5 and we headed over to the movie theater at Fenway to meet up with our friends who scored free movie screening passes to Paranormal Activity 4. We were early, so we killed time getting Starbucks, Chipotle (terrible idea), pretending like we were rich at West Elm, and buying craft items at Blicks.

We walked into the theater and called our friend… and while we waved our hands in the air so he could spot us in the line, we realized that we were in the wrong theater.

So we took the T back into town to the Boston Common theater and ate our burrito bowl while having our first taste of the Paranormal Activity franchise.

Friday night: Cabin in the Woods and dinner w/friends

Some friends (our bowling friends, actually), were very excited to watch their new Blu-ray of Cabin in the Woods with some people who hadn’t yet seen it. I was very excited to watch Cabin in the Woods, so we trucked it out to East Boston with our dinner (Roasted Pear & Goat Cheese salad) and added it to spaghetti, garlic bread, wine, and a cheese plate.

The movie: good. The food: better. The stomachache: legendary. Granted, I hadn’t quite recovered from the Chipotle the night before. This is quickly becoming a recap of my digestive health, though, so I will stop talking about food.

Saturday night: Halloween Party

Friend in Law School invited all his law school buddies over for an early Halloween party. I did not have a costume idea until about 4 p.m. and constructed my costume entirely out of clothing I owned and other craft supplies I had around…. and our costumes were sweet and we won the costume contest. Pics to come.

And on the seventh day, we rested.

Just kidding, we did laundry and bowled.

 

Reading:

• Discovering Wes Moore  by Wes Moore
• Reluctantly Alice by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
• Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater

Watching:

• Shameless, Shameless, Shameless.
• I made it through 50 minutes of the Presidential debates before becoming too irate to exist.
• Aaaand on Friday? My hold on Mad Men Season Five came in. Sorry, Shameless, Don Draper’s in town.
• I may have accidentally watched an episode of Top Chef… and liked it.

Listening To:

• So, Spotify and iTunes are really excellent repositories for such hard-to-find musical gems as a cappella CDs. We’ve come a long way since the same 100 tracks available on Napster, all attributed to Rockapella. This is all to say: I listened to a lot of random a cappella this week. Blame Pitch Perfect.
• Got back into listening to Gary D. Schmidt’s Okay for Now again, and I’m really digging it.

 

Despite what I might have portrayed here, this summer wasn’t all jobs & stress & retail. I did have a few moments of summer fun. I even put on my swimsuit once! Here are some of the highlights:

My close and semi-extended family descending upon Boston for my graduation.

My Favorite Darling Roommate coming to visit.

(Please guess which two ladies in this picture went to an open bar wedding the previous night!)

That day I went to a job interview, then laid on the beach and ate Cheet-os.

Lantern festival picnic in the Forest Hills Cemetery.

Fancy rooftop risotto & scallops & sangria at Daedalus.

Watching my sisters get married while we shopped for wedding venues.

All-terrain backyard urban croquet.

And last but not least…

A multitude of summer sunsets in Boston.

Lucky for me, the fall sunsets are pretty great, too.

I am finding it a bit hard to believe that I have been a New England resident for three years now. As my longtime friends know, I am here because of school, not because I have a penchant for colonial history, skiing, or foliage. I’ve been working, studying, and being poor. I haven’t spent my weekends crisscrossing state lines, haven’t stayed a single night in a bed and breakfast.

It all seems like a bit of a shame, now. I don’t have to love New England to at least drive around a little. An old friend of The Boy’s moved to Boston a year after we did, along with his lovely girlfriend. They seem to rent a Zipcar every two days or so to take a trip out of town. We invited them over to our apartment a few weeks back and they decline; they’d already planned a trip to Vermont.

The Boy is even more skeptical of New England than I am. “What, exactly, is so great about Vermont?” he asked.

Our friend was livid. “Breweries! And vineyards! And the Ben & Jerry’s factory! And covered bridges!”

Now that I have weekends and a little bit of gas money, I’d like to see me some covered bridges.

Here is a short list of fun things I’d like to do in New England in the near future:

• Go to the beach on Cape Cod. I should probably get started on this one being that it’s already September.
• Take a hike on a pretty mountain
• Live out my lifelong, Summer Sisters inspired dream of visiting Martha’s Vineyard.
• Pick some seasonal fruit. Okay, I did this once, but it was fun!! And so many delicious apples!
• The Eric Carle Museum of Picturebook Art. This was, surprisingly, The Boy’s idea. I am just a bit ashamed I haven’t been yet… maybe swing by Northampton while we are in the area?
• Something fun in Salem. We did the Salem Witch “museum” on a rainy  vacation once but didn’t really have a chance to take in the town at all, and now we have some friends who live there who we can visit!
• Eat a Lobster Roll in Maine.
• Take a trip to Providence. After reading The Marriage Plot, I’d like to at least take a look at Brown’s campus…
• Look at some freaking foliage already.

Tonight, they boy and I went to the Coolidge Corner Theater to watch the new Wes Anderson movie.

Don’t worry, we aren’t actually that twee. We were supposed to do something else fun, but then *somebody* slept in too late, and then *somebody else* got grumpy because we had about .2 oz of coffee in the house and she didn’t get lunch until after 2, and then we had car troubles.

The movie was an ameliorative for the general bad mood of the day, and when the boy wants to suck up to me, he lets me pick the movie. Ask me about the time he surprised me with tickets for Stick It.

Anyway, the experience did it’s job.

The movie featured some of my favorite things: summer camp, awkward first love, and children’s books.

The theater also featured some of my favorite things: comfy seats, Boylan’s fountain soda, alcohol, room for long legs, and an audience who claps when the movie is over.

Also, when we emerged from the theater, it was no longer 90 degrees out. Praise. The. Lord.

… do as the New Englanders do.

It was kind of chilly/overcast… but what better kind of weather to take fancy photos in, my dear?

It didn’t help that my friends and I are just so stunningly attractive.

We picked a 1/2 bushel of apples, but we just kind of randomly picked everything we found.

So when we got home, we spread all the apples out on the counter,

and The Boy laughed at us while we held Apple Draft 2011.

Team Roommate/Me ended up with 20+ apples of various shapes, sizes, and flavors.

We still don’t know what they are.

Roommate said it’s like Bertie Bott’s Every-Flavored Apples.

She swears she got one that smelled like a pumpkin.

Better than ear wax, I suppose.