Blog of Chris

So much happened on this extended weekend that it warranted revival of this blog after over a year.  Here we go…

I did my last minute (literally) Christmas Shopping around 3 pm on Christmas Eve, making one trip to Barnes and Noble and getting everyone some sort of book… this is my M.O. every year, for reasons I will not go into… maybe I will blog about it next Christmas.

My extended family has a Christmas Eve gathering in Timonium, where we used to do a secret Santa gift exchange, but recently have been exchanging donations to charities, cookies, and this year, anything edible (which ended up being mostly cookies, as expected).  I made banana bread from scratch, and Joanna made rugelach.

I planned to make 2 loaves, just in case I messed the first one up, I could tweak the recipe for the second one.  The first one was prefect, so naturally I started eating at it while the second one was baking.  To make a long story short, the second one was within dog’s reach of the floor, and either my dog or Joanna’s dog proceeded to eat about 25% of it, ripping up the plastic wrap.  So, I was left with a half dog-eaten loaf and a half human-eaten loaf, so I made two clean cuts and combined the good halves into one delicious Christmas present, ready for exchange.  I came out of the exchange with a box of mini-chessmen cookies.  BA.

On Christmas day we drove to New York, dropped the dogs off at Joanna’s dad’s house and proceeded to Manhattan.  Joanna purchased 4 tickets for us and her parents to see the Rockettes Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall.  She got them from a semi-shady website which indicated that the tickets would arrive via FEDEX, a highly unlikely scenario since they were ordered on Christmas Day and needed to arrive on Staten Island before 10am the next day.  Of course, nobody answered the contact us number, so we left for NY uncertain as to whether she had just lost her money.

I went with Joanna to her Aunt’s house where I met several cousins, uncles, aunts, cousins once removed, etc, and had Christmas Day Chinese food, heard lots of stories about Joanna as a kid, and was entertained by a little boy who got a magic set for Christmas but did not seem to have read the instructions.  He was just making up tricks as he went along!

Our attempts at ice skating in Central Park (and another park whose name I can’t remember) were foiled by ridiculously long lines, so we walked around mid-town a bit, making stops at Rockefeller Center, and the window displays at Saks.  The rain arrived, and I bought a $10.00 street umbrella that I became very attached to, but would not last through the weekend despite my best efforts.

Coincidentally, I had checked Facebook on my iPhone on the way up, and noticed that my friend Kevin was on a train to NYC at that moment, so I called him and we made plans for dinner, in Chinatown at a place called Hop Lee.  There is another Chinese restaurant right across the street called Hop Kee, which we stood out in front of waiting for Kevin until realizing late in the game that it was the wrong place.

Dinner was delicious, and I also go to catch up with Dave and Tali, former Kemp Millers who currently reside in New York.

It was raining and nasty, so I figured we should catch a movie, so we killed some time driving around Manhattan and stumbled across what Joanna remembered as “blue light park”, which is actually called South Cove Park, a very cool little waterfront boardwalk on the Hudson by Battery Park City.

We saw Sherlock Holmes at a theater in Chelsea… neither of us could stay awake in the theater, tired from a long day of driving, walking, and stuffing our faces with Chinese food.  The review of Sherlock Holmes will be another blog post in itself.

We stayed the night at Joanna’s mom’s house on Staten Island. She was able to dig up a VHS tape of her appearance on “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” in 1991.  If you don’t remember it, it is a kid’s educational, geography-themed game show.  Joanna was eliminated in the second round (which is really a memory game, and has nothing to do with geography), but not before answering questions with a THICK New York accent which she has grown out of.  “Route Fawdy” was one of her answers in round one, which I proceeded to tease her about all weekend.

When we woke up, she got a phone call from the semi-shady website saying her tickets could be picked up in person, so we scrambled to fight traffic, get the tickets, get to Radio City Music Hall, park, and watch the show.

Joanna’s gift was an awesome surprise for her parents, who had wanted to see the show for 3 decades but never did.  It really is a powerful show, with synchronized dancing, carols, Santa claus, 3d cinematics, a virtual tour of NYC with an on-stage bus and a moving background, and a million other amazing on-stage things that leave you wondering “how did they do that?”.  True to my nerd-dom, I was dissecting the technology while I should have been enjoying the show.

After the show we drove to Astoria in search of middle eastern food, where we found a little restaurant called Jerusalem Nights on Steinway street.  I had falafel, a favorite of mine, that Joanna’s dad explained to me should only be made with Fava Beans and not Chick Peas…  I don’t care, it still tastes awesome to me.

We stopped off at Best Buy and the mall, to get memory for Joanna’s dad’s computer and a new sweater for Joanna, respectively.  We also stopped off a pet store to pretend we were interested in buying a puppy but actually just wanted to play with them.

Joanna had gotten into a little fender-bender in the ice last week, and her hood was dinged up in the front.  After we opened it, we had a bit of trouble getting it closed again, and Murphy showed up on the Verazzano Bridge, in very high winds and very cold rain…  On our way back to Manhattan on Saturday night, the latch for the hood came undone, and it proceeded to open violently, smashing the windshield and scaring the crap out of Joanna and I.   After some debate on whether or not to try to get off the bridge before stopping, we pulled off, and I attempted to tie down the hood using small ropes from a shopping bag.  It was so windy that it took almost all of my strength to get the hood back down, and I had to keep weight on it to prevent it from blowing back up again.  My ghetto fix was in place, the windshield was broken but still intact, and I was soaked from my hasty repairs in the rain, but we made it into Brooklyn in one piece.

I then began to look for a Home Depot on Google Maps, so we could get a ratchet strap to really hold down the hood.  Google Maps took us to the nearest Home Depot, which was incidentally in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, home of the Notorious BIG, and incidentally not the best part of town.

I had always joked about going to Bed-Sty, but I never thought I would actually go there.  We drove by the famous Marcy Houses projects where Jay-Z used to live and eventually found the home depot and tied down the hood of Joanna’s car.  It was at this moment that I decided that this weekend was blog-worthy, and I would have to write all about it on Monday.  I told the world via Facebook what had happened, and how we accidentally ended up in a stabby part of Brooklyn, and that despite the misfortune, we were just laughing about it and weren’t going to let it ruin our night.

We made our way back to Astoria to meet up with Joanna’s friend Gina and watch Avatar in 3D, which was just freaking awesome.  I am definitely going to see it again, hopefully in IMAX.  I won’t do a movie review here, but I will say that Avatar is groundbreaking and has a great message about humanity, war and nature.

On Sunday we went to an All You Can Eat Chinese Buffet (that’s three times we had Chinese food if you have been counting), where there’s always an eclectic mix of Staten Islanders, and the peoplewatching is just as good as the food.  There was an unsupervised table of toddlers nearby, probably children of employees, who were watching cartoons on a portable DVD player with the volume turned all the way up.  There was a table of teenage boys who got a free cupcake because it was one of their birthdays (though I am certain it was not actually, as we used to do that in high school for the hell of it).

On the way home we hit terrible traffic, including a 15 mile backup behind the Delaware toll plaza.  (this is where you have to pay $5 just to drive through Delaware.  Joanna had some work to do, and didn’t want to use my iPhone to get online, so she came up with the idea of trailing a megabus to use the free wifi.  We found one in short time, pulled up alongside it, and it worked!  I wondered if there was a name for leeching free wifi from a moving vehicle on the open road…  let me know if you have heard of this.

That’s about it… I got home and played Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 all night, which Joanna had surprised me with for Christmas. Stay tuned, it looks like I am going to start blogging again.

-C