Mom's visit!!

Phew! Well, this week has gone by nice and fast because my mom was here for the first three days of the week. We had a great time, and Mom did a great job of keeping herself busy during the days by taking bus tours all over the city. Heck, by the end of the week, she was mentioning “Soho” and the “Flatiron Building” like a pro (I didn’t even know what those things were until I’d lived here like a month).

Mom got in on Saturday night and we went to dinner in Queens. My idea had been to take advantage of Taylor having a car and go somewhere that most tourists don’t go: Queens! Well, we did succeed in going somewhere most tourists don’t go, but I can’t say it was a totally cultural experience. We did end up in a very Middle-Eastern dominated area, with Hookah bars and Koran reading rooms all along the street. But the “Mexican Fusion Sports Bar” that I picked out ended up just being a bar with some rice dishes thrown on the menu. Oh well, it was fun .

On Sunday we toured around the city, stopping at the Museum of Natural History (see giant cross-section below), TJ Maxx (I had to return something!) and even church! It was very windy and cold on Sunday, so we were tired out by the end of the day and we went home early and ordered Pizza for dinner.

Monday morning we got up early and discovered that I had NO HOT WATER in my apartment! I sucked it up and skipped the shower and we went to Rockefeller center to see the taping of the Today Show. Mom got a picture of Matt Lauer, so it was successful. I had to work and mom spent her day exploring the town. We met for dinner at 5pm and went dinner in the Financial District. There is this really cute cobblestone street right outside one of the buildings that my company has offices in. We ate dinner at the Stone Street Tavern. It was delicious and very reasonably priced. After that we took a self-guided tour of Wall Street, which included stops at the New York Stock Exchange and the World Trade Center. It was fun, but I got some bad news when I called my leasing company during dinner to check on the status of our hot water situation.

Apparently someone had forgotten to “deliver the oil” (no wonder my rent is so high, I’m paying OIL prices….). They assured me not to “worry” I would have gas the following afternoon. Which obviously didn’t help me because I would have to go another morning without a shower! We decided that we would have to go get showers after dinner. My best idea was to go to my gym, which has two branches. One is closer to my apartment, and the other is NOT. We went straight to the closer one, only to find out that their showers are out of commission…AWESOME. So we trekked all the way down to the far branch and FINALLY got our showers at around 9pm. My mom was such a trooper! I was grumpy the whole time because I really wanted a shower. Thanks mom 

On Tuesday we grabbed coffee at my favorite place near my old work: Guy and Gallard. I love their hazelnut coffee, and I think Mom agreed, it was pretty good! After that, I went to work, and Mom did a couple more tours before she met me for lunch at South Street Seaport. We had a nice lunch in the food court there and then I went back to work. I managed to leave work early and we went to try to get tickets to see Wicked via the box office lottery. The way it works is you go there 2½ hours before the show to put your name in the pot. You can ask for up to 2 tickets, so my mom and I each put our name asking for 2 tickets, that way if either of us was drawn, we would be able to go. Even though it was Halloween, there weren’t many people there, so I thought we had a good chance, but we ended up not getting picked . That was ok, though, we decided to just have a relaxing evening. We went out to eat at this really good little sushi/Thai place up by Columbia and then had cupcakes from Buttercup Bakery before going to bed nice and early.

Oh, and if you were on the edge of your seat waiting to find out how I calculated the speed of the sunset, here it is . Ever since the sunset, it has been getting dark REALLY early in New York. I checked and sunset is at 4:51 tonight. CRAZY! Well, it occurred to me that since Ohio is about 566 miles west of here, but still in the same time zone, it must get dark quite a bit later at home. Sure enough, sunset there isn’t until 5:28. That’s a difference of 37 minutes. Do the math and you have 566 miles/37 minutes=15.3 miles/minute. CRAZY! I’ll keep up with this for the next few weeks and I’ll be sure to give you not only the velocity, but also the acceleration of the sunset as the season progresses! See…having a challenging job really gets my juices flowing!

Ok, enough blogging for now. Thank you for reading. Please leave a comment so I know you’re around!