New York travels

I’m back in Massachusetts now after a weekend away in NYC. It was a great trip, even though it was on the quick side. D and I both took Friday off of work so we could start the drive as early as possible. We left around 9AM, stopped mid-way to eat lunch and arrived around 2. Of course, it decided to start snowing just as we were embarking on the trip, but luckily it didn’t accumulate or slow us down much.

It did, however, continue to rain for the remainder of the day in NY, which put a little bit of a damper on things because we were outside walking around all afternoon and night. Lots of great exercise and sightseeing followed and we decided we wanted to see a show to get out of the rain and to make the most of the fact that we were in the city. We ended up seeing “Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark”, which ended up exceeding all our expectations. The music was amazing and the performance was spot on.

Saturday, we did a LOT more walking (I’m sure we logged a decent amount of miles), and thankfully the weather improved a little bit. We lost the rain, but we gained a tremendous amount of wind. There were high wind warnings all day, and although the temp was in the 40s, it felt absolutely freezing because of it. But again, we persevered and made the most of our day. Saturday was also the day we had been waiting for and the reason we made the trip to NY: We were going to see Bjork!

We had a great time at the concert and both thought Bjork put on an awesome show.

Sunday we hopped back in the car and arrived back home in the late afternoon, exhausted but happy. It was a nice getaway and we got to do some new things, eat some great food and spend some quality time together.

How was your weekend?

Weekend wrap-up

I didn’t start off the week like I usually do today. The weekend was a whirlwind with ups and downs and bizarre happenings all at once.

The good: As planned, D’s sister came to spend the night for her birthday. Also as planned, my parents came over on Saturday for lunch and to hang out. Both events were a lot of fun and it felt good to see family. Everyone seemed to have a great time.

The bad: My brother was also supposed to come over on Saturday, but had to back out at the last minute because he came down with Strep. Then, on Sunday morning, my mother emailed to let me know that my family’s pet cockatail had passed away overnight. We had him for 13 years, and he was like a member of the family so everyone was pretty sad. He had been going downhill for a while, so it wasn’t a total shock, but it was still kind of sudden.

The bizarre: After all of those events were over, D and I decided to watch some movies last night since neither of us was really intereseted in the Super Bowl, plus we wanted to take our minds off of things and escape for a while. About halfway through the movie, at around 9:30, what do you suppose would happen? Naturally the fire alarm started wailing throughout the apartment building. We immediately got up, grabbed our stuff and walked down to the lobby where we found… absolutely nobody except for the security guard. Then 2 fire trucks and at least a dozen firemen showed up and were saying there was a fire in one of the apartments. But apparently NOBODY in our 12-story gigantic apartment building cared enough to leave their cozy apartments for safety. What in the world?

Anyway, the firemen weren’t able to find anything actually on fire, but they did have to break open a door to an apartment on the third floor (would hate to be those people coming home to find their door in pieces), so we went back upstairs and tried to calm down after such a commotion.

Needless to say, I needed a day to recover from this weekend’s events, and that day is today. I’m not putting the pressure on myself to go to the gym, but tomorrow I see no reason not to go. I did work out 4 times last week, and I’m pretty happy about that.

Did anything bizarre happen during your weekends?

Crazy weekend => Crazy Week

When I last posted, I was recapping my hectic weekend. Well, last weekend was nothing compared to the hectic-ness of this week. I knew it was going to be crazy, because our whole month of December is pretty booked with concerts, birthdays, holidays and getting together with friends and family.

On Tuesday, D and I went to Tori Amos in Boston. Now, before I tell you this story, I want to let you know that both he and I have lived right outside of Boston our entire lives (with the exception of the 4 years I spent in NYC during college), so you would think we’d be able to get to a landmark concert venue, right?

Wrong.

We started out strong. I had done some research and found a parking lot close by, had written down the lot’s address and meticulously written down additional walking details from that lot to the venue. I thought I was prepared for anything. Well, with Boston, you’re never really prepared for anything because it is one of the worst cities in the world (in my opinion) to navigate. The drive into the city was about 20-30 minutes tops, but as usual, as soon as you’re actually inside Boston, you completely stop moving. The phrase “dead stop” takes on a whole new meaning. So we sat in traffic for a little bit and eventually found the lot I had picked out.

Guess what? The guy running the lot wouldn’t let us park because he was closing at 10 and we would be there until later. What’s that about? So, off we went in search of another parking lot. Around and around we went, searching for anything that wasn’t a ridiculous hike to the Orpheum. We settled on a big parking garage we happened to find, that wasn’t too far from where we had started at the bad lot. At this point, it was about an hour after we had left the house.

So we parked, and then began the biggest dilemma of the night: how would we get there now?? Boston is not a city where you can just find things. You have to know where you’re going. We started off in one direction and had to stop in at a sandwich shop so we could use the bathrooms. And then wandered and wandered and wandered and wandered. To make matters worse (and I still don’t understand this), EVERYTHING was closed. It was only 7:30PM on a Tuesday night in the middle of downtown Boston and nothing was open. Not a CVS, not a Dunkin Donuts, NOTHING. We were desperately trying to find someone to ask for help at this point and we really should have asked at that sub shop, but we weren’t desperate enough yet when we were there. Oh, and did I mention it was pouring rain the whole time?

Somehow we managed to find a pizza place that still had some people working inside, doing their nightly cleanup before closing. They tried to shoo us out because they were officially closed, but we told them we were just looking for directions and the guy there helped us out. Thank God, because we were DONE by that point and D was actually arguing to go back and find our car to go home.

We got to the show around 8ish (we had left the house at 6) and once we were there, we had a great time. Tori put on a great show and did a lot of the songs that we loved.

So, if you’re ever in Boston, beware: the city is not kind and not logical, and that’s my 2 cents on the matter.

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And today is blog hopping Friday! Here are some of the blog hops I joined today: