I did it my way

*With apologies to Frank Sinatra

And now, the end is near
After a month in our home-away-from-home, we felt really settled in and it was hard to face returning to reality. Packing felt like taking down Christmas decorations -- the fun's over, and now the drudgery is left.

A quick survey of the fridge showed that we had more food than we could reasonably finish, so we introduced some of our NY friends to the Polish tradition of poprawiny -- a big party the day after a wedding reception, when you invite people over to help eat and drink the leftovers.
John made a big pot of soup and roasted root veggies, I made quiche and a salad, and we managed to use up the bulk of our perishables, at least.




Here's our makeshift seating for 7: a small square table with three matching chairs, a card table, Ben's desk chair, a bench that's also sort of the coffee table and a bamboo folding chair. Add wine and candles, plus a view of the skyline, and voila, New York dinner party.


Regrets, I’ve had a few

Good Lord, what were we thinking using UPS again? It would have been so much more expensive to ship our stuff home by US Mail that we somehow convinced ourselves the ridiculously heinous service getting our stuff to New York was a fluke.

It appears not.

I scheduled a pickup for our boxes so UPS would come to our building instead of us having to lug them to the nearest UPS store on foot. Instead of showing up at the NYC apartment building for the pickup, a driver rang the doorbell at our house in Ann Arbor to pick up the boxes.

It took John about half an hour on the phone to sort that out.

Idiots.

I saw it through without exemption

We weathered the first transit strike in 25 years, we spent Christmas in the pouring rain far from friends and family. The building's hot tub was even broken the entire month we were there.
Oh the suffering we've endured. ;-)

These are the meager Christmas decorations I put up to try to make our apartment feel more festive.

I faced it all and I stood tall

Here's John standing tall in the face of the most terrifying part of our New York experience -- one of the many nightmarish street rides you find in the outer boroughs. For a quarter, this one will give a kid a ride on a chimera with Mickey's head and a sort of seal body but with feet and a basketball ... the more you try to figure them out, the worst they get.



And here's me on Park Avenue late New Year's Eve night. Sadly, for a marketing MBA with a background in media, I didn't think to get a pic of me on Madison Avenue, right near by.

And now, as tears subside

We're back in Ann Arbor now. We have laundry going, and we enjoyed a mellow dinner at home.

Everyone's big question: was it worth it? Meaning, did you get a job? No, I haven't given notice yet. But I didn't expect to net an offer in a few weeks during the holiday season.
What I hope is that now that everyone is back to work after the end of year distractions, I'll be a face and a person instead of a resume in the pile, and if there's a good job that needs filling, that will help me get an edge.

We'll see whether the seeds that were planted germinate into something good.

I did it my way



Here's us having coffee on our balcony our last morning in New York city.

Happy New Year! (without Dick Clark)

No, we did not go to Times Square for New Year's Eve.
We also didn't see the Rockettes, or go skating at Rockefeller Center. Those are the TV notions of New York that tourists are drawn to like moths to a flame, but not the way locals do it.

Conversation with an NYPD officer in front of the Stock Exchange this week:
Cop: Where you guys from?
Me: Michigan
Cop: What are you doing for New Year's? You going to Times Square?
Me: Oh good Lord no.
Cop: Good. It's a madhouse.
Me: What do real New Yorkers do for New Year's?
Cop 2, older: Stay home.

We couldn't quite bring ourselves to rent movies on our first New Year's Eve in the city, but we did brush aside the $150/person affairs in favor of something closer to our hearts.

We started with Lombardi's Pizza, where we strolled in and immediately got a seat at what is purportedly the first pizzeria in America. Thankfully, getting featured on Ellen this week didn't bring the crowds decending.













We hoped to get dessert at Rice to Riches, but they closed early so we were thwarted. We wandered Little Italy in search of a dessert place/ coffee shop and nothing called to us, so we took the subway to the West Village.
There we went to a coffee shop John liked called Cafe Esperanto, but I really didn't like the vibe -- outside it was frat party-ish, and inside, it seemed intentionally, affectedly nerdish. I mean, really, at 11 on New Year's Eve in the Village, and you're sipping herbal tea working on your laptop in a coffee shop?


We decided to call it a night and head home, and on the subway, as a really boisterous group of buppies laughed and squealed, it dawned on me that we'd be able to see the Central Park fireworks from our balcony. We got home shortly before midnight and watched about half an hour's worth of great fireworks, alternating between being outside to hear the boom! and the honking and the yelling and scurrying inside to warm up.




Suffiently re-energized, we ventured back out into 2006.
First stop: buying a beer for Ricky, the solitary guy stuck working the front desk at our doorman building. You'd have thought we brought him a bottle of Dom. He hopped up to shake John's hand and say thanks.
Next stop: the Auction House, where the crowd seemed a mix of people coming back to their neighborhood for the night and young people still very much on the bar hop. We dubbed our favorite girl Butterfly. I think you'll see why.




The Auction House is usually a quiet, candlelit, mellow place, but last night it was louder than usual, with Coldplay on pretty loud. It seemed right for the night, and it gave me and Butterfly a chance to dance without going to a $50 a pop club.











This is me with the worst French martini ever, but John likes the photo so this is for him.



We stayed out late walking around our neighborhood and just observing as all the various kinds of people -- young professionals, older guys in tuxes -- called it a night.

Our first New Year in New York. I hope it's the first of many.