lewis and clark had a journal. you, beth-annie, have a diary.

Friday, January 30, 2004
Like a dear caught in headlights.
Dear American TV, Appliance, and Furniture,
You know what we want you to put on sale.  Please do.

Dear K-Mart,
You know what we want you to put on sale.  Please do.

Dear Leigh and Mark,
Congratulations on the January 9th birth of Henry Bingham Nash.

Dear God,
Could you maybe kinda sorta let the temperature get above zero degrees today?  Yeah, that would be great.

Dear Carolina Panthers,
Please beat the Patriots on Sunday.

Dear Rupert,
Please beat all the rest of the All-Star Survivors Sunday and every Thursday for the next three months.
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Thursday, January 29, 2004
Sometimes it's hot.  Sometimes it's cold.  Sometimes dogs drink from the toilet.
You know it's cold outside when you open the front door to get the mail in and see heat ripples from the 67-degree air inside your house.  Oy.

Beth-Annie's Made Up Recipe of the Week.
Not made up in that it's never been done before and therefore might be horrible, but made up in that I came up with it last night from scratch and Josh (a picky eater) liked it.  So.

A BUNCHA STUFF IN A SOUP POT (or, for the boring, straightforward version: Chicken, Spinach, and Tortellini Soup)

1 can condensed cream of chicken soup + 2 cans water (10.5 oz.)
2 cans chicken broth (14-15 oz.)
2 boneless skinless chicken breasts
10-12 oz. frozen/refrigerated/shelf-stable cheese tortellini or mini ravioli
2 roma tomatoes, diced
2-3 C. loosely packed, destemmed fresh baby spinach (or torn fresh spinach)
~1/2 C. sliced carrots or any other veggies you want to throw in
3 garlic cloves, minced (or equivalent)
1/2 C. diced onion (or equivalent)
1/2 t. dried basil
1/4 t. dried rosemary
1/8 t. dried marjoram
1/8 t. ground black pepper (more if you like--personally I don't think I put enough in)
Parmesan cheese, grated

In large pot bring to a boil condensed soup, water, and broth, stirring to get uniform consistency.  Add uncooked chicken breasts and cook until chicken's inner temperature reaches at least 165 F (or until no pink in the middle).  While chicken is cooking, add all herbs, spices, and veggies, EXCEPT spinach (yes, that includes the tomato, I know it's a fruit).  Remove chicken.  Add tortellini and boil approx. 10 min. or until pasta is cooked (time may vary depending on whether it's frozen).  Meanwhile, cube chicken and add back to pot.  When pasta is done, turn down heat to warm and add spinach.  Cook for about 5 min. more and serve with grated Parmesan sprinkled on top of each serving and warm bread.  Makes about 6 hearty servings.

Please do not let the fact that I made this recipe up stop you from trying it.  I swear, it's really good.  And if you make it and it doesn't taste good, then you did it wrong.  :P
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Monday, January 26, 2004
Not to be too Ed-centric, but...
There is a monstrous mail-in campaign going on as we speak to save "Ed." This is more specialized than just writing letters saying "Renew Ed!" Oh no, we Stuckeyvillians are a bit more inventive than that. We are inundating Mr. Zucker with Stuckeybucks (alluding to Ed and Mike's infamous $10 Bets):

Your mission is simple.  Click on the above Stuckeybuck.  Print it out (may require landscape mode).  Cut it out and stick it in an envelope addressed as follows:

Jeff Zucker, President
NBC Entertainment
3000 West Alameda Ave.
Burbank, California
91523

Seal the envelope and place a 37-cent stamp in the upper right corner.  Send it in the mail ASAP.  This is not difficult, not expensive, and will take up very little of your time.  I am only asking you to do this once, as opposed to the 50 times many "Ed" fans are doing.  I don't care if you've never watched "Ed," if you never watch TV, even if you don't have electricity.  Find a neighbor who does.  Do it for me.  If you love me.  Pretty please.  Just once.  Real quick like.

And then brag about it to me.  If you do not, I will know you did not do it and therefore do not love me.  And then I will stop blogging.  And that would be sad.  Not for me, but for you all.  I think.
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Friday, January 23, 2004
I heart "Ed."

"Ed" has NOT been cancelled.  Yet.

People have been calling the NBC Programming Department like mad and been getting the response that the promos stating "the final three episodes of 'Ed'" are referring to the final three of the season, not the series (at least at this point), and that no decision has yet been made as far as the show's future and it has not been cancelled.  Likewise, someone who called "Ed's" production office in New Jersey had this to say: "I spoke with a gentleman who said it is the final 3 shows of the season but no decision has been made about next year.  I asked what was the best thing we could do and he said it was pretty much in God's hands.  Just tell everybody to WATCH THE NEXT THREE EPISODES."  (Friday, 9/8c)

On the stuckeyville.com boards there is much pessimism, much moreso than last year, and for good reason (ratings dips, timeslot shuffling, cut episode order, and now these blasted promos), but there is still a sense from some of "it ain't over till it's over."  It doesn't make sense that NBC would not make an official cancellation announcement before the final shows aired if they were certain it wasn't coming back.  It would certainly be the courteous thing to do for such a loyal and vocal fan base as the show has, and by treating those fans like crap by giving no official announcement at the same time as they are taking away their favorite show would be asking for major trouble and hassling from those fans expressing their distaste and anger even after the show has ended.  Would NBC really be so stupid?  (Don't answer that.)

Looking at stunts NBC has pulled in the past--misleading and sometimes even blatantly LYING promos have been somewhat par for the course ever since Zucker jumped on board--it is entirelypossible that NBC has truly not made a decision regarding whether the show will come back next season, and they are using an intentionally ambiguous/intentionally misleading phrase such as "the final three episodes of 'Ed'" to lure those casual "Ed" watchers into tuning in because they think it's the end of the series.  And it very well might be, but no one, including NBC, knows that for sure yet.  It may depend on how these next few episodes fare ratings-wise, as well as the level of Jeff Zucker's money-grubbing-over-quality tendencies on the day he makes the decision.

One thing I though might save the series this year is that fact that NBC's schedule is, well, crap.  They are losing their "flagship" show in "Friends," as well as "Frasier"--two programming holes they haven't had to worry about filling for a VERY long time.  All three of their "soft-dramas":  "American Dreams," "Miss Match," and "Ed," have been doing similarly poorly in the ratings, and I find it inconceivable that they would cancel all three of them and force themselves to start entirely from scratch in that department gambling on all new shows.  And since "Ed" has the longest history as well as the most loyal fan base, that could give it an edge over the other two.

I would love to be able to use the argument that THERE IS JUST NO WAY they would toss to the curb one of television's few truly unique, quality, gems of a program and replace it with more of the same garbage that has started to overrun the airwaves more and more in recent years, but I can't.  Television just isn't about quality anymore--anyone tried sitting through a sitcom lately that isn't "Everybody Loves Raymond?"  Ugh!  Even "Frasier" and "Friends," two shows that could be brilliantly funny at times throughout their histories, are pretty awful now.  I wish I could entirely blame the networks for that, but it is also the fault of our STUPID society.  How else can you explain millions more people watching garbage like "Hope and Faith" than "Ed?"  (Sorry Kelly Ripa, you know I love you, but your show stinks.)  "Ed" is a show for people with a more discriminating taste--I know there are plenty of people who watch practically no TV except for "Ed"--and apparently television is no longer a hospitable place for people with brains.  I'll be the first to admit that I watch a lot of crap on TV, but I would give it all up just to keep around those few precious shows--"Ed," "Gilmore Girls," "Arrested Development," "Alias"--that have a legitimate claim to brilliancy and truly brighten my week every time I watch them.

If Mr. Zucker sees fit to take one of them away, you'd better believe he'll be getting an earful from me and thousands of others.  Watch your step, bub...

Please watch "Ed" tonight and the next two Fridays at 9/8c.  And especially tell all your Nielsen friends to watch "Ed."  Lots.  This may be your last chance.  PLEASE!  I know I ask you to do a lot of things via this stupid blog, but I REALLY mean it this time.  I am truly passionate about this.  "Ed" deserves so much better than the crap it's gotten from NBC.  I would love nothing better than to prove them wrong.
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Thursday, January 22, 2004
TRIP-O-LOGUE.
Days Four-and-One-Seventh and Five.
After the show ends, we leave the theater part of the theater and I use the restroom because that's what girls do.  As we walk toward the escalator to leave I spy a painting on the wall I really dig.  So I says to Josh, I says, "Hey, Josh, kindly hand me the camera so I that I may take a picture of this lovely painting."   And Josh feels around for the camera and realizes that it is not on his person.  Uh oh.  He must have left it under our seats in the theater.  No biggie, we'll just go back to the theater and grab it.  But wait... what the heck is going on...?  The theater doors are... LOCKED?!?  But, but, but... it's only ten minutes after the show ended!  You CANNOT be serious!  Can you?  Okay, let's not panic, maybe they just locked up the mezzanine early; we'll just go down to the main floor theater doors -- surely those are open.  Surely.  Um.  Hello?  Anybody there?  We pound on the doors.  Let us in!  Elaine!  Elaine!  How is it possible that this theater is locked tight so soon after the show ended and there is NO ONE around??  We see another woman wandering around peering through the glass wall surrounding the theater and find that she has also left something in her seat.  We join forces.

We spy through the glass a merch man closing up in the dark vestibule just beyond our reach.  We knock on the glass to get his attention and yell to him our collective problem.  He says he is "not authorized" to let us in.  Poo on that.  He points around the corner and says something about a manager's office.  We go around the corner and wander in and out of hallways not seeing any door that says "Manager" on it.  We call out can anyone help us.  Dead quiet.  As we walk back toward the main area again we spy a woman coming out of an unmarked door and locking it up.  We plead for her to help us.  She stares at us like she's never seen other human beings before.  We tell her we are desperate and what we left in the theater is very valuable.  She doesn't seem to understand.  When she speaks it is so... slow...ly... it's... a... wonder... she... doesn't... fall... asleep... mid-...sentence...  She seems, to put it bluntly... stoned.  When we say we were looking for the manager's office she mumbles something about this being the manager's office.  Um, okay.  But for someone coming out of the "manager's office" she seems to have not much of a clue about... well, anything, including her whereabouts.  She says she's "trying to think" and doesn't have time to answer our questions right now.  Huh?  But she walks toward the theater -- incidentally, about as slowly as she talks -- and peers in as we did with a quite blank expression on her face.  She says something rather incoherent about a party upstairs and that must be where the manager is.  O...kay...  Good for him.  So how does that help us?

She sees someone she seems to think could open it for us, and indeed he has a bunch of keys.  Josh runs after him.  Sure, he could open it for us, but he wants to leave and isn't about to wait an extra two minutes for us to get our stuff.  What the--?!?  At his point panic is quickly giving way to anger.  Burning, seething anger...  The stoned lady had wandered off.  We try asking security guards, the front desk (the theater is attached to a Marriott Hotel), anyone we can find.  We get sent outside to bang on the stage door (no answer), told to call security, facilities, and housekeeping on the house phone (sorry, the hotel is completely separate from the theater, we can't help you), and just in general waste an hour of our time running around and getting absolutely no help from anyone.  We have no choice but to leave our $400 digital camera with all our photographs from our trip in the theater overnight and pray that it is still there in the morning and hasn't run into a custodial employee with sticky fingers (I've had that happen to me at hotels before).

I am in a VERY bad mood at this point, at the absolute ridiculosity of locking a theater ten minutes after the performance, the complete lack of assistance and in some cases even politeness we received from the staff, the waste of our time that evening when we could have been back home with our friends, and the additional waste of our time in having to come back to the theater the next morning instead of spending our last hours in the city doing what we had planned--going up to the observation deck of the Empire State Building, seeing the parts of Central Park we had missed, going back to that bakery in Chinatown...  And on top of it all the bleeping box office didn't even have hours posted so we could know when to come back.  Aaaarrrgghhhhh...

After 9am the next morning we tried calling the box office.  Then after 9:30.  Then 10.  Nada.  We decided to just go to Times Square ourselves.  Not open.  We wandered around a while.  Came back after 11.  Not open.  We started to worry.  Not open by 11am when there was supposed to be a matinee at 2?  What if there wasn't a matinee at 2?  We had to be at the train station ready to leave before 2...  We asked at the hotel desk and they said they opened at 11.  We went back and peered into a dark, deserted box office.  Yeah, right.  We weren't going to let them rob us of any more of our time, so we went up to Central Park and walked around a bit more.  In the rain.  Without an umbrella.  Or a camera.

When we got back to the theater after noon, lo and behold it was open!  The guy at the box office made a call, asked us questions about our camera and where it would have been found, and directed us to the stage door.  Just inside we found a very friendly man who asked us again to verify that it was our camera, and then gave it to us.  Josh took a picture of me with him, the guy who FINALLY handed our camera back to us, and I was so thrilled I said I could hug him.  So Josh and I both did.  He seemed quite amused with the whole thing and I think our extreme enthusiasm made his day.  What a relief that was all over with.  I finally got pictures of the Millie marquis, my painting that had started it all, and just for the heck of it, the formerly locked theater doors.  You know, just to be able to remember the fun of it all years from now.

We had very little time left, but just enough to at least see the Empire State Building up close, if not actually go up. I was surprised we could just walk in without going through any security, but once inside there sure were a lot of security officers everywhere, and you couldn't get to any of the elevators without some sort of screening.

Across the street I bought a couple of New York City magnets (the two things I collect from places we visit are refrigerator magnets and Christmas tree ornaments--or things I think I can turn into Christmas tree ornaments) after giving up on finding a Millie magnet, though we'd found one for just about every other Broadway show.  We walked back to Uri's, ate some restaurant leftovers as a quick lunch, and scooted off to Penn Station, once again painfully dragging all our bags with us.  Once our bags were checked we waited, um, patiently, sure, for them to announce our train's track number (which they only do about 15-20 minutes before the departure time), and sprinted there to be (almost) first in line so that we could get the only seat with an outlet if we were directed to a stupid old car again.  We weren't.  It was a beautiful new car with a beautiful outlet at every beautiful set of seats.  So what did we do?  Why, we took a picture of it, of course!

We're weird.  The end.

Photoses.
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Tuesday, January 20, 2004
TRIP-O-LOGUE.
Day Four:  Shopping;  Central Park;  Hitchcock;  Broadway.
Saturday was the day after Friday on this particular week, and so that is the day that came next.  As this was our last full day in the city, our first priority that morning was to GET TICKETS TO A STUPID SHOW.  After a bit of excitement due to Glen throwing out his back and not being able to move so that an ambulance had to come to the apartment complex to take him to the hospital (no worries, he was okay), Josh and I headed for Times Square to try a few theater box offices again.  Our first stop was Thoroughly Modern Millie, which was desirable for several reasons--its six 2002 Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Actress (who was still in the role, incidentally), the chance to see Delta Burke perform (I loved "Designing Women"), and Uri's recommendation of it as something he thought we would really like.  This time we got lucky on our first try.  Well, if you call paying more than twice what we would have for Beauty and the Beast's cheapest seats "lucky," but it was our choice.  If there's one thing you might as well splurge on in New York City, it's a broadway show.  So we did.  We got seats in the back row of the mezzanine for that evening's performance (it wasn't as far away as it sounds).  Once we got that out of the way we felt much better and could relax and enjoy the rest of the day while having something to look forward to that night.

We stopped at the Hershey's Store again to get Josh a Hershey's Times Square Reese's shirt (they had been out of his size the day before), and then we walked up to 53rd Street to see the Ed Sullivan Theatre and Rupert's Hello Deli up close (they were both closed).  How exciting.  At the CBS Store--which was about one-fifteenth the size of the NBC one--I experienced a moment of temporary insanity where I actually considered buying an "Amazing Race" tank top for $18.  We needed to make our way up to Central Park, where we'd be trying to meet up with the others (those that were left, anyway, about half the people originally there on New Years had left by then), and on our way walked a bit along Madison Avenue and Fifth Avenue, the Sophisticated Shopping Mecca of Manhattan.  We didn't go to Tiffany and Co., and I wish we had.  (As a side note, I discovered for the first time on this trip that "Tiffany" the glass company and "Tiffany" the jewelry company were one and the same.  Is this common knowledge?)  But I bought a nice rug at Crate and Barrel (never shopped there in my life), and saw a $12,000 toy Mercedes at FAO Schwarz--which was having a store closing sale, so it was actually a steal at $7200.  But alas, we could not have fit it on the train with us.

We moseyed on into the southeast corner of Central Park and for lunch ate our obligatory New-York-hot-dog-and-pretzel-from-a-New-York-hot-dog-and-pretzel-vendor.  Cheapest lunch in Manhattan.  We met the rest of the gang at Wollman Rink and walked around the park a bit more together.  It was awfully peaceful and a very nice walk, even in the boring, stark, brown of winter.  I can only imagine how lovely it is in the summer.  At Bethesda Fountain a few of the guys (that would be Nathan, Josh, and Ryan) tried their hand at juggling--some with more success than others, but still to the entertainment of some kids in the area (I wished I'd snapped some pics of this, but I didn't :().

We split again and Josh and I went down to SoHo to see Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder in 3D at the Film Forum (it was originally filmed in 3D--who knew?).  We got there quite early, which turned out to be a good thing as the line to get in was already quite long even half and hour before the show.  Neither of us had seen the movie before, and it wasn't a masterpiece, but it was quite entertaining.  It was odd in a way to see such an old film in 3D, but the effect was just subtle enough that it enhanced the experience without seeming distracting or overdone.  One thing Uri had warned us about Manhattan movie theaters--not all, but a lot--is that the screens tend to be... small.  Indeed, the screen at this movie house was I swear literally only about half as wide as the screens at our local bargain theater here at home.  Ten bucks for a movie and it's on a dinky excuse for a screen.  Reason #147 I won't be moving to Manhattan anytime soon.

On our way to meet the others on a street corner to have supper in Little Italy, we stopped at the Apple Store, a funky, chic store for all things Apple (as in the computers, not the fruit).  We had been told to check out the bathrooms.  We forgot.  But we did get a kick out of the "Genius Bar," their tech support section.  And we played with the iPods.  We met everyone on the aforementioned street corner, and after a bit of aimless wandering (Uri found he wasn't quite sure exactly where the pizza place he wanted to take us was), we found it only to also find a long line to get in--which we could've waited for if Josh and Beth hadn't had a show to get to uptown at 8.  Stupid Josh and Beth... always ruin everything, those two...  So we instead went into a random pizza place we had passed up the street called Pomodoro ("Home of the Vodka Pizza!") that had immediate seating.  We did in fact order a small vodka pizza to share (small as none of us were quite sure what to expect), and it was actually quite good.  It did taste unique in a way, but if you didn't know it was called a "vodka pizza" I don't think you would ever guess that was what the uniqueness was rooted in.  But the BBQ chicken pizza took the cake (if you will) for me.  Two words:  YUM-MY.  We scooted out of there early to catch our train up to Times Square (AGAIN) for Thoroughly Modern Millie.

Like I said, we were seated in the back row, but we each had a pair of binoculars that served us quite well. Besides the fact that it was just plain cool to go to a real Broadway show, we couldn't have chosen a better show to drop a wad on. We LOVED it. And good thing, too, because what was about to happen right after the show would test our patience, our sanity, and our entire enjoyment of the evening.

TO BE CONTINUED...

When you have a camera, sometimes you take pictures with it.
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Monday, January 19, 2004
Note to moM.
That plant on your mantle is a Cyclamen, if you haven't already figured it out.  I found out several weeks ago but forgot to tell you till now.  Sorry.  :P

Ha.  I blogged today.
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Friday, January 16, 2004
TRIP-O-LOGUE.
Day Three:  Lower Manhattan;  Rockefeller Center;  quick jaunt to Burma.
So Macy's is this department store.  And they have one in New York City.  I hear it's on 34th Street, but that's really just a rumor.  If that rumor were true, though, it would have been a fabulous place to meet Liz when she came in on a train from Long Island Friday morning, as Uri's apartment is also on 34th Street and Penn Station is on 33rd Street.  And then we could've gone into Macy's and said to ourselves, "Well, heck, this ain't so special, it's just a department store!"  Except for the wooden escalators that date from the '20s or some such long-ago era.  Those probably would've been cool, but not worth spending more than a few minutes.  Enough with what "could" have happened...  ;)

The three of us hopped a train to the New York Stock Exchange, which we promptly discovered we could not enter to view the trading floor for security reasons.  Not terribly surprising, but disappointing nonetheless.  From there we walked to the World Trade Center site.  There's no good way to describe it, so I won't even try except to say that it's unbelievable to think that what is now basically just a big, fenced-in hole in the ground used to be this massive, sleek complex of buildings that reached over a hundred stories into the air at its highest.  I know Liz had a different perspective than we did-- she had seen it all as it once was many times as her dad worked in WTC 5, and for the last time when she helped him clean out his office on September 7, 2001 when he retired.  She showed us her own personal pictures of what the area used to look like, which we really appreciated.  There were a lot of people milling around, probably about 99.9% tourists, looking at the signs that describe what the complex looked like and what happened that day, and reading the names of all those who lost their lives.  It was a very poignant experience, and though all the rubble has by now been removed, the buildings bordering the site on the south serve as a stark reminder of the realness of it all, as some of them still have visible damage that has yet to be completely repaired.

From there we walked across the street to the World Financial Center and saw the Winter Garden, a beautiful glass-enclosed atrium with lights and palm trees, all things Bethy likes.  And then to the Staten Island Ferry to get a view of the Statue of Liberty for free (yes, the Staten island Ferry is free--did you know that?  I didn't.)  We could've paid $8 a pop to take a ferry to Liberty Island itself, but the closest we could've gotten to Lady Liberty would've been the lawn below her base, and somehow it just didn't seem worth it.  So we rode past and then hopped right back on another ferry at Staten Island to go back to Manhattan.  And as we were docking, the boat was a bit of course and had to make a very sharp turn into the slot, which it didn't completely make without scraping some of the wooden "bumpers," if you will, in the water.  Liz and I just looked at each other when we heard the loud scraping sound, as we were both thinking of the nasty ferry crash into the dock a few weeks prior.  But, hey, it's free, right?  What do you expect?  ;)

Now back to Times Square for probably the third time in 48 hours.  We went to Planet Hollywood for a late lunch, not because we wanted to pay $14 for a sandwich, but because Liz and I wanted to see if they still had the "seaQuest" prop (a WSKR[S], for anyone who cares, Kaly ;)) we knew Jonathan Brandis and Michael Ironside had given them in the mid-'90s.  (Uh, yeah, they didn't.  But we did get an eyeful--and earful--of the Cher concert they were playing on all the TVs during our meal. :P)  We came out of lunch to see if the line at the TKTS booth was too terribly long--it was.  Way.  So we instead went to a few individual theater box offices to see if they had any reasonably cheap tickets for their shows that night (like "Beauty and the Beast" and "Aida," whose cheapest full-price tickets go down to about $30).  They didn't.  After a quick stop at the Hershey Store (because how can you pass by the Hershey Store and not go in?), we walked toward the Rockefeller Center area, stopping at Radio City Music Hall to see if THEY had any tickets to their Christmas Spectacular for that night.  After being frisked just to go in to the box office, we found out they did, but they were only scattered single seats so we couldn't have sat together.  O for a million.

We ducked into St. Patrick's Cathedral across the street from Rockefeller Center, which for me rivals only Grace Cathedral in San Francisco for The Most Beautiful Church I've Ever Seen.  I didn't feel right taking any pictures inside, especially since they seemed to be getting ready for a mass (the have eight per day).  It was weird enough just walking through the back of the church with the other tourists.  But it was almost more beautiful inside than it was outside.

Finally it was time for Rockefeller Center, aka The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree.  It lived up to everything I've seen on TV and in the movies (a lot of times things like that don't), except there usually aren't quite as meany people EVERYWHERE as there were in actuality.  The place was SO crowded, and I'm sure it would've been more enjoyable if it hadn't been, but it was still beautiful.  You don't want to know how long the line was for ice skating, so even if I had wanted to plop down the $22 to skate I wouldn't have had time to.  We went to the NBC Store (excuse me, it's called "The NBC Experience Store") on the main floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where we debated buying some "Ed" merchandise, but decided we could actually get it cheaper shipped off NBC's website.  There we met up with Uri and some of the others and went a few shops over to La Maison du Chocolat, where most of the chocolate is around $60 a pound.  We bought the one thing in the store that was within our price range, a small chocolate bar that was miraculously only about $4.50.

What do you do after noshing on some of the richest, most intense chocolate in the world?  Go have dinner.  We all went to the Upper East Side to Cafe Mingala, a Burmese restaurant that Josh and I were quite leary of after our not-so-satisfying experience at an Asian restaurant the night before.  We were wrong to be so leary.  Now, we certainly wouldn't have liked everything on the menu, but after making an attempt to choose our dishes carefully, we were very impressed.  There was lots of excellent food (everyone did a lot of sharing of their dishes amongst everyone else), the service was outstanding (they refilled our water glasses about every three minutes), and the prices were quite reasonable, especially for Manhattan.  The mango ice cream was to die for.  And just when we were done, they brought us orange slices at the end of our meal.  It was the most fun eating experience I had in New York.  Who knew?

The others went on home as Josh and Liz and I made a quick stop at Grand Central Station, which none of us had seen yet (and Liz has lived nearby her whole life--bad Liz!).  It was certainly not your typical subway station (what, you mean marble isn't standard in New York City subways?), and it would have been a lot brighter during the day when there was light coming in the huge windows, but it was impressive nonetheless.  Then Liz was off on her train back to Long Island and we went back to Uri's and... yes, played Taboo.  And made margaritas.  And watched UHF.  And then we sleeped.

Please peruse these lovely photographs.
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Thing Number One.
Please watch Guster on Austin City Limits this week.  I realize it may have already aired for many of you, which is my fault for telling you too late, but I believe it airs tonight (Friday night) at 11:30pm on Iowa Public Television for those of you who have Iowa Public Television, probably because you live in Iowa.  I would think.  You will see why I loves me some Guster.  It is 25 minutes of ubergoodness.

Thing Number Two.
The Iowa State Women's Basketball team, a few years removed from their status as one of the best teams in the country and having a so-so year at best, beat Texas Tech, the #1 team in the nation, last night.  It was one of those games that went down to the wire (or so I hear, yet again we couldn't even listen to the game's internet broadcast as we had stupid choir rehearsal), and best of all it was a home game.  We will be doing everything in our power to get a copy of this game on video so we can see it for ourselves.  I will hurt someone if we don't.

Thing Number Three.
The Trip-O-Logue will return with another installment tomorrow (uh, meaning today).  I pinky-swear.
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Wednesday, January 14, 2004
We interrupt your regularly scheduled Trip-O-Logue to bring you a special presentation.
Steve has already given a good description of Melissa and Darrin's wedding, so I won't repeat him. It was all very casual, very comfortable, and very fun (first wedding I've ever been to that included a silly string fight at the reception :) -- LOL, I just realized I said "first," like there are likely to be more...). After the reception we (read: Me, Josh, Kaly, Patty, Steve) went over to Pam and Jeremy's house and talked and watched A Mighty Wind and talked some more until, ahem, about 4am. I have tons of pictures, which you can look at one by one here if you so desire (disclaimer: we had a setting on our camera wrong, so some of the shots are a bit blurry -- boo...), but other than those I have a very nice group shot of the good chunk of the bannerfamily that made it (ask me about that later, Liz, and I'll attempt an explanation :P). We are all quite loverly, methinks.

Heads from left to right, not taking into account up or down or front or back: Kaly, me, Josh, Melissa (melvan--one half of the happy couple), Patty, Darrin (beldin--the other half), Pam (tupo_girl), her son Emmett (or Walter as Patty named him, and which he was actually responding to :)), Steve (Opie), Renee (eener), and Andy (Elkvis, mel's brother).
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Thursday, January 08, 2004
i.  I have updated my movies and CDs.

ii.  TRIP-O-LOGUE.
Day Two:  Greenwich Village;  Brooklyn Bridge.
By the end of this day I would have decided that Greenwich Village is where I would have to live if someone were to force me to live in Manhattan.  My first thought when I think of the Village, though?  Sadly, "Oooh, that's where 'Friends' takes place!"  Yes, I am very TV-minded.  Anyhoo...

We started in the Flatiron District, mainly just so we could see the Flatiron Building, which may be the single coolest piece of architecture in New York.  From there we walked down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square Park, home of the famous... Washington Square Arch!  What else would it be called?  (Okay, so technically it's name is the Washington Memorial Arch.  But who ever calls it that?)  Which was under construction.  Boo.  At the park we split into two factions, and Josh, Nathan and I started our exploration of the Village.  We walked along historic Bleecker Street with all its shops, and went into a video store that looked tiny from the outside but went on for miles inside with all sorts of nooks and crannies.  They had a HUGE foreign/independent film section, and I have a feeling a certain someone would have gone quite crazy in there (I'd be willing to bet they had Vernon, FL, for instance).

Parts of Greenwich Village are so quiet and cozy it's hard to believe you're in New York. The Bedford Street area is one such place, and there we saw the Cherry Lane Theatre, started by Edna St. Vincent Millay, 75 1/2 Bedford, a house that's only 9 1/2 feet wide and which has been home to several well-known people (see my pics), and Chumley's, a former speakeasy and literary hangout for some of the most famous writers of the 20th century. We took note of several other addresses in the area where famous writers had lived (whether the buildings themselves were still there or not), including Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Mark Twain. Curiously enough, we also just ran across The Bitter End, where Burlap to Cashmere's live EP "Live at the Bitter End" was recorded. It was right next door to where James Fenimore Cooper once lived. :) We saw a tad of NYU, and Washington Mews, a quiet, brick-paved street where artist Edward Hopper once lived. Okay, enough with the famous artists and writers, already!

On to Lower Manhattan, where we poked around for a few minutes to see things like the Boss Tweed Courthouse and the Municipal Building, before heading over to walk the Brooklyn Bridge. I highly recommend this activity. We only made it about halfway across as we were limited on time, but the views of both the bridge itself and Manhattan are pretty spectacular, plus it's just plain... cool. And it was on this walk that I saw my first and only Random Celebrity Sighting in New York, rivaling only "Paul Dooley at the Burbank Taco Bell" in its randominity. Quite coincidentally, this sighting was of yet another Waiting For Guffman actor: Larry Miller. As we were walking toward Brooklyn, he passed right by us walking the other way, talking to a guy who looked very rich and important and was smoking a cigar. What Larry Miller was doing walking across the Brooklyn Bridge on New Year's Day with a rich, important, cigar-smoking man, I have no earthly clue. But there he was. And Josh missed him. Why is it always me who notices the celebrities? Oh, nevermind... ;) Look out Christopher Guest, you're next!

We took a quick walk through Chinatown and bought some really cheap pastries at the Golden Carriage Bakery, then made our way to Union Square to meet up with the others for our dinner reservation at... ready for this?  Zen Palate.  This would be the Vegan/Asian restaurant I referred to in my teaser.  It was... okay.  It was certainly different.  Needless to say, we didn't choose it.  :P  But it wasn't too expensive.  I was actually quite surprised overall at just how cheaply one can eat in Manhattan if one chooses the right places.

After dinner we all went to Times Square to the TKTS booth to see if we could get cheap tickets to any shows that night.  Because it was so close to show time and since many of the shows were off for the holiday (duh, something we hadn't thought of), there wasn't much to be had.  Five people hopped a train to Lincoln Center to try to get tickets to the Metropolitan Opera--not so much in the mood for that, we were, and the other four of us (we, Brandon, and Ryan) went to several movie theaters trying to find a non-sold-out movie we could all agree on (the main problem being the sold-out part, not the agreeing part), at which we failed miserably, so we went all the way uptown just to see the planetarium at the Natural History Museum at night (it was very pretty), and then went home and watched Waiting For Guffman (which we thankfully had brought to be able to watch on the train).  And a fun time was had by all.  The End.  The end of Thursday, anyway.

AH!!!!!!!!  PICTURES!!!!!!!!!
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Wednesday, January 07, 2004
TRIP-O-LOGUE.
Day One:  The Train;  New Year's Eve.
We woke up for good round about Syracuse, NY.  We ate granola bars, canned beans, and animal crackers, watched an episode of seaQuest and some Benjamin Gate videos on the DVD player's battery, and read our NYC guidebook to try to plan what we would ty to do while we were there.  We got delayed a bit when we had to wait for an oncoming train to pass because apparently it's only one track between Albany and New York City.  I'm starting to see why Amtrak has a reputation for accidents (though admittedly not recently).  But that one-track stetch is all right along the Hudson River, which was quite beautiful and I'm sure is even much more so during summer or fall.  We arrived at Penn Station at about 2:45pm, 55 minutes late (which wasn't so bad compared with the same train the day we left to return home, which was running about 3 1/2 hours late).

As we exited Penn Station at the intersection of 33rd and 7th (which in addition to the station is also home to Madison Square Garden and the NYC General Post Office), we were greeted by about 50 police officers milling around on the corner.  Ah, New York City on New Year's Eve in the middle of a terror alert.  We had a very painful walk of a few blocks to Uri's apartment with all of our luggage (um, that would be one very large and very heavy rolling duffel, one rolling suitcase, a very heavy, full backpack, three smaller duffels and my purse--all carried by just the two of us).  Ow.  Thank goodness for elevators.  We walked into the apartment and immediately wondered  A) Where the heck we were going to put all our luggage, and B) Where the heck we were going to sleep considering the size of the apartment and the number of air mattresses already there.  We decided to worry about it later.  :)

Some of us went to Katz's Deli on the Lower East Side for supper, made famous by the scene in "When Harry Met Sally" where Meg Ryan, uh, you know, "fakes it."  But they are also known for having the Best Corned Beef on Earth, and they do.  Melt-in-your-mouth tender.  Quite good bread pudding as well, and the most unusual ordering and paying system I've ever experienced.  (When entering, everyone is given a ticket, which you then get marked with the amount of each thing you order at the counter.  You sit down and eat, and then give back your ticket on the way out and pay then.  If you lose your ticket there is a $50 fine.  Strange.)  One deli sandwich costs about $13, but it feeds two people.  Easily.

We played a rollicking game of Taboo back at the apartment as more people trickled in from their escapades out and about in the city that day.  This was the first of many such games--or at least partial games--to come.  At around 9:30 the 12 of us (the 13th had been braving the crowds and the boredom in Times Square since that afternoon) headed for the general ball-drop area to see how close we could get.  We started at Central Park South and 7th Avenue, where we were already in a throng of people waiting for the police to let them through to make their way further down 7th toward Times Square  (for those of you who have no concept of where anything is in relation to anything else in Manhattan, here is a map of Midtown--I put a yellow "X" at Times Square, and another one where we eventually ended up for the ball-drop.  A blue "X" shows where Uri's apartment is, just for reference).  Crowd control must be a horrible job.  Suffice it to say the next couple hours were spent V-E-R-Y  S-L-O-W-W-W-W-W-L-Y being pushed down 7th Avenue by the crowd in spurts as the police let people through.  We managed to only lose one person in the process (who we found later, don't worry ;)), and stopped moving forward for good about halfway between 56th and 57th Streets, right by Carnegie Hall and within the part of the crowd that was being floodlit, I'm guessing for both safety and television reasons.  The "open" part of Times Square extends along Broadway and 7th Ave. from about 42nd St. to 47th St., but the actual "ball" was at 42nd, which meant we were about fourteen short blocks away.  We could see it, but it's actually quite small, so you won't really be able to see it in any of our pictures.

We hung out until midnight and were pretty much bored silly, but it was still... an experience. At least it wasn't too terribly cold--probably upper 30s/low 40s. The crowd went a little nuts at various moments, just yelling for no apparent reason as far as I could tell, but I guess that's what crowds do, especially when half the people are drunk. Midnight came, and we could see the countdown on the big video screen under the ball better than we could see the ball drop itself, and not surprisingly the whole thing was a little anti-climactic. We could see the cloud of confetti from a distance, but didn't get any ourselves except a little poof or two from random people around us who brought their own, um, confetti exploders, apparently.

We then walked the 1.5 miles home (which also gives you an idea of the scale of the map), as the subways would have been completely insane.  Back at the apartment we had Champagne and--you guessed it--played more Taboo.  We went to bed about 3:30am.  We got Uri's bed and poor Uri got kicked in the head during the night--it was a little tight in the living room.  :)

You:  "Show me more pictures!  That are clickable to see the full-size versions!"
Me:  "Okay!"
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Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Before I launch into our Trip-O-Logue...
I have to say that an amazing this has happened.  Not amazing to you, but at least amazing to me and thousands of other people around the world.  Counting Crows' first album was titled August and Everything After.  The album did not include the song of the same title, but the cover of the album had some of the lyrics to the song scribbled in the background.  In the ten years since then, Counting Crows fans have been entralled by the mystery of "August and Everything After," which no one had ever heard.  Some said the song never actually existed except for the few lyrics on that album cover.  Some said it was written but never recorded.  Some said it was recorded but no one but Adam Duritz's (the lead singer and main songwriter) father had a copy because it was some really personal thing.  Some said no one had a copy of the song, including either Adam or his father.  Regardless, it was this huge mythic thing that no one knew anything about and everyone knew we would never hear even if it did exist.  Yup.  Um, nope.  The band recently did about six shows in a row in San Francisco to promote their new best-of album, for which they had considered fan voting on their website for the setlists.  The write-in campaign for the song, along with the many discussions about it on the messageboard (which Adam does actually read to a certain extent, unbelievable as that is), apparently did... something.  At the concert on Dec. 12, 2003, Adam sat down at the piano by himself and played "August and Everything After."  it was almost eight minutes of pure... well... shock.  I still can't believe it actually happened.  It was NEVER going to happen.  But it did.  It would be like if Steve Taylor suddenly at Cornerstone last year said, "Now please direct your attention to the video screen, where I am now going to show the film 'St. Gimp.'  Yeah, I did actually make it, and was never planning to show it to anyone, but then I thought, hey, what the heck!  Copies of the soundtrack of all-new Steve Taylor original songs will be available at my booth after the viewing.  Enjoy the show!"  So now I, along with thousands of other CC fans, have the one existing boot copy of "August and Everything After" on my computer (though I wasn't able to get it until today, something about exceeding-bandwidth problems... I can't imagine why...).  That is all.

TRIP-O-LOGUE.
Day Zero:  The Train.
We had no outlet.  And because from what we had read we assumed we would have one, we hadn't charged our rechargable batteries or much else.  This meant that we couldn't use at all or at least for only a very short amount of time:  the CD player, the laptop, the DVD player, the TV, the XM satellite radio :(.  So the first thing we did was played a really long, boring game of War (as in the card game).  Then the attendant made us move to different seats.  That was fun.  I think then we tried to sleep.  This didn't work with the teeny pillows they gave us, but once we got out our own big pillows from home we managed to sleep a total of about six hours on and off I think.  Not as bad as I was afraid of, though it was awfully difficult to get comfortable, especially at first.
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