beowabbit

Our bus did not catch on fire.
We spent a long time lost in the American Museum of Natural History, which is a great place to be lost. Among other things, we saw a neat IMAX movie about aquatic reptiles.
We spent some time at a dog run on the AMNH grounds.
We saw Bodies: The Exhibition, which is similar to Bodyworlds, but felt both a bit more commercial and a bit more informative (i.e., educational).
We had several great meals, notably lunch today at Ben’s Kosher Deli, which I highly recommend, and drinks at a nice little Japanese restaurant across the street from our hotel (when we discovered the bar we were originally aiming for was too crowded and noisy).

Of course the best thing was my delightful traveling companion. And now to bed!

Headed off to New York with my honeywuzzle today, and so looking forward to it!

(Userpic chosen because I don’t have a photo of a Chinatown bus. I wonder if anybody got any pictures of that one that caught fire on the Mass Pike a couple years ago...)

Sorry for my long absence here. I’ve been too busy enjoying life to post about it. In fact, I’ve started to post a couple times recently and not gotten very far. So, since I don’t seem to have the stamina for a long post, here are some bullet items:

First, the bad news: As plumtreeblossom posted here, her lovely grey Siamese Rowley was diagnosed with kidney disease on Saturday. But evidently it hasn’t gotten too bad yet, and the vet says he’ll definitely get some weight back with a low-protein diet and subcutaneous fluids, and it might even cure him. So we’re very glad we took him in. (He’d been gradually but very steadily been losing weight over six months or so.)
Everything else is good, starting with a lovely visit to see eisa in New York City a couple weekends ago, which involved good food (as always) and meeting a couple of her friends. It also involved getting introduced to a new TV show (on DVD), whereon more later.
Mare and I saw Theatre@First’s production of The Winter’s Tale, excellently directed by dietrich. Loved the staging, loved the somewhat quirky play, loved the performance. Congratulations to all!
The news from the vet was not good, but it was great to be there for plumtreeblossom and Rowley, and I’m really glad we got him to the vet. And that morning plumtreeblossom cooked me banana pancakes and bacon. She must love me!
Besides The Winter’s Tale, I’ve been enjoying a lot of classic or retro movies and literature:
On the bus on the way to New York, I finished the utterly bizarre Edison’s Conquest of Mars (Wikipedia; Gutenberg). ( Cut for length. )
Preparatory to starting Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I read Pride and Prejudice, and enjoyed it quite a bit. The funnier bits reminded me a little of Saki.
plumtreeblossom and I watched a DVD she bought of a 1964 adaptation of The First Men in the Moon, which we both enjoyed a lot. ( Cut for length. )
The TV show eisa introduced me to was Mad Men, which is retro in a different sort of way. ( Cut for length: Mad Men vs. Star Trek. )
And it’s not historical or retro, but I also watched a weird French movie called La Moustache. ( Cut for length. )

OK, that was fairly long after all. Now it’s time for me to go to bed. Good night, all!

cathijosephine and I are at a deli in Times Square at 2:30am having pancakes and beer. I ♥ NY.

On Saturday,

plumtreeblossom and I went to the American Museum of Natural History, one of my favourite places.

sexykneesocks, who happened to be in town as well, met us there, and it was great catching up with her. I took lots of photos, which I will try to get posted at some point.

plumtreeblossom and I tried to go next door to the Rose Space Center, but we got there close enough to closing that we couldn't see a show, so we went back to the AMNH for another half hour or so.

After that, we met

nex0s and

midnightstation for dinner nearby, and had a fabulous time. I'd seen

nex0s in Boston a few months ago, but I hadn't seen

midnightstation in far too long.

On Sunday, we got together at Fred's, a dog-themed restaurant I've posted about before, for brunch with

beetiger,

eisa, and

fairyleathrdady, who surprised us by paying for brunch. Lovely seeing all of them, and I'm so glad

beetiger drove in to meet us.

Then we made our way back to Chinatown to take the Fung Wah back to Boston and had a lovely snuggly trip back with lots of nice conversation.

Y'all should also go read

plumtreeblossom's post about the weekend here, since I'm posting this in a hurry and I'm certainly missing stuff.

plumtreeblossom and I are here in New York. Our hotel (which we got on Priceline) is excellent. We're staying at Gild Hall (NB spelling) in the Financial District. The room is just really pleasant and comfy, and the staff are friendly and relaxed and very helpful. It was a really good deal.

Our bus ride down was nice (despite me running very late and almost making us miss the bus). The bus wasn't full, and it was didn't smell bad, and it got us here in very good time, so it was a pretty good Fung Wah experience.

(I basically skimmed LJ on the bus because my net connectivity wasn't very good, by the way, so feel free to call my attention to anything you particularly want me to see.)

We had a very good dinner (actually it was breakfast for me since I hadn't managed to get food before getting to the station in Boston, and the bus didn't stop on the way) at a Sichuan place right next to the bus drop-off. I had particularly good General Tso's and dun dun noodles, and our fried pork dumplings were quite possibly the best I've had; I usually like them steamed but I'm glad

plumtreeblossom wanted them fried.

Then we made our way to the hotel, which took a bit of wandering around because Google Maps had a confused idea of the street numbers, and checked in and unloaded. On our way from the subway to the hotel we had discovered that there's a small branch of the Strand in the neighbourhood, so we spent a couple hours there. (I picked up a book on the history of the English language, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, on which the nearly eponymous movie is based, and a book about the prehistoric origins of language, as well as a few post cards. We both got Strand messenger bags to carry our haul away in.

Then we stopped in at an Irish pub around the corner from the hotel. We were a bit underdressed; I wasn't even wearing a tie. The place was very nice, with very traditional décor, and the bartender was friendly, but things shut down very early. At 9 when we got there, there were three or four other clumps of people; by 10 when we left there was only one, and the staff was cleaning tables and putting stuff away. At 10pm on a Friday night. We felt like we were back in Boston! I guess the place caters to the after-work crowd.

(After close to twenty years in Boston, it feels weird to be someplace where people are cheering the Yankees.)

Anyway, delightful trip so far!

Another lovely weekend with

plumtreeblossom. On Saturday we went to a sheepshearing festival¹ in Waltham with

teratomarty and

trouble4hire (big thanks to them for posting about it!) and had a lovely time. It was great hanging out with them, and great doing country-fair things within easy reach of Boston. (I drove, but the festival venue is bus-accessible.) While there, we bumped into

mrpet and,

lady_anemone. Anyway, after the festival, which was huge amounts of fun, the six of us wandered Moody Street and then had yummy tapas for dinner before

plumtreeblossom and I went back to my house, where we watched the first two-thirds of Lust, Caution.

On Sunday, we went to a Poly Boston dim sum organized by a wonderful person whose LJ name, if he has one, I don't know. We had a wonderful, wonderful time. Thanks so much to the organizer!

Last night was the monthly Poly Boston dinner at Bertucci's (the first one in a while

plumtreeblossom's been able to make it to, because of theater commitments), and tonight

plumtreeblossom,

cathijosephine, and I get to go see Eddie Izzard perform! Life is incredibly full and fun.

And this coming weekend

plumtreeblossom and I are finally making a trip to New York City.

Whee!

¹ Sadly, the venue has already taken down the web page about it. If you are luckier than usual, I will eventually get around to posting some pictures, though. Because, you know, you all appreciated the Topsfield Fair pictures and the pictures of our trip to DC to meet

bcat1 and

spacechicken so much.²
² That I haven’t posted yet. Those pictures.

I’m really sleepy, so I don’t have time to do justice to my lovely NYC trip to visit K. and hang out with

cathijosephine and her mom, but I can’t go without posting something about it, so very briefly:

Had a lovely time catching up with K., telling her about my life since she saw me last and hearing about her travels (notably Vienna) and her music and multimedia projects. It was great! She’s doing some amazing stuff (which I’m not sure I should talk about since they’re in progress) that I look forward to hearing more about. And I got to see her delightful apartment, which looks like it works really well for her. Yay for a good work- and living-space! And she took me to a scenic lookout over the Bronx and a scenic (no, really!) lookout over New Jersey, and took me to her favourite local Indian takeout place.

Sunday I met

cathijosephine and her mother (who is in New York for a conference this week) for brunch, and then we had a nice long walk from 32d Street to Chinatown — stopping in at a makeup store, a goth/fetish clothing store, and THE MOST HUGEST COSTUME STORE EVAR which was like Hallowe’en in April on our way. In Chinatown, we met K. and A., and wandered around Chinatown for a bit, stopping into a bakery for yummy baked goods and bubble tea. (Or in my case, bubble coffee.)

Then K., A., and

cathijosephine’s mom bade us farewell at the bus pick-up, and

cathijosephine and I rode back to Boston, getting here around 9. It was great weather, and light out for most of the trip back. The bus was run by some other bus company, filling in for Fung Wah to deal with overflow, and it took a different (and more scenic) route out of the city than I’ve ridden before. On the bus I finished Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, and

cathijosephine finished her nap, and both of those things made me happy.

(By the way, I highly recommend Dreams from My Father. It makes me wish Barack Obama would hurry up and get elected President already and get his eight years over with so he can get back to his true calling as a writer.)

As I mentioned,

eisa and I saw Pan’s Labyrinth on Saturday, and I loved it. I think that might be a movie I need to own, although I’m very glad I saw it on a big screen. (Actually, we got to the theater pretty late and ended up having to sit in the very front row, so I saw it on a trapezoidal screen which was big at the bottom and small at the top. :-)

( Dream, CPAP, good food, and dogs. )

Then we went to the American Museum of Natural History. We’d been there the last time (or so) I visited, but we’d only had time to see the Darwin exhibit (now in Boston at the Museum of Science, and to dash through a tiny bit of the rest of the museum. This time we spent almost all of our time in recently revamped Hall of Human Origins, which was really amazing. The science and physical discoveries presented there were very current; it was neat seeing casts of bones I’d read about in the news recently. Notably, they had a cast of a Homo floresiensis skull. That was very impressive. I’d love to go back to that exhibit. Before we left,

eisa took me to see the dinosaur and extinct mammal fossils, mainly to show me a giant sloth and a glyptodont, both very impressive.

( Weird Japanese toothpaste. )

Highlights since I’ve been back (which are getting fewer column-inches than they deserve just because I’m exhausted and need to stop typing and start sleeping) are a delightful date with

plumtreeblossom on Monday, which included some very nice hanging out with

thanos73 and

mynext_boldmove, and dinner (and dessert) tonight with

cathijosephine and

xmelancholia. Oh, and a highlight from before the trip was a couple phone calls with

missingworlds, a good friend of mine from college.

I confess I’ve been mostly skimming LJ lately, so apologies if I’ve missed important stuff. If you invited me to a party or offered me a free car or the presidency of a small but peaceful and mineral-rich country on LJ recently, you might want to comment here to make sure I saw it.

Had a fabulous visit with

eisa this past weekend! I was so glad to get to see her. Don’t have time to do it justice, but one of the highlights was meeting a delightful sweetie of hers. (And we watched Shaun of the Dead, which I hadn’t gotten to when it was in theaters.)

In other news, I’ve shaved off my beard. I did that mainly so that my full-face CPAP mask would fit better; I’ve slept with it without the beard once, and it seems to help. (I couldn’t actually detect any leakage with the beard, but the mask seemed more effective last night judging by how I felt this morning.) I’ve had to switch to the full-face mask because I discovered recently that I no longer consistently wake up when I open my mouth in my sleep and I’m wearing the nose-only mask (and all the pressurized air rushes out my mouth), and if I’m blithely sleeping away with my mouth open and using the nose-only mask, the CPAP machine isn’t doing me much good.

I’m not thrilled with the way my face looks without the beard (it really makes my head look round and boyish), but if it makes a difference in how effective the mask is, it’s what I have to do. And it doesn’t look terrible.

My chin felt very cold yesterday morning. :-)

Now to bed!

Hi. A good friend of mine who lives and goes to grad school in New York is planning to move (within the city) in the next few months and while she’s considering finding a place on her own, she’s also considering living with housemates. If you’re either looking for a place in NYC or have a place to offer within the next few months, and you think you might be compatible with the sort of person I hang out with, feel free to comment here or email me at

beowabbit@livejournal.com and I’ll either get you more details or pass along your information to her.

I’m in New York, visiting

eisa (and trying to prevent Puppy Monster from drooling on her laptop keyboard whilst still enjoying his kisses). She is a delightful host, and I’m very pleased to be here. Yesterday we went to the Met, and spent all our time in the Ancient Egyptian wing. (Fascinating! 3500-year-old bread and fruit! I restrained myself and didn’t taste any, though.) Today we went to the Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History (otherwise known as the National Shrine to Theodore Roosevelt), which was a blast! Science, history, and sailing — the perfect combination to grab Jay’s brain. Then she took me to Maxilla and Mandible, Ltd., and the only reason I didn’t buy stuff was that I couldn’t decide what to buy.

I’ve also gotten to see more of Riverside Park than I have previously (including waving to my erstwhile home state across the water).

Anyway, it’s been a delightful visit!

Current Location: New York, NY

I hate the web browsers on my phone. I tried three times unsuccessfully to post the following from the road:

You know, I don’t generally think of mosquitos as a major hazard of the New York City subway system. Admittedly, it was an unusually swamp-like subway station.

Current Location: back home in Quincy

I may not be done sorting and annotating last February’s pictures from Hawai‘i, but at least I finally have some pictures from the Mermaid Parade last weekend up. (Unfortunately, I left my fresh camera battery in the car, so the only pictures I have are from the very beginning of the parade. On the other hand, that let me get them annotated and sorted in finite time.) A few are behind the cut (at relatively small size), but you can also see the full gallery at http://www.aq.org/~js/gallery/2006.06-mermaid_parade/.

( Pictures! )

Current Location: at home in Quincy

My New York trip was delightful; I wish I had time to do it justice. Here’s the quick overview, though:

Saturday brunch with

eisa and

nex0s at a nice French café called French Roast at 85th and Broadway. We sat outside so Puppy Monster could hang out with us. The waitress really liked him, and brought him a pie tin of water. The food was good, and the conversation was excellent! I had a great time catching them up and getting caught up. Then

nex0s rode with me partway to K.’s performance, and we got to talk some more on the subway.

Kala’s performance Saturday night was amazing! She’s a composer in residence at Tribeca Performing Arts Center, and this was a work-in-progress performance. It was really powerful. It’s called Axis of Beauty, and it’s a response to the war and the US war propaganda that depersonalizes an entire culture. It consisted of K. narrating and playing piano (sometimes by plucking the strings) and drums; her friend and collaborator Sukato playing ukelele, doumbek (a kind of drum), violin strummed like a guitar, and her voice (and “playing her voice” is probably a better description of it than “singing”); recorded electronic music, and recorded interviews with Iraqis about their experience of the war, which she used (with permission) from War News Radio. It all worked together really, really well.

I was really glad for the opportunity to meet Sukato, whom I’d heard a lot about, and after the performance I had the pleasant surprise of meeting Kala’s father and stepmother, who took us out to dinner. K.’s sweetie Alex was also there, and it was nice to see him, but he didn’t join us for dinner.)

Then I went back to

eisa’s, and we got more good conversation in before going to sleep.

eisa rocks.

Sunday morning,

eisa went off to spend the day with her father, and I headed downtown to meet

sexykneesocks for brunch at Shopsin’s. I had a really great time. I got biscuits and gravy;

sexykneesocks had a bowl of grits with her meal, so we both went to New York City for Southern food. :-)

Then I had a few hours to kill before seeing K. again, so I wandered around a bit, including taking a brief nap in Central Park until the rain woke me up and getting my film from Hawai‘i developed.

Then Sunday late afternoon I met K. at the new Fifth Avenue Apple store, which looks entirely appropriate as a tabernacle for the Cult of Steve, and we wandered around Central Park for a while. It was really good to see her, and to do a bit of catching up. Then I rode back to Tribeca with her (where she was going to see another performance) before turning around to get my car out of the garage and drive home.

Due to a misguided notion of how to get to I-95 in NYC, and a long foray in Connecticut looking for fuel, it was 1:30 before I got home. And due to LiveJournal and email, it was 3:00 before I was in bed. I’m going to do better tonight. :-)

Today I met

gishmi1ish for dinner in Central Square. I wanted to introduce her to Baraka Café, the great Tunisian place on Pearl Street, but it’s closed on Mondays, so we ended up at Mary Chung’s, which still made us both happy. She’s a good sport for listening to my sleep-dep blather about my week in Hawai‘i and my weekend in New York; I feel like I talked non-stop, but it sure was fun.

You know, I’m lucky to have such wonderful people in my life.

Now is time to sleep!

Just got home from a fabulous, delightful weekend in New York City. I hope to write all about the weekend when I have time, but for now, I’ll just mention that at the performance I met K.’s good friend and collaborator Sukato (an expected pleasure) and also K.’s father and stepmother (an unexpected pleasure), and also that the squirrels in Central Park are amazingly tame and that it is financially stupid to drive down to NYC when there are busses that will take me there for $20-$30 round-trip (not that that’s going to stop me from doing it again). Now to sleep! Well, first to shower, because I don’t think I’m willing to sleep with myself before a shower.

Too tired to do the rest of my trip justice, but I had a great rest of the evening on Saturday with K., slept well, and saw

eisa on Sunday. We went to a place called Popover Café, which was yummy, and she introduced me to Red Dwarf, which I’d never seen before.

It was an excellent and relaxing trip.

Reminder to self: Self should post about the books self is reading.

I'm posting this from Kala's stairwell due to the kind assistance of an anonymous neighbour of hers (well, not quite anonymous, but the only name I have for them is LINKSYS.)

I made it onto the 9:00 bus this morning with a few minutes to spare, and (much to everyone's surprise) the bus made it to New York on schedule — that never happens! (Since we passed a Fung Wah bus on the side of the road about to be towed, I'm glad I didn't take the 8:00 bus.)

nex0s met me at the bus stop in Chinatown, and we had yummy Dim Sum and did a lot of catching up. Then we walked to Kala's place and Kala met us and we went for a walk around the neighborhood, and Kala and

nex0s chatted about music and the city. Then Kala and I went back to her place (which looks great!) and got to catch up and looked at photos. It's been great to see her. Then I went out to meet

beetiger for dinner. We ended up at a place that mostly does Peking roast duck, which I'd never had before; it was yummy.

Now I am hoping K.'s phone starts working so I can tell her I'm back. :-) Still, the stairwell has hot and cold running net, so I'm doing fine. [Edit: I got in mere moments after posting that.]

It's great to be on a trip and not be worrying about the moving pod in the driveway!

(1) I am going to NYC the last weekend in February, the 25th and 26th. I am mostly going to be visiting K., but I would love to see other NYC-area peoples. I am probably taking the Fung Wah bus to Chinatown Saturday morning and back Sunday evening. Saturday early afternoon or Sunday late afternoon/early evening would probably be good times to see me. Yay!

(2) Only I could get lost on the way home from the IHOP that’s about ten blocks from my house, and which I’ve been to several times. I’m used to walking from near there, but a couple blocks over. So I was on autopilot, and turned a block too early, and continued on autopilot until I was far away from my house in an unknown direction.

My new boots are starting to get broken in.

(3) However, my feet had better be happy again by tomorrow evening, ’cause I’m going contra dancing at the Thursday Used-To-Be-VFW dance now at Springstep Center in Medford. I haven’t been in a long time, and not since they moved to their new location, but I’m looking forward to it and it will be good for me. Ooh! I just looked at the web page, and the Greenfield dance band is playing! That should be good! Would be lovely to see any of my contra-dancing friends there.

Very tired, so this will be just the nutshell summary:

Had a lovely drive down to NYC with

eisa and Puppy Monster. Spent one hour and fifteen minutes driving around looking for parking, before

boymeat Googled and guided me via phone to a parking garage that wasn’t full. Actually, probably spent more than that, since I didn’t think to look at the dashboard clock until the first time it occurred to me that I’d been driving around for an unusually long time. Got to hang out with

boymeat and

eisa and the pup.

boymeat’s apartment is great! At a party, got to see my first menorah lighting, which was a little odd with the Christmas music playing.

Had plans to see Kala today, for brunch and an art exhibit, but she had something come up (long story involving computer failure) and that fell through, which I’m sorry about but completely understand. Somehow, between sleeping later, finding myself a neat Greek lunch counter near the garage I ended up at, and dawdling on my way back to Boston, I managed not to get home any earlier than I’d planned.

Now I must fall down.

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Another former LJer, now mostly on Facebook

Entries tagged with nyc

Wonderful visit to New York City with plumtreeblossom

Off to New York with my honeywuzzle

’E’s not dead, ’e’s just pining for the fjords.

Layover — nom nom nom

More New York

Yay NYC!

Another lovely weekend, with a side of bees and jam

Quick NYC update

More on my NYC trip (and the week so far)

Quick note

Friend seeking housemate(s) in New York City

Quick update from NYC

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Mermaid parade pictures

Weekend and today

Just got home; very brief update

Too tired to do the rest of my trip justice, but...

Update from NYC

Travel plans; also Stupid Wabbit Tricks. Oh! And dancing!

Very quick summary of weekend trip to NYC

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August 2016

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