Highlights from the Late Night A Train

Tonight, Matt and I took the late night A train in from Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Now normally we'd have taken the F train, but for whatever reason the F was not running.

At any other time, the A train is fine. In fact, it's the exact same line I take to and from work every single day. While I have grown to hate ukeleles riding this train, it's otherwise fairly tame.

However, tonight was Saturday night. And we got on at around 1am.

We sit down and immediately notice the loud event going on at the other end of the subway car. There are several large, laughing black women cheering at a big dude with a rolling suitcase. Suitcase Man, who I shall henceforth refer to as "the bartender," has several differently colored plastic bottles. These bottles, he announces to the car's occupants are $5 bottles of Puerto Rican vodka. Special deal for buying multiple bottles. High quality!

The bartender makes a quick sweep of the car before getting off at the next stop, yelling all the way about the Puerto Rican vodka.

Next stumbles in a short Hispanic man, who sits across from us. The doors close and he begins mumbling to himself. Odd, right? No, not really. This kind of thing isn't new..... we ignore him.

To our right at the other end of the car are several possible drug addicts and one definite drug addict. He's trying to make conversation with random people, but everyone's ignoring him. He says someone's hair is fabulous, shouts a couple things in our direction, giggles, and goes back to looking crazy.

At the next stop two gentlemen stumble onto the train. And by stumble, I mean "stumble onto the train giggling like madmen at nothing because they're high as kites." They take their seats to our right (we're sitting next to the door so they're a few feet away).

Definitely-A-Drug-Addict notices Chuckles.  The following exchange takes place:

Crack Addict: What's so funny?
Stoner: Hahahaha
CA: What's so funny? What's your name?
Stoner: Mwuh?
CA: What's your name? Why's it so funny?
Stoner: My name?
CA: Yeah.
Stoner: It is a name representative of an entire denomination of religions!
CA: Wut.
Stoner: My name is Christian.
CA: Why's that funny?
Stoner: It's not.
CA: Hm.

At this point, Mumbles (the Hispanic gentleman across from us - what, you can't keep up with all of them?) notices the giggling girl next to Matt who has decided she has a lean on his chair.

While I am not entirely sure of the full context of the conversation, I heard the following phrases:

"What's your name?"
"Where you from?"
"Me? I'm from everywhere."
"You need me to shoot someone for you?"
"Yeah, no seriously. It's easy to shoot someone. I'll show you."

Then Mumbles moves over to sit next to Matt and the girl and they proceed to exchange names and possibly info on hiring him as a hitman.

At this point we're finally back in Manhattan, with only a few stops to go. And on comes Mr. "I Am Out of Cocaine and Really Pissed About It." He stands down where the bartender originally was, shouting that we're all "F*cking d*cks who can suck my f*cking c*ck!"

Oddly enough, he's the least frightening of all the crazies on the train.

We FINALLY get to 23 St and promptly hop off the train. Matt and I don't really say anything to each other, because we immediately notice a young guy standing by the trashcan with a wallet and a ton of credit cards that clearly don't belong to him. We book it up the stairs.

As soon as we get to the surface, I tell Matt to make sure I never work late enough to need to take the A train home, and we vote on whether this train ride was scarier than the one to the Bronx where Matt thought the guy next to us had a gun.

Not trying to freak you out, Mommy, and I promise that 99% of subway train rides have one or less of these types on them, but tonight was just like being in a bad 90s cop movie about NY.

Hurricapocalypse 2011

Evacuation notice on our elevator.

Eh.

Not much to really report, aside from some cool pictures from around the city..... none of which, I might add, were taken by me.

For instance, this lovely shot of an empty Grand Central Station.

Or this shot of the Manhattan skyline this evening.

Or this shot of Penny being displeased.

Not really much to report. We packed our bags and prepped the apartment, pulling things off the floor and laying towels along the windows and the patio door to keep any water out. We have a tiny semi-clogged drain in our patio which serves as the only drainage, so that should be interesting. I did not bring my purses or anything like that, since we were expecting to have to make a 30 minute walk with a crap-ton of stuff, but all of that is up high.

We went out for lunch only to find that everything was closed, obviously, so we decided we might as well head out. Matt took a bunch of pictures of our disaster of an apartment, we finished our packing, and off we went!

It was pretty quiet on our end when we headed out. We managed to snag a cab, which was awesome, but with the flat-rate hurricane fees we ended up paying MORE than usual by about $2. When we got to Laura and Tino's building, we ran into Tino at the elevator. He was coming back from a failed grocery attempt, with one store being closed and the other having a line that wrapped around back into the frozen foods section.

We've pretty much just sat here all day watching the news. We took a break from that to watch a documentary about street artists called "Exit Through the Gift Shop," which was pretty interesting, but other than that it's been a pretty meh day. Lots of NYers complaining, lots of news coverage... little else.

Oh, Penny and Mr. Big (one of Laura and Tino's cats) had a brief love affair. They were sitting nose to nose separated by a semi-translucent sliding door, Mr. Big's little heart all aflutter. But alas, it was not meant to be. Penny hissed vehemently and sent her suitor packing, leaving Mr. Big a broken cat forced to take solace in the comfort of my feet.

I'll update more once we start to float away. Matt brought his camera. Hopefully we'll catch a good shot of some kayaking or something. If we don't get any good pictures, at least Matt has an awesome shirt for when we become depraved lunatics and start looting TVs.

The end of the world and stuff...

Well, I suppose now is as good a time as any to make a post.

We got a notice this morning asking us to pull everything off of our patio, so our already tiny living room is covered in patio furniture and plants.

As far as evacuations and such go, there are three hurricane zones: A, B, and C. As you can see from my lovely map, we are in Zone A.

They have already started evacuating hospitals and nursing homes in our zone, but we won't have an official word on if we have to leave until Saturday morning. The subway system will be shut down on Saturday, as will the Metro North train that would normally take us to Greenwich. Matt's aunt and uncle live just outside of the border of Zone C in No-Zone Land, so if we don't head for Greenwich tonight (which seems likely since his aunt and uncle and a bunch of other people are already there and there's probably no space), we've got a key to the building and we'll head over when the order is given (or when we feel like we should).

Where we'll go, in case you're wondering.

They have ordered everyone off of Long Beach Island, so all the menfolk went down to the beach house yesterday to get it ready before the island is closed off. It's a barrier island that is only about 10 lots wide at its widest, I think, so we'll see how that goes.

In other news...

• Penny hates the air conditioner
• I've not heard back from Etsy yet, although I imagine they're busy trying to figure out a hurricane plan since they're in Brooklyn
• My DBA paperwork FINALLY came in, so I have to have it notarized and mailed back to them so they can process it. Not sure if that's going to happen before next week...
• We watched the Formula One documentary 'Senna' last night at the movie theater, and it was very good. It's about Aryton Senna (you may/may not have heard of him), a famous Brazilian race car driver who died in 1994. If you can find a place that is showing it, you might like it.

Oh well, I suppose after the press conference today we will know more, so I'll keep you updated. <3

No Longer Homeless!!!!

Well, we finally closed yesterday!! Matt had to sign his name about 30 times - most of which he swears he already signed. The painter will hopefully start this Friday and be out by next Tuesday night. Unfortunately, because you can only have contractors in cond-ops Monday through Friday from 9am-4pm, he can't do any work this weekend, but hopefully it won't take too long.

When you walk into the apartment, you have the kitchen immediately to your left, with sliding doors covering the pantry and (ZOMG) wine shelf to your right. All of these shelves are movable, so we can arrange the pantry closet any way we like!

The kitchen is very narrow, but still pretty great. The fridge is the exact same one Matt had in San Francisco. The stove is gas. We also have a microwave and dishwasher, and gorgeous counter tops. Tons of storage, although not a lot of counter space. There is an opening overlooking the bar and the living room, with shelving above it.

The living room is spacious, with just a couple weird angles to deal with where it meets the bathroom. We're looking to put the TV in the corner there on the bottom picture, with the sofa across from it, and then the small amount of space that will be left next to the sofa may go towards my sewing set-up.

Oh hey, it's the bathroom. Looks like work has been done on the leak the inspector found. Note to self: always use inspector. The couple hundred dollars is worth the peace of mind (and saves you the cost of paying for repairs yourself later on). Oh, and by the way, we have a peacock shower curtain! Muahaha!

The bedroom is going to be interesting. The bed is huge, the dresser is huge, the bookcases are huge........ we'll just have to see how everything fits. We're pretty sure Penny is going to love the huge windowsills.

And finally, last but certainly not least, the patio!! The previous owners left behind some great patio furniture, and from our 2nd floor balcony (that's right, Momma, we're on the 2nd floor!), you can see the courtyard below and the Highline Park off to the left.

We should hopefully be in sometime next week! If you're interested in the paint colors, they are by Benjamin Moore:

Paper White (OC-55) - living room
Green Tint (2139-60) - bathroom and kitchen
Misty Gray (2124-60) - bedroom

We got a huge tan-ish rug with an interesting texture for the living room, as well as a chair from LoveSac (bahaha!), and then a long shag rug with brown, blue, gray, and tan for the bedroom called "Dandy Dan".

More pictures to come once we're in!

McHobblesfoot Wanders the City

I'm going to go ahead and apologize now for my beautiful photography in this post. And by beautiful photography, I mean Google Image skills (except for the picnic pictures!). Poor Mr. Nexus One, whose power button was already starting to short and who could only be turned on by plugging in the charger, met a terrible end at the hands of a six year old this past weekend, so until Monday night I was sans camera phone. But fear not! I have a phone with 4G and a camera now, so I figured I'd jump on this family blog bandwagon finally.

This post will be a little longer than most since a lot has happened the past couple days, so I'm sorry ahead of time. XD

Last week, we went to Google's annual summer picnic. They rented out all of Chelsea Piers, including the sports complex and driving range. When we first walked in, there was a guy in one of those funny casino hats and a tan pinstriped suit, squirting people with water guns and talking in a funny accent. And of course, because that's what always happens, he followed us a few feet to ask what I had done to my foot. The outdoor park area was covered in life-sized versions of family games, including me-sized Jenga and Connect Four. There was free food everywhere, from ice cream to sliders, and in the grassy part of the park they were holding frozen tshirt contests and foot races.

We explored the huge piers for a while (especially since we will be living RIGHT next to them), and wandered into the bowling alley, which Google had converted into an "OMIGAWD PIZZA AND BEER EVERYWHERE" center. Things of note here: They had to have 40 lanes. I saw two scores above 100. Just sayin'.

Now that my boot is off, and since my roommate hasn't sent my thread box to me yet, I decided to wander down to the famous "Garment District" of New York City to look for some thread. I was thinking a nice multi-pack of Gutermann all-purpose polyester sewing thread.

HA.

After wandering around for an hour trying to find a place that was retail and not wholesale (which won't be an issue once I've got my tax ID #), I finally wandered into a couple places and asked about multipacks. They looked at me as though I had walked into Tiffany's asking if they had any fake jewelry. Bummed and kind of ticked off from the heat at this point, I wander back to the apartment and stew. Eventually, I realized that I should just suck it up and pick out one or two colors, and I went back up to the Garment District (via subway this time). I found a place called Sew Fast/Sew Easy - The Stitch and Bitch Cafe on the 8th floor of a random office building, and there I nabbed some thread and (FINALLY) a sewing basket.

NYC is pretty nice, although freaking hot right now. It's way easier to get around than San Francisco, and way less homeless to trip over constantly. Everyone jaywalks pretty regularly, which was kind of a shock, but seeing as I am a grumpy pedestrian, I took to it pretty quickly. >.<

In an effort to not make this first post super long, I'll go ahead and stop for today. But, before I go....

WE CLOSE ON TUESDAY!!!!! We'll be doing a walk-thru this Friday, and depending on if we want painters to come in and how long they take, we could be moved in by next Tuesday night. :)