The Big Blackberry

Months later (no excuses).....we're in New York, which MixMonster has determined is no longer the Big Apple but the Big Blackberry. It seems we are the only people in New York who walk the streets and sit in restauarants without one.   

We're staying in  outside the city with bff and her family so it's the perfect combination of city and country, hangin' with friends and running around the city.  

Okay, and now it's weeks later, after we are back from NY, and also after my laptop and wallet were stolen from my office, and after an amazing workshop with Lexi Boeger, the author of Pluckyfluff.  Major hassle, major inspiration.  

As it turns out, the Big Blackberry turned back into the Big Apple on the day the new iPhone was released.  We were up near Central Park and had completely forgotten about "the big day" until we saw the lines at the Apple Store, wrapping around and around like a Disneyland queue, past FAO Schwartz, and as far as we could tell, all the way through the Upper East Side.  It was crazy hot, and we felt very superior walking past them in search of a geocache in Central Park.  There are several, but we found the one near the Carousel with really fun clues.  

Other New York adventures:  a trip to the Buddhist Monastery, three plays, a adult dinner while the boys asserted their independence and went to a fourth play.  Very romantic courtyard dinner, complete with a proposal straight out of the movie - he got down on his knees with a ring, right in the middle of dinner.  I immediately starting poking the husband, whispering, "OMG, OMG, he's proposing.  Get out the camera - they'll want a picture of this.  Hurry!"  We talked to them later and it turns out he's American, she's Croation, they've been living in Croatia and it was their first day in the states for a long vacation.  So sweet.  MixMonster and I started talking about his proposal, during which I was half-naked and bitchy.  In spite of this he made aring appear out of a silk handkercheif, and told me the magic word was "yes."  He still pisses off most of his male friends because he's just so damned clever and GOOD at gift-giving, and yet he's not whipped. Really, he's not.  Okay, so I get a little cranky sometimes, but never at him.  And the middle of the night when he's keeping me up with his snoring doesn't count toward my cranky quotient; any sleep-deprived peri-menopausal person would poke him in the ribs as much as I do at those moments.

NY Shows:  Avenue Q (for the boys, who know every song), The Thirty-Nine Steps (Monty Python meets Alfred Hitchcock - hilarious), and a staged reading of a new play in development by the folks who brought us Spring Awakening.  Other activities: Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island (we had to do that with the boys just to balance out the fact that we took them to Avenue Q and let them see Rent on their own!), a late-night walking tour of Greenwich Village, SoHo, Tribeca, Chinatown with friends who know every corner of the city and all kinds of wonderful fun facts about architecture and history.  And a visit to the Merchant House Museum.  

The Camp Pluckyfluff workshop gets its own posting - it was that inspirational.