blogging for two

Bleurgh. Despite the bestest of intentions I am well behind and days seem to have merged into each other. Shark sends her apols and demands that I blog for two, so from collected memory…..

On Thursday we embarked to Bryant Park with grand (de)illusions of ice-skating, well TH and purplemafling were thinking of giving it a go. However, the queue going half way around the square rather put them off. We did hang about to watch though. Te he. Runny nosed kids and adults of all ages grasping onto the hand barrier running around the edge for dear life. Except the ones that were good of course. They showed off. The sound track was strange to say the least; with every other song sounding like it came from an all American cast of Annie the musical, mixed in with snippets of jazz and a small amount of disco. We stayed until our limbs were frozen and our noses were running and sauntered around the market where we bought hats to warm our frozen bodies. The Elf and I went on the Carousel, where of course I was the only adult. I think that I enjoyed it much more than all the 3 year olds, who were no fun at all. Next stop was Pax where we all nourished our bodies with much needed green leaves, fruit, veggies and gorgeous warm soup. Yum.

Up to this point, every evening I was rather embarrassed to follow the Elf’s bedtime by minutes and decided to take drastic action. Completely lost without my regular run I bought myself some rather jazzy bright red new running trainers. Alas I couldn’t use them until the next day and fell asleep at 10pm AGAIN after dining on a feast of TH’s homemade chilli. Still, a lady of fierce resolve, on waking on Friday I did go out running along the East River. TH later, rather competitively worked out that it was close to 4 miles. So, awake and with energy to spare I was able to partake in the trip to Central Park with the German contingent. We all hooked up later at the 55 Bar, one of Sharks’ favourite jazz joints. It’s a well kept secret that I bought all of Ella’s song books on vinyl when I was younger and as the lady covered loads of these, I impressed TH by knowing loads of lyrics and only needed to be told when to clap twice this time round. Friday night in Manhattan without a dinner reservation resulted in chaos and we eventually found a pizza joint that could accommodate us close to home. It was madly busy and the waitress was clearing up a mess by our table as we waited. Hmmm, she didn’t clear up well enough, as we found out on our exit. Shark’s coat looked like it had been jizzed, not jazzed, all over and a trip to the dry cleaners was called for the next day. Still, I made it to see 11pm, for once, and soundly slept for 10 hours, even managing to only hear 1 of 10 wrong numbers that resulted in Frank hiding all the phones in the cutlery drawer. Yet another advantage of living near an airport, ear plugs!

Saturday morning saw myself and TH going out for a short run. Starving by the time we made it to our brunch date of dim sum, we managed to devour 2 hours worth of food in 20 minutes. Well, they give it to you so quickly and how were we to know that we were supposed to be relaxing and chatting when they brought plate after plate of newly experienced delights? The German party left to explore another corner of NY while the Shark, TH and myself went back to HQ to watch Arsenal thrash Sheffield United LIVE. Isn’t technology wonderful? Except that they didn’t. Sheffield United scored at the end of the first half and TH spent much of the second half with his fists in his mouth as Arsenal successfully managed not to equalise. I quickly scarpered to the Natural History Museum to meet up with the German party as we wandered around the Museum looking for characters out of A Night at the Museum before going to see the brilliant Cosmic Collisions narrated by Robert Redford! Wow, planetariums have come on a bit since I was last there. Purplemafling cooked us a wonderful meal and I again managed to stay up past the Elf’s bedtime. Hurrah.