While we can't actually see the river from our house (well we can during the winter, if we get up on the third floor, lean out the window, and pray for a vision) but it turns out that we actually do have a pretty good view. From our bedroom window and from the third floor window, we can see about 3/4 of the fireworks display (the bottom half is cut off by a 3 family house in the distance.) This is the first time we've been in our house during a fireworks display. We are at the bottom of a gently rising hill, so our view is really better than expected! And we can definitely hear them, along with the myriads of illegal fireworks being shot off by our friendly neighbors.....

We haven't been posting much, mostly because we've been busy nesting. That's the technical term for pregnant mothers who start taking on home improvement projects in their last trimester, in a vain attempt to be as busy as possible and to not think about their heart burn and the increasingly difficult time they have getting out of bed. (I have been sworn to say no more on the subject... but let us say there is a possibility of a videotape of the spectacle at some point. After all, a guy has to have some leverage!) Anyway, not to be indelicate, but we've been nesting like the proverbial rabbits. In the past four weeks I have put together from kits a Crate and Barrel Hutch, a Crate and Barrel Buffet, an Ikea cabinet, a Joann Fabrics sewing table, an Ikea desk with four telescoping legs, 6 or 7 Ikea book shelf units, an Ikea sofa desk, and probably some other stuff that I've simply forgotten about. Some of these things I've even put together twice! (I got it wrong the first time!) All in all, best directions go HANDS DOWN to Ikea, whose illustrations are always very clear. Sometimes they don't make sense, or are in the wrong order, but once I've put something together, and have three left over parts, I usually can look at the drawing and figure out what I messed up. Worst go to Joann's, whose illustrations missed several key points, and it wasn't until I re-assembled the piece a second time did it become clear what goes where-- and then I had to re-jigger it so that the little pneumatic gizmo had enough clearance on all sides to go up and down. I've also had to lug and lug and lug this stuff out of the car, up the stairs, and in the case of the ikea book cases all the way up to the third floor. Not easy! And a lot of this stuff said "must be assembled by two people" and of course that means two people that can lift stuff, not one pregnant person who definitely should not be lifting heavy objects. Suffice to say that Stephanie helped as much as she could, and I did a little engineering to allow the very heavy awkward objects to be placed on top of one another (specifically the hutch on top of the buffet-- the hutch weighed 120 lbs, the buffet 140 lbs, and I had to put them into place together. Aside from the windows being slightly mishung-- it looks very good. Today I've spent most of the day trying to clean out the second floor office (soon to be the nursery) and move that stuff up to the third floor. I've been up and down the stairs probably 20 times today. (The gym's not open today, anyway.) I've moved a whole set of bookcases down to the floor level to either be free-cycled, or more likely put in the garage for a rainy day. Now it's hamburger time, followed by a potential fireworks show

So for the last week or so, we've been smelling an ugly smell in our kitchen-- it smelled alternatively like fish or ammonia. We searched everywhere, but couldn't seem to find it. We sprayed Oust, we made herbal teas, we brewed coffee, we ate smelly cheeses, we kept the window open, we sacrificed a goat to the gods-- nothing seemed to get the smell out. We had started to think that maybe our housekeeper had cooked some fish in our oven, and that some residue or something had gotten stuck in the oven, or in between the oven, or beneath the oven. Or perhaps a dead bird had somehow gotten stuck in the ... Anyway, we had ALL kinds of crazy theories. I'm happy to report that none of those were the issue at hand-- it turned out that the smell turned out to be a year old pumpkin-- a pumpkin that had during thanksgiving or something oh so long ago, been put on the top of the oven cabinet and then been left there to slowly, ever so slowly decay. It took a good 6-8 months for this thing to start really smelling up the joint, and to say that it was squishy was to be kind. It was awful. You hear a lot about rotten pumpkins (esp. around Thanksgiving), but this was my first time up personal with one. A little bit goes A LONG WAY, believe me. You'll never guess who was given the unenviable task of cleaning up this squishy former pumpkin mess-- that is right, your humble narrator. This is not a picture of our pumpkin, but just a sample of the awfulness.

Isn't that the name of a song? Or a movie? It also happens to be the name of our honeymoon, a quick 4 1/2 day trip to the City of Light. We left on Monday evening after the wedding, and let me tell you, I've never been so unprepared for an overseas trip. I usually have a packing list weeks in advance and am packed at least a few days before. As it was, with the wedding and my office move, we packed on Monday afternoon (after the Times video person left, which threw a fun, but time-consuming, wrench into our packing plans), zipped the suitcases and flew out the door to drive to JFK. Fortunately or unfortunately, I have very few clothes that fit and so my choices were dramatically limited anyway, and we both felt that we had brought exactly the right stuff. Thank goodness that was the case, as Paris was WAY expensive and we were reluctant to buy anything, let alone something that we already had at home. The dollar is totally in the dumps and we were extremely frugal, with the majority of our spending going to food. We took the Metro everywhere - we bought two week-long unlimited Cartes Orange for about $28 each, but in an uncharacteristic move I lost mine the first day (I blame the pregnancy) so we had to buy another one. Adam won't let me live that down anytime soon. I think I was a total trooper on this trip, considering that I was 20-21 weeks pregnant and we were both recovering from the weeklong wedding festivities. We walked about 10-12 hours a day (including strolling around museums), went up and down dozens if not a hundred sets of subway stairs, and only slept late/lazed about one morning. Due to all the walking/standing, I had some pain in my abdomen (quite common, round ligament pain - fortunately, thanks to my sister-in-law Andrea, I knew what it was before we got there and it started), and some sciatica in my left lower back - but neither really held me back until Saturday, when they both happened simultaneously. At that point I was pretty happy to be going home on Sunday. Some of the highlights of the trip: Of course the city itself, which always plays a starring role. It's just such an accessible city, totally walkable and so beautifully arranged with the Seine and the arrondissements each with their own character and features. We spent a lot of time in the area around the Pompidou Center, in and out of the edges of the Marais district for museums, eating, and shopping. We ate two really great meals (and lots of better-than-usual-because-we-were-eating-in-Paris bistro meals): one night at Le Relais de Venise, where I had been once 13-15 years before - this steak-frites-only restaurant was as good as I'd remembered. If you get to Paris, you must go. The other really memorable meal was at Pain, Vin, Fromage (thanks, Chocolate and Zucchini) in the Marais district, where we had a hearty meal of raclette (melted cheese eaten with charcuterie, cornichons and boiled potatoes) - Adam had never had it and I'd never eaten it in a restaurant, and we really enjoyed it. We would absolutely have liked to have had more cool restaurant experiences but man, when you can't even sit down at a table for less than $50 (and only for just lunch, nevermind dinner), it's very hard to justify fancy meals, especially after having just paid for a wedding. We did eat a lot of nutella crepes on the street, as well as pain au chocolate plus wonderful French yogurt every morning for a relatively cheap but entirely satisfying breakfast. We stayed in the Latin Quarter at a lovely little budget hotel that we can highly recommend, the Acte V; though the rooms were Manhattan-small (if not smaller), the service was great and there is a metro station 1/2 block away (though we quickly learned that that station doesn't have an escalator, so we went into the metro there, but usually came out 2 blocks away that the station with the up escalator ;-) ) We opted not to hit every tourist attraction on our list (after all, we only had 4 1/2 days) and so we saw the highlights of the Louvre, most of the Pompidou, Notre Dame, and after freezing our asses waiting in line in the windswept plaza under the structure, we went up to the 2nd level of the Eiffel Tower. We also did a great impromptu walking tour of the city on the first afternoon - from the Latin Quarter up to Notre Dame, past the Hotel de Ville, across the Pompidou plaza, to the Louvre and Pyramid plaza, over the Pont Neuf, and through Saint Germain - until we collapsed at what turned out to be a Brussels-themed chain restaurant for moules frites and beef stew. One day we spent at Disneyland Paris (more on that on a separate post - hold your groans for now), and on Saturday, our last day, we shopped a little bit together in the morning (including an amazing yarn store, La Droguerie, where I bought a beautiful book and some lovely yarn, not terribly expensive), and in the afternoon Adam went to a circus tradeshow (amazingly, yes, there was a circus tradeshow in Paris the same weekend we were there, he can elaborate on it) and I shopped a bit more. In the end, except for a few small gifts for other people and the yarn, we really didn't buy very much because of the exchange rate - all we've got in the house to show for our travels is a cow milk pitcher from the Bon Marche and a couple of wooden spoons from E.Dehillerin. Funny that Adam, almost book-fluent in French, had great difficulty speaking French in Paris. For the first time ever since I've known him, he was shy! and felt he was making a lot of mistakes. So with my one year of high school French I forged ahead a lot of the time (I certainly didn't have any internal standard to hold myself against), and it wasn't until the last day or so that Adam started to reach out in French a bit more. But for the most part everyone spoke English, so even if we spoke French to them they answered in English. Ah well, c'est la vie! All in all, a wonderful trip - just the right length, distance from home, and level of excitement/exertion for our circumstance. I'm sure Paris will be top of our list of destinations for future travels.

You would think that mowing our lawn would be an easy maneuver. After all, we don't have very much of it, it's relatively compact, and how damned hard can mowing the lawn be, anyway? Well, to paraphrase my grandmother, "a landscaper, you're not." I spent a good hour doing lawn stuff this morning-- mowing the over grown grass with the mower, picking up garbage that is unceremoniously dumped in front of our house by young hooligans, using the weed-whacker to get those hard to get places. And while it looks noticeably neater than it did (well, not neater-- but at least better trimmed) I was exhausted by it, and if I had paid for the job, I would have probably had to fire myself. There's still some uneven-ness in the grass, there's still some garbage on the ground-- and there's still plenty of weeds around. People like to do this? They choose to do this? Feh. I think I'd like to just pave the whole thing-- except, to paraphrase my grandmother: "A cement-man you're not."

I am such a big fan of XKCD that I had to post this-- the comics there are just my style (and in this case, taste!) Highly recommend checking out the rest of their site...

It's Yonkers Business Week this upcoming week, and I'm hoping to attend a few of the FREE seminars this week. The most interesting to me is the FREE ride on the Ferry on Friday, which I missed the last time they were giving them out. Their schedule was not online, so I put it up at my other YONKERS blog: http://www.yonkersarts.blogspot.com (in case you didn't know, I created that as a way of making connections and finding out what's going on in the arts in Yonkers. It now serves primarily as a resource, although it's a good place to store interesting info about events and such!)