Much like the Congress and their omnibus bills to collect a bunch of unrelated crap here is a general catch up of the holiday events.
We spent the few days between the time Mary got home until we left for New York watching 3 seasons of Scandal on Netflix (at Mackenzie’s suggestion) and then switched to documentaries. I think the TV was on more during that week than it had been in the year before. Here is a picture of the plant watching TV.
On Saturday after Christmas it was off to New York for a few days. The main scheduled event was dinner with Randi, Chris and Chris’s parents Sunday night. We were staying in a hotel in the center of Brooklyn with convenient subway connections and, unfortunately a big shopping area. As Randi was working Saturday we had dinner later that night in Brooklyn. Sunday we wondered around Brooklyn and then headed into Manhattan. I don’t remember why but I think it had to do with shopping. Here is Union Square. Not too exciting although the underwear guy was playing.
Here is a street sign so you know where you are.
So it was back to Brooklyn for dinner. Dinner was a couple subway stops from the hotel so we took off to meetup with every one. Randi had to work so her and Chris came separate and we got there before them and Chris’s parents were already there. Randi came straight from work wearing her official Dr. uniform but she left her stethoscope and that chrome plated round flip down peephole head gear thing at home.
We had a wonderful dinner and good conversation. As an added entertainment factor the waiter kept pouring drinks and food on Randi. Must be one of those Brooklyn hipster traditions to soak the Doctor. He did take a group photo though.
After the dinner we all headed to our various homes.
Although Mary and I walked a couple blocks West to the river and views of the city.
The next day we went to New Jersey to visit Mary’s old friend DJ as Randi got called into work (which happened again on Tuesday). They had become friends in college and occasionally get together. DJ has a couple girls in high school that were home and cooking.
We got back to Brooklyn and met Randi for dinner (Chris was visiting another of his friends). Randi took pride in wearing the Elmo sweater that Mary had got for her.
But then about half way through dinner they both experienced what can only be described as a simultaneous foodgasm.
Tuesday, since Randi was working we went into Manhattan and ultimately ended up at the Metropolitan Museum. It was my first real cashing in on being an official senior citizen. I saved $8. If I went every day that would be $2920 a year.
We looked at art stuff for a few hours like this statue thing.
By late afternoon Mary was tired.
When Randi got off work we had dinner around the corner from her apartment to wrap up the big New York visit.
We safely returned home and went back to the documentary watching on Netflix. We also got out the big time meat slicer to slice the meat Chris had brought from Seattle and managed to actually get the thing to work. Here is Mary making meat slices by the thousands.
Soon it was time to pack up and head back to China.
I dropped Mary at terminal 1 and and a couple hours later picked up Ashley at terminal 5. Mary didn’t actually leave for 30 hours because of various problems so her trip that normally takes about 24 hours door to door took more like 60 or so. The weather turned bad for the trip to the airport Tuesday morning. Ashley and I got stuck Wednesday on the toll road on the way to Muncie for an hour because of a wreck. I got up Friday morning to -7 F temp and 18 inches of snow.
A couple hours after this picture there was a 150 car wreck on 94 East of Kalamazoo. It seems that the holiday travel ended just in the nick of time as winter has arrived. At least the news outlets are not hyping winter as POLAR VORTEX like they did last year.