Winter Starts

Oh the weather outside is frightful,
But the fire is so delightful,
And since we've no place to go,
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

Lyrics by Sammy Cahn

Assuming this technology works, this video is a brief work by the artist formerly known as Linda. I asked her to use her brand new Flip to make a brief video showing the winter weather that attacked us last night.

When our train arrived in Rutland 15 minutes early, it didn't seem like a big deal to just wait outside the station until Bob and Deb showed up to pick us up. That was until we stood out there and I realized that the temperature was 18 (that's Fahrenheit, about -7.8C for my Aussie pals). I think I toughed it out about 30 seconds before I pulled out the mobile and rang for them to come as soon as possible.

Over night a couple of inches of snow landed, and they cancelled school this morning. Throughout the morning a light snow continued to fall, but the hellacious part of the day was the howling winds that gusted up to 45 miles per hour (72kM/hr - and pretty soon folks are going to have to figure these conversions out for themselves.)

I haven't dealt with a car covered with snow and ice for 20+ years, but memories came flooding back as I swept and scraped the car. By the time I could see through the windows, I had cold toes and very cold fingers. Not turn-black-and-fall-off-your-hand cold fingers, but pretty chilly for a guy who's been used to wearing shorts and t-shirts in December.

The short drive to my parents turned out to be easy, but I worried lots before heading out since I haven't driven in snow and ice for nearly a quarter century. Isn't it like riding a bike? asked LK. When I pointed out to her that I tend to fall off bicycles, she seemed to begin to understand my concern.

Anyhow, the snow has stopped even though the wind is still whipping the bare trees and knocking over Christmas decorations. With nightfall, there may be a bit of ice on the road on the way back to Bob and Deb's later on, but by and large it should be a safe enough trip if I take my time and pay attention.

The good news is that winter is going to go easy on us for the next few days, which will enable us to drive back to Peg's without battling the notorious central New York blizzards I remember from when we lived there. Once in Pittsford, we can keep the car parked if the roads aren't good.

Anyhow, we haven't really experienced winter in a couple of decades, so it is good that it has happened today. Good in the sense that I am pretty sure we have learned not to come back for a visit at this time of year again. Spring, summer and autumn will do just fine, thanks.

Sad News

The message we have been dreading came yesterday. Our good friend Andy has died. He fought on bravely and much longer than anyone thought he could after being diagnosed with cancer last year.

We last saw Andy in July last year when we visited him and Doni. That's a picture when we went out to dinner on the last night. It was after his diagnosis, and yet you would have never known it from how much he did to make us feel welcome and at home. On the other hand - typical of him - he was more than ready to talk about what he was dealing with. Or not - our call.

Andy was my counterpart in Canada, and we first got to know each other when we discovered how much in common we had running the businesses. He always was my best source of ideas when I had a problem to solve.

But the business stuff - while a running conversation between us - sooon became secondary to friendship. We had so many good times together. He made the trip to Australia a couple of times, and we were able to teach him the joys of an Aussie barbecue with lots of good red wine.

Andy was one of the funniest, most laid-back guys I knew. If you wander back among the earlier posts of this blog, you will even find some of his comments on my writing. My favorite was when he decided I was the opposite of concise and succinct by marvelling at my "verbosatility".

He was also sharp as a tack and amazingly creative. It was great fun and a great privilege to know him, and it sucks to think that we won't be laughing with him again.

Probably the most fun we had was when he joined LK and me for a holiday in Budapest in 2007. There's a great picture of him from that trip, and I think it says as much about his personality as any words I could use, so I will end this sad post with a happy picture.

Walt and Terry and Ed and Kelly and Sam's Club

So let me see, my excuse for not blogging this weekend is ... well, I guess I don't have one.

We arrived at Walt and Terry's Saturday afternoon in a freezing rain, and by evening wet snow was sticking to the ground. Our first experience with the white stuff in a long, long time - but we were happy on Sunday when the temperatures went back up and the sun melted most of it. Enough is enough, after all.

Saturday we were invited to be Walt and Terry's excess baggage and went to a lovely dinner at their friends, Ed and Kelly. We've spent a couple of evenings with this great couple before when they came over to Walt and Terry's while we were visiting, but it was really nice of them to put on such a nice night and ask us over.

I do wonder about our reputation, though. LK and I have been in Freehold twice in the past three years - admittedly for a full week in August. We have never visited Ed and Kelly, yet when we walk in they don't even ask if we want a drink. They simply pull out a bottle of Johnny Walker and a bottle of vodka - which, come to think of it is what my mother does, too.

Sunday was, for obvious reasons, a little bit lazy. Very disappointing football as the Patriots showed they probably won't go deep into the playoffs this year, and then a great dinner with some of Walt's homemade goulash - the genuine article from a guy who knows.

Then yesterday LK and I talked Walt and Terry into taking us to Sam's Club. Starting with Robert and Jaki and then Walt and Terry, we have been hearing so much about this store that we just had to check it out.

For the Aussies reading this, Sam's Club is a Walmart-owned store run like a buyer's club. It has everything from electronics to groceries to booze to a pharmacy, and the prices truly are amazing. For example, in a belated attempt to kind of cover some of the expenses of offering us hospitality, we bought Johnny Walker and Absolut in the extra-large bottles. The 1.75 liter bottle of Absolut cost $30. Which, compared to Australian bottle shop prices, means I was getting a free liter of the stuff.

Most of the grocery items tend to be super-sized but amazingly good value. LK loves cooking pork loin, but the ones we get at home are about 1/6th the size of this cut - which cost a grand total of $13 (about $14 Aussie dollars). Such bargains - and Walt tells us the quality of the meat is excellent.

By the way, Linda didn't want to pose for that picture. She said you're just going to make some wisecrack about me holding a piece of meat. Which hurt my feelings a bit. I think most of you know that this blog is just one long love song to my sweetie. Can't imagine why she feels I might make fun of her. Besides, now that I've planted the idea I know most of you are coming up with your own wisecrack. Feel free to share them with me.

Anyhow, backtracking today - bus to New York to catch a train to Rutland - for a couple of more days with my family. Having a ball.

Food for Thought

Oh, we have eaten well here in New York. We have had pastrami at Katz's Delicatessen, one of the places that celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain listed among the "13 Places to Eat Before You Die" in a magazine article earlier this year. I will spread out the remaining 12 rather than face a retirement with no further goals.

Katz's is an odd place. There are guys at the door handing you tickets as you walk in and telling you not to lose them or you'll end up paying $50. But when you see how many people there are and how crazy the place is, it makes sense.

This is the restaurant where Meg Ryan did her fake orgasm noises in the movie "When Harry Met Sally". That's the scene where Rob Reiner's mother in the background tells the waiter, "I'll have what she's having." In fact, we chowed down one table away from Meg Ryan's table in that scene. We knew because there's a big sign over the table telling everyone. I suspect the staff just got tired of having to tell everyone who asked about it.

As for the critical issue, the pastrami was excellent, but I suspect Bourdain is about the only person in the world who could not find another place to be in his 13 places all for the sake of a pastrami sandwich.

Along the way, we also ate at a great Cuban restaurant, an Irish pub, and a generic cafe in the neighborhood here.

Yesterday we returned to the cafe, the Pink Pony, for brunch. I had a sandwich and LK celebrated a return to her childhood by having hot chocolate and french toast with fresh fruit. Everything looked pretty good, but I noticed she left a bit of the fruit. I understood.

Last night we had a wonderful evening catching up with old friends Kevin and Pamela, whom we haven't seen in a couple of years. We went to Telepan, a trendy restaurant about halfway up the west side of Central Park.

We all did the four-course fixed price menu. The price was a real bargain, and even though our waiter told us the portions were smaller, none of us could have eaten another bite by the end. I had foie gras, scallops, sea trout and a cheese plate. Oh yes, and some very nice chardonnay. Yummy.

Having feasted and shopped and walked and done a museum and Broadway show, we've squeezed heaps into our New York holiday. We're now packed and ready to check out on our way back to Walt and Terry's in New Jersey. Apparently, we left an ounce or two of vodka and scotch when we visited last August.

The New York City Marathon

I am writing the morning after a day that left me with sore feet and so tired I didn't even want a drink before bedtime. The Ks took Manhattan.

We took the subway up to Rockefeller Center to check out the Christmas tree yesterday. The weather was beautiful - somewhere in the 60s - and there were crowds jamming the area around the tree and ice skating rink.

After obligatory pictures, we went into the Metropolitan Museum Shop to buy a Christmas gift we had seen in their window. Once inside, we got upgraded significantly to a really cool gift. The only problem was that the original gift weighed about 2 ounces and the new gift is big and weighs about 20 pounds. Can't say any more or the surprise will go away for someone, but we left it to be picked up at the end of the day.

We then wandered around in search of a restaurant for lunch. Unfortunately we were wandering around Fifth Avenue, and there aren't any restaurants there. Once we figured that out, we wandered down a side street and ended up at an Irish pub where we drank Harps with our lunch.

Then the day took a new turn. LK and I have had a 25-year fight going on. It's about who will be responsible for what we do. Neither of us wants to do it. It used to be enough to be the first one to ask, "What do you want to do?" to win, but now LK cleverly counters that with "Whatever you want" and from there it generally goes back and forth until we have exhausted our "I don't care, whatever you want to do" and one of us made a decision.

That, of course, means if the decision is no good it's your fault. Which is also the reason we have the fight.

LK won yesterday - and last night reminded me quite strongly that I had first broken her original plans for the day and then made the decision to do the things we did, so any pain I felt was my fault. We walked north along Central Park to the Whitney. That's about a mile and a half, which is no big deal on such a beautiful day.

Then we walked around the museum for about two hours. The only time I sat was when I visited the men's room. When we left, I was game for a taxi back to the store where we left our gift and a bar until our play started. LK - who was also complaining about sore feet - saw no reason that we couldn't walk back the mile and a half.

"But we can take a taxi if you want to," she said. I recognized this very clever ploy. Either wuss out and admit you're tired without me having to, or suffer, fat boy. Of course I couldn't take a taxi.

Walking back down Fifth Avenue, we came upon one of the scariest sites I have encountered in New York - Tiffany & Co.

It was crowded and the clerks were not their typical all smiles and patience. They were busy and crabby. LK picked up a gift for someone on behalf of someone (more Christmas secrets) and even she was getting crabby about Tiffany by the time we left. The crabbiness also may have had something to do with her comment that she was a bit surprised that I hadn't picked up on her comment and bought something for her.

I played dumb.

We got back to Rockefeller Center and picked up the gift, which now appeared to weigh about 3 or 400 pounds. We had tickets to a show at 8 and had to kill 2 hours. I had fantasies of a bar stool and a very cold beer. And we found just that two blocks away from our show.

Rested and refreshed, we wandered down to see Carrie Fisher's one-woman show "Wishful Drinking". She was very enjoyable, but this post has gone on so long I won't write a review now. Suffice it to say, we grabbed a quick pizza and salad after the play, definitely grabbed a cab for the trip back to the hotel and slept very late this morning.

This morning I am feeling great, my feet are ready for action and the weather remains good. Last day in New York. Time to go.

Tenements

LK booked us into a tenement on the Lower East Side for our stay in New York City. No kidding.

We're at the Blue Moon Hotel, a lovely, renovated tenement house in the neighborhood made famous by so many movies about immigrants first arriving in America. After so many years of Intercontinentals and Ritz Carltons on business trips, it's fun to discover these boutique hotels in parts of town that almost never see a business conference.

This is the neighborhood of the movies "Crossing Delancey" and "Hester Street" and "The Gangs of New York". We seem a million miles from the upmarket midtown of Manhattan.

The hotel doesn't number its 22 rooms. Instead, each is named after a famous performer from the first half of the 20th century when it actually functioned as a tenement. We're staying in the Ella Fitzgerald room, right next to the Frank Sinatra room. When we checked in and the clerk asked if I had ever heard of Ella Fitzgerald, I was able to tell her that I had her on my iPod. I thought it was pretty impressive. Linda assured me no one was impressed.

The hotel is two doors away from the Tenement Museum, and we checked it out today. They have a variety of tours that show you what life was like in the New York tenements of the 19th and early 20th centuries. We chose a tour called The Moores, which looks at the apartment of an Irish family that immigrated to America in the mid-1800s.

Our chief concern in booking the tour was that it required us to walk up 63 stairs to the fourth floor of the old building. I am particularly aware of how difficult it would be for them to carry me down steep stairs should my body suddenly decide the exertion is all too hard. I was especially concerned because our guide - excuse me, our educator - was 75, and I didn't want to show how hard it was for me to keep pace with a really old guy! (Just kidding, Mom and Dad!)

The good news was that my Wii Fit training worked fine and they had the good sense to have us all sit down and watch a presentation when we got to the top floor. I was only breathing a little bit fast when we got up to walk through the building 10 minutes later.

They wouldn't let us take pictures in the tenement, and I cannot quite understand why. There was nothing much that could have been damaged by flashbulbs. In fact, as you can see from this picture from their web site, the rooms were pretty much bare and sparse. There were a few artefacts and pieces of furniture, but nothing that couldn't be photographed.

By the way, what you are looking at with this picture is 2/3rds of the apartment that would typically house 6 or 7 people - and around 11 during the Great Depression. There was only one other room - a very small bedroom which could sleep as much as the two parents and three or four of the younger children. You just had to hope no one wanted to turn over during the night.

More than 7,000 families lived in the building during its lifetime. All of them were poor, many of them lost children to the unsanitary conditions - conditions which were due in part to the fact that people didn't even know there was a connection between cleanliness and health until the 20th Century. (Thanks to our educator, Gerry Lemmon, for that tidbit.)

At one point this part of the Lower East Side had more people per square foot than any other part of the world, including Calcutta. It was where the Irish and Germans came, followed by the Poles and Russians and Italians. Later the immigrants from Central and South America arrived.

Even for new immigrants, the American dream was alive - move to a better place, get a better job, get your kids a better education. It was virtually everyone's desire to get out of this area as fast as they could. This was the starting point of their great life's adventure. After today, I think it's kind of cool that so many people are coming back here to make sure that time is not forgotten.

Training Day

Unlike Christmas - or even Halloween - there aren't a lot of great Thanksgiving movies. With the exception of a great scene in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, probably the best is John Hughes' Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

That's where Steve Martin learned to be funny by playing straight man to John Candy, and the theme is all about trying to get home for the holidays by any means possible.

John Candy in this movie and I had a lot in common. We both had moustaches, we both played the accordion, and we were both - well, a punching a bit above the weight on the chart. Although I never was in a polka band like John Candy, I do wish I had been.

I couldn't help thinking of this movie today because we completed the transportation trifecta by taking the Amtrak train from Rutland to New York City.

Please permit me to become the greatest advocate for train travel since tracks were standardized. What an immense pleasure to take a long train ride. Look at your ticket and see that you have nearly six hours in the air, and your heart sinks. Same time for the train - you've hit the jackpot.

No droning engine noise, no seatbealts, not even a perfunctory safety demonstration that no one watches. You can stand up any time - even during takeoff. You can eat, drink, read, go to the loo - and no one ever tells you the tracks are a bit rough and you need to keep your fat ass in the seat.

And during most of the trip - that is, the part when you are not looking at the backyards of people in upstate New York who have train tracks running within a hundred yards of their homes - the view is great. The last part of today's trip was like taking a superfast cruise as we were right next to the wide Hudson River from Albany down to Yonkers. Beautiful.

I suspect passenger trains will disappear soon. In fact, I am surprised they are still around. But LK and I agree wholeheartedly on this one. (With the obvious exeption of those who have to use the rest rooms during the six hour trip), trains are easily the best way to get from Point A to Point B.