Easter Weekend

Two weekends ago, my parents came to visit for the second time since we've owned the house (the first time was last August). It was a short visit, from Wednesday through Sunday, but it was actually longer than last time, when I think they came up on Friday and left on Sunday. We didn't have any specific plans for the weekend, my dad just happened to have Thursday and Friday off because of Easter, so they decided to spend the holiday with us. The one thing I hoped we'd accomplish was getting the office "mudded" -- last time my parents were here, my dad helped James put up most of the drywall in the office, and my dad taped the seams and spackled them to make them smooth. When my brother visited, we enlisted him to help us finish putting up the rest, but because James and I really had no idea what we were doing when it came to mudding, we didn't deal with it. Now that my dad, expert mudder, was coming back, I hoped he'd help James finish off the room. That was all I hoped for - working on finishing those blasted seams.

Well holy smokes, the mudding was only a small part of all that we accomplished that weekend.

Back to the beginning: my parents arrived around 6pm on Wednesday, shortly after we got home from work. Their car was jam packed with stuff for us, which was a big surprise and kind of ridiculous. They brought me my wedding dress, which was a huge yay, plus a nifty orchid that only needs to get three ice cubes once a week to be happy. And sunshine, of course. And they brought a few of their homemade jellies, plus some homemade applesauce, pickles, chutney and wine. But they also brought boxes and boxes of random junk leftover from when the cleaned out my bedroom and other stuff they probably unearthed from the basement, stuff that really should have been thrown out but instead they hauled it across four states to let me throw it out. Yippee.

Anyway, it was fantastic to see them, since it had been since Thanksgiving! After a flurry of unpacking and a bit of visiting, we had dinner. That morning I had made a Mexican-style chicken and pinto bean stew in the slow cooker, so it was awesome to have dinner pretty much ready to go when we got home. And it was good! That was a huge relief since I'd never made the recipe before and we were worried that the dried pinto beans would turn out hard or sandy, but they were perfect.

Unfortunately James and I had to work on Thursday and Friday. On Thursday my Mom made dinner, and it was awfully nice to come home from work (after a crappy day) to a lovely homecooked meal. There's really nothing like Mom's homecooking. My dad had worked on mudding the office during the day, not even waiting for James, and he had it mostly finished by the time we got home.

I was able to leave work early on Friday, so I came home after lunch. Dad had finished mudding the office by then. He and I worked on digging an herb garden in the back yard. My dad did all the hard work and I supervised and helped pick out the rocks and roots. And then we transferred my herbs from their temporary location in the vegetable garden to the herb garden; Dad dug up the plants and I planted them again. Then he and Mom took me to Home Depot and got a couple of little bushes and a flat of pansies and a few other things, as a housewarming gift. I picked up James from work and mom and I made a yummy dinner of pasta with roasted butternut squash and bacon. It sounds weird but it is SO GOOD. James and I took them out for gelato at our favorite place to go for dessert, which is across town.

On Saturday morning, Dad and I worked on the front yard. He dug up a flower garden along the front of the house (there was only a very narrow strip of garden there, with a few stray tulips and daffodils - it was very sparse) and I trimmed the hedges which looked like they hadn't been tended in years. Dad planted the hydrangea, azalea, and boxwood bushes that James and I had purchased earlier, plus a small-leafed rhododendron and another non-flowering bush that he and mom got us as a part of their housewarming gift, plus the pansies. I was so excited! It makes a big difference to the front of the house - it makes it more charming and inviting and it shows that we care and take pride in our house. Dad's help was huge - I know if it had been entire up to us, that garden would have been an all-day job and probably wouldn't have even been started yet. But Dad got it done in just the morning.

James and I whipped up a breakfast feast for him - homemade buckwheat pancakes, scrambled eggs a la dad (lots of veggies!), and bacon. It was great. That afternoon, we drove down to Lexington and Concord and visited the Louisa May Alcott house.

I'm sure the men weren't too excited about it but Mom and I got a kick out of seeing it. We explored downtown Concord a bit and saw a little of Minute Man National Park - I think you could easily spend a whole day there, and we only had a few hours so the parents want to go back and see it next time they visit. I want to go back too! The park is beautiful and looks like a great place to bike around, and there's so much to see.

When we got home, our neighbors invited us over to join them in their front yard barbeque. We hadn't ever actually met them so it was nice. They were extremely friendly and kept plying us with food even though we said we'd be going out to dinner soon and couldn't eat with them. But we did try some of their appetizers. They're from the Dominican Republic so it was food that we'd never had before, and it was very yummy. The house actually belongs to the parents of the family, who are probably in their 60s, but their son and daughter are close to our ages. Their daughter Giselle was super friendly and I think we could be friends. She said they visit their parents a lot, and they have lots of cookouts and we're always invited. Yay!

We had a late lunch/snack in Concord, so we didn't have dinner until 8 or 9 that night. We went to an Italian place in Salem NH, the next town over from our town. It came highly recommended by people at work and Giselle's family, and we weren't disappointed. The portions were huge, too. When we got home, we watched The Pacific, which I'd been recording and saving on the DVR because I thought my dad would like it. We watched the first episode the night before and they did enjoy it. The fact that each episode is an hour long I think helps, because dad tends to fall asleep in the middle of movies, so the episodes were short enough that he didn't get the chance.

On Sunday we accompanied my parents to church since it was Easter. I'm not sure what the denomination was but it was a huge stone church build in the 1800s with an enormous pipe organ in the back. My parents were hoping, I'm sure, that we'd continue going to that church but I don't see that happening. But anyway it was fun to get dressed up, and it was a beautiful and surprisingly warm day.

After church, I thought we'd all relax but dad disappeared and i found him out back, digging up our vegetable garden. There was a spot in our back yard where there obviously had been a vegetable garden years ago, but it was all hard-packed and weedy and neglected. So dad turned the soil over and I helped by picking out rocks, cutting the thick roots we uncovered, and sifting out the clumps of grass roots.

In the afternoon, Mom, Dad and I worked on putting together an Easter feast. We had roasted turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, salad, homemade buttermilk biscuit (which I made and were soooo yummy!), and roasted asparagus. It was fantastic. We had lemon poppyseed cake for dessert, which I made Tuesday night for their Wednesday arrival.

We cleaned up after dinner and then pretty soon it was time for the parents to go. They sold their car to us over the weekend, so they were flying back. We drove them up to the airport in Manchester NH, which is a half hour away. It was a really nice visit and I'm still amazed at all that we got done!

Everyone's your friend in New York City

The weekend of March 19-21, James and I went down to NYC for his birthday. It was the first time I'd stayed in a hotel in the city (and the second I'd ever stayed overnight in the city, the first time being with Kelly Barrows a couple years ago), and only the second time James had ever been to New York. The weather was lovely all weekend, which was awesome because we had a LOT we wanted to see!

We drove down to the city on Friday morning, arriving sometime around 2pm. I was really impressed by James driving through Manhattan - all of my memories of driving through the city involve my dad driving and being extremely stressed out and both of my parents freaking about all the traffic. I guess their fear of driving in the city rubbed off on me, because I was majorly intimidated at the thought of driving in Manhattan, thinking that it'd be WAY WORSE than ANYYWHERE else, and CHAOTIC and AWFUL but it turned out to be not such a big deal. I guess if you can drive in LA, you can drive anywhere. Anyway. We found our boutique hotel, which was on the corner of Madison and 27th. We checked in and our room was TINY - just big enough for a double bed, really. But it was very clean and modern and had obviously recently been remodelled so we were happy.

Then we set off on our first adventure! We got subway passes and went down to the Brooklyn Bridge. We walked about halfway across, which was really all we had time for, but it was really fantastic. We both got a huge kick out of being on such an iconic bridge. Then we walked over to the WTC site, which is nearby. We walked by City Hall Park, which was a nice spot, then stumbled across the St. Paul Chapel, which we learned is the oldest surviving church in Manhattan. It's the church where George Washington first worshipped after being made president. Pretty cool. We wanted to pay our respects at the WTC site, which James had never seen but I saw on a college trip in 2002 or so. Unfortunately the whole site is hidden behind chain link fences that are covered in plastic, but we got to peek in and see how huge the hole in the ground is. It was encouraging to see the frame of One World Trade Center starting to rise up - they have probably a half dozen floors built so far.

Next we went up to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What a spectacular place. I could spend weeks in there - there's just so much to see! We only got a few hours but I think we made the most of it. We got a poster of Pierre August-Cot's painting Spring, which we didn't actually get to see in person. That's a bummer because it's one of my all time favorites, but I'm so excited we'll have a copy of it at home. After the Met we made our way over to Junior's, a Brooklyn-based restaurant that's famous for its cheesecake. We went to the one near Times Square, and while my meatloaf was forgettable, James' Reuben (or pastrami sandwich, I forget which) was super yummy, and the raspberry swirl cheesecake was pure awesome.

The next day, we woke up in time to get the free (and surprisingly good) coffee and danishes in the hotel lobby, and that combined with the homemade granola bars I'd packed made for a pretty satisfying breakfast (those tasty, tasty granola bars saved us from having to buy breakfast or lunch during our visit, which I think saved us quite a bit of cash). Our first adventure of the day was visiting the Museum of Natural History, but rather than take the subway right there, I took us to the other side of Central Park and we walked across. James had never been in Central Park before and I think he got a kick out it. It was lovely to stroll through the sunny park with trees and flowers beginning to bloom (it was also nice to get an early taste of spring, northern Mass is at least a couple of weeks behind NYC).

We really enjoyed the Museum of Natural History - I remembered it as being a lot of cheesy dioramas, but it's really a lot more than that, especially with the Rose Center and Planetarium. James especially loved seeing the meteorites and the dinosaur bones. And even the dioramas were pretty neat, it's nice to be able to look at the animals up close. Although, at first, all these dead, frozen animals made the museum seem like a creepy zoo.

After about four hours in the natural history museum, which was definitely not enough time (especially if you want to see any IMAX shows or the planetarium show, which we didn't do), we headed over to the MoMA. We saw a lot of good things there, from Pollock and Warhol to Starry Night (which had a big crowd around it and a big guard sternly guarding it!) and performance art by Marina Abramovic, who I knew only because she was featured (parodied?) in an episode of Sex and the City. We were kind of burned out on museums at this point, but we spent some time checking out the design section of the MoMA which was a nice change of pace because it wasn't just oil paintings and it was less esoteric than pieces of string pinned onto the wall (I actually saw more than one of these, amazingly enough). The MoMA can be kind of exhausting because you're trying hard to understand some pretty wacky stuff and it can be a bit overwhelming.

After the MoMA, we headed downtown to meet up with Caitlin (who was one of my bridesmaids) for dinner at 'Smac, the mac and cheese place. On our way down to meet Caitlin, we got a bit lost looking for the subway but we stumbled across a Magnolia Bakery! I thought Magnolia was in a completely different part of town, but I guess there's more than one? We got three red velvet cupcakes so we could share them with Caitlin, and one chocolate one because we needed a cupcake RIGHT THEN. Mmm, such good cupcakey goodness. I got the brie, walnut and fig mac, which sounded awesome on the menu but turned out to be pretty greasy and kind of tummy-hurting. I guess I love brie in certain applications but not really in mac and cheese. It was still good, I just couldn't eat a whole lot of it. Anyway, it was awesome to be able to catch up with Caitlin! We hadn't seen her since the wedding, which is ridiculous. After dinner, we went with Caitlin to meet up with some of her friends, including Shola, another film production kid, who I hadn't seen since graduating from BU. We went to a karaoke bar and had a blast. I even sang a couple times! Always in a group though, because, c'mon.

The next day we slept in (almost to our checkout time!) because we were so exhausted by all the walking we'd been doing, then we checked out and drove home. It was a fantastic weekend and I think a complete success. I'm pretty proud of how well it went because I organized the whole thing, planned out what we were seeing and when, got our reservation at the hotel, and navigated us through the subway. The next week though we were pretty wiped out!