2 years in the making

So My New Best Friend and I just celebrated 2 years of glorious wedded bliss. Really it has been awesome. We had a week off starting the day before our anniversary so we stayed up north a couple extra days and made a couple trips into NYC. We visited with my old bud "Dave the super drum bucket rabbi" and his wife Rita and their small offspring Ilana. They live in the east Village where all the cool stuff is anyway. So we checked out their apartment and Dave showed us his dunny collection. He also directed us to an all vegetarian Thai restaurant across the street from his house called PUKK. I had the protein duck and MNBF had something else. It was super delish!!! I also ordered the special gay martini and toasted to our cats. Yummy Yum Freshmmmm!

Afterwards we went back up to Dave and Ritas crib and gave Ilana a build a bear we made for her at the shop on 5th ave. Actually we made a build a cat and put one of those little baby laughing noise boxes in it, which are actually quite terrifying and not cute at all. But I knew Dave would appreciate it.

Then they took us to a place I can't remember the name of, but we were assured it had the best italian deserts. So we got some scrumptious little edible doo dads and proceeded to consume them heartily. Ilana just held on to hers forming a gelatinous mess in her little fingers while shouting "WHOA WHOA WHOA WHOA WHOA WHOA WHOA" with every step. This is the preferred method of enjoying a scrumptious little doo dad for a toddler.

We then went to a performance a few blocks over at John Zorn's space The Stone and saw a quartet comprised of piano, cello, violin and drums. They proceeded to bend their instruments into perverse balloon animals and then drag them through a manic depressive ballerina's bad dream. It was an interesting display of "far out" classical jazz noise. The cello player was especially fun to watch as he was very cartoonish and several times it seemed that his head was going to explode. I think Anilia was actually terrified by him and is currently seeking therapy to work through this difficult trauma.

We wandered around the village some more and stopped for some coffee then called it a night and drove back to our hotel to be greeted by a bounding bouncy doggie.

Sunday was our actual anniversary and we headed back to NYC for the day, this time opting to take the bus instead of driving in.

We hopped the subway over to Canal street to tool around Chinatown. Somewhere along the way it became Little Italy and we stopped and had lunch in a nice little restaurant which also had very good food and not so bad house red wine. We then proceeded to wander around the city through SOHO and did a little shopping. I got a new pair of sketchers. They are blue and a soccer-bowling combo style. We wandered into some artists studio that was painted all up on the outside and I have to say the painted up outside was the best looking thing in the studio.


We wandered around for a while having no idea where we were and eventually ended up back over near Dave's apartment. We were accosted on the street by a struggling comic who convinced us to come into the basement of a club called the Lantern to watch a free show and drink $3 pints. So we did. It was OK some of the comics were pretty funny, others not so much but none of them sucked. Ok the last fat guy sucked but the rest were pretty good at the jokes. We continued our blind wandering in search of desert and ended up in a little coffee shop called Cafe Vivaldi.. I think. We had excellent Tiramisu. Also there was a quartet of piano, violin, brass clarinet and vocals performing some traditional Russian tunes which was very nice. That about wrapped up our anniversary in NY and we headed on back to our hotel.

Monday we drove back to Baltimore... TO BE CONTINUED.