Tonight is the West Village Chorale’s annual Messiah Sing, and I’m going for the second year in a row. This year my Grandma is coming down to the City and we are going together. My grandmother is my favorite person ever, and I am so excited! If you come, be sure to find us at intermission and say hello!

The details:

487 Hudson Street in Manhattan
It starts at 7:30 and you should arrive before 7:15.
Admission is $12, and $10 for seniors and students – no sales in advance.
You don’t have to sing (but it’s more fun if you do!)

From Time Out New York:

Bowery Mission, which just celebrated its 130th anniversary last month, serves Thanksgiving meals from Monday 23 to November 27. Volunteer slots for Thanksgiving (7am–7pm) are filling up, but operations director Matt Krivich urges walk-ins to drop by anyway. If you really want to lend a hand, he says, bring fresh-baked pies, of which “there are never enough.” Ain’t that the truth. 227 Bowery between Rivington and Stanton Streets, Manhattan (bowery.org, 212-674-3456)

I perked up when I read this. I love baking for Thanksgiving but we celebrate at Rob’s parent’s house, and they keep kosher, so stuff from my not-as-strict kosher kitchen can’t contribute to the table. I’ve been bummed for a while that my pie baking prowess never gets to shine, so now I plan to spend Tuesday and Wednesday baking up a storm. If you want to bake a pie, too, go for it! Spread the love.

Yeah, that’s right! Two list items in one weekend!

Saturday night me, Dana, Wesley and Rob headed to the 86th floor of the Empire State Building. There are touristy things to do in New York City that are way overrated, but going to the top of the Empire State Building is not one of them, especially at night when all the lights on the ground are twinkling and you can see three states worth of view. The observation deck is open until 2 am and the last elevator up is at 1:15. We walked through the lobby doors at 1 and sailed through the empty maze of velvet ropes that usually are jammed with tourists. From lobby to observation deck was about 5 minutes.

At the top, I got good and kissed.

A drunk girl in a Yankees jersey was standing in front of the entrance to the B, Q, and 4 trains (both uptown and down).  She pointed at the platform beyond the terminal and asked, “Where does this go?”

How do you even start to answer that?

A man stuck his head through the open subway car and addressed the passengers inside.

“Does this train run local?” We were at Jay street, on the A. Tourists don’t go to Jay Street. People who live in Brooklyn and should know where they are going go to Jay Street.  Just saying.

I was about to answer him when he shouted at the train car, “Hey! Wake up! IS THIS A LOCAL TRAIN?!”

“NO!” yelled about five us us, and then the doors slid shut.

“Hey wait,” I said, “did he just tell us to “wake up?”

“Mmm-hmmm! Yes he did.” said the woman next to me. “Yes he freakin’ did!”

We scowled at him together through the windows of the subway car as the train pulled away.

Last night Rob and I walked up and down Carmine Street after a meeting, looking for dinner. We ducked into The Grey Dog for food, and it was wonderful. Cheap (at least, by NYC standards) and tasty and very, very cozy. They even have draft beer which totally made it perfect. There was a small array of yummy looking desserts, and it’s a coffee shop, really, so I’m guessing they know their way around a steam wand, but we only had supper.

I got a tuna melt. Rob had a burger. We left full and happy.

These photos by artist Christoph Niemann have been all over the internet after being in the NYTimes. They’re so fun! (See them all here.)

This taxi one is my favorite. I can never tell what the lights on top of the taxi mean, so I usually just end up flailing at any cab I see and hope it will stop for me. Yes, I realize this makes me uncool. This is one of many things, really, that make me uncool. It’s ok. It’s part of my charm.

Happy weekend.

I am so sick.

New Years eve, in the morning, I slipped on my bathing suit for the last time in a long time, threw on a gauzy skirt and tank top over it, and padded down to breakfast with the family in my flip-flops. Afterward I slathered myself with sunscreen and collapsed into a chair poolside in the hot sun, trying to soak as much of it in before I went back to New York, and the cold, and the snow. I went swimming with Rob’s super adorable nine year old nephew and his mom, and floated around on a blow up raft with my feet dangling in the water.

It took forever for our plane to pull up to the gate, and forever to get our bags and forever to get to our car. By the time midnight came around, we were almost home, and we listened to the countdown on the radio. Rob pulled over on the deserted side street, and we kissed quickly, said “Happy New Year!”, and continued on.

The dogs jumped all over us and we kissed and patted them all hello. It was a few minutes before either of us realized something was off: the furnace. The thermostat read 49 degrees, although the heat was set to 70. We called the landlord, the super and 311, but no help came until the morning. It was, literally, a “three dog night”, with the five of us huddled together as the temperature in our bedroom dropped even further.

We waited for hours the next day while they tried to fix it before we gave up and packed everyone up to go to Rob’s parent’s house. We eventually got a phone call saying it was all done and the heat was working again. We waited until after dinner to give it a chance to warm up and then drove home again. We we arrived, it was as cold as ever and the furnace still wouldn’t kick on.

“We’ll be back in the morning” we were told. “Something must have gone wrong.”

Yeah, no kidding.

“I can’t spend another night in this cold!” Rob declared, and I agreed. We packed up again and drove the hour back to Rob’s parent’s house, and the next morning, it was finally warm in our apartment.

Now we are so, so sick. Rob spent most of Friday laying in bed, full-on miserable, while I slumped on the couch feeling “not so great”, but ok. Carissa had come over to collect her stuff from house sitting, and we watched movies. Saturday I couldn’t get up until well after the sun had gone down again. I spent the day mostly awake, reading, and, at one point, getting attacked by a giant house fly that had survived January by living in my bedroom. He was HUGE, and he wasn’t going down without a fight. It was horrible. He kept flying into my face, and tried to steal my sandwich.

We have mice, too. I saw them, and not a “glimpse” of a mouse either; I stood by my stove and watched them boldly play on top of the burners and dirty plates and cups: their own mousey jungle gym. They didn’t notice me if I didn’t move, so I stood quite close to the stove, and watched them for a while. If they weren’t infesting my house with their mouseness, I would think that they are pretty cute.

I tried to set traps for them involving complicated series of wooden spoons, boxes, trap doors, cardboard tubes and soda bottle caps, but nothing worked and I kept being outsmarted. The score currently stands Mice: 2, Amber and Rob: 0 (call me a granola hippie douche bag if you want, but I’m not breaking their necks with normal traps). We’ll keep trying. When I catch them, I have plans to insert them exactly where they belong in the Circle of Life: I’m giving them to Bra the cat. Bra is pretty cool. He has gone from running away at the mere sight of me to scurrying out of the way cautiously and watching me from a distance, to not moving at all as I brush by, to letting me stand near and look at him from a few feet, to cautiously sniffing my outstretched hand, to letting me pet him with one finger behind an ear, gently, and just for a second before he gets too scared. We’re growing fond of one another.

I went to a meeting today and had to commute home in rush hour Manhattan traffic. It was tough; twice I missed the subway by mere seconds and once I had been waiting right where the doors open, but people shoved me out of the way and the doors closed on my face and arm. “Ah!” I shouted, “THE SUBWAY DOORS ARE SQUISHING MY FACE!”, except, of course, it sounded like, “Tha! TH’ THUBTHAY THORS THAR THUISHING THY THACE!”

Someone behind me grabbed my left shoulder and heaved, thank god!, and with another big yank I was able to rescue my handbag which was half in my hands and half on the train in danger of going downtown without me. I thanked my quick-thinking rescuer and scowled (painfully) through the windows of the subway at the people who had shoved me aside and were going merrily on their way with their faces unbruised. Assholes.

I took another subway in the wrong direction, and then, because I took so long getting home, Rob left our home subway stop where he was waiting for me with the car and I had had to walk seven blocks in the rain. And the drummers! My god.

There were these guys with bongos that got on the subway to “entertain” everyone with their music, hoping for thank you money. Ok, fine, it’s New York. I expect that, and usually it’s pretty cool to stumble upon a car with musicians. But they’re drummers. DRUMMERS. The first (only?) requirement of drumming is that you need to have rhythm. These guys did not. I wanted to hit them with my purse and yell,

“One!” *smack* “Two!” *smack* “Three!” *smack* “Four!” *smack* LEARN TO COUNT TO FOUR!”

But these guys were “free stylin’”, which is to say they were too, ahem, “chemically altered” to keep a beat. The noise made me feel slightly crazy. I changed subway cars to get away from them, but at the next stop they moved, too, and I had to go back to the first car to get away from Annoyance, the musical.

During my switch, I realized I was on the wrong subway, so when it stopped I found the correct one, an endeavor that involved all sorts of complicated shenanigans. When I finally got myself sorted and found a seat on the correct subway, I heard drummers on that one, too. Like the first guys, they sounded awful. I thought to myself, “How many off-beat drummers could there be in this city right now?” and then I saw them and kind of froze for a second, horrified. It was the same guys.

I was going to move but I figured there was no point. They’d just find me again. I sat glumly, shoved between two fat people, and endured them pounding on their instruments like drunks (which they probably were).

The drumming stopped and they took off their caps, walking up and down the car hoping for money. “A small donation would be appreciated,” he said to me, smiling.

I seriously hate this city sometimes.

Yesterday was a series of circumstantial bell curves.

I got an appointment last minute with an optometrist. Rock! Three minutes before, I was 1000 feet away from the entrance of the door (according to my GPS), and an access-a-ride truck decided that the middle of the street was a great place to unload slow-moving seniors. Suck.

I drove around and couldn’t find a good parking spot. More suck. I was late.

I finally found a spot, and the guys who worked in the shop I parked in front of told me that, yes, this too-good-to-be-true parking spot is valid. Rock!

I was late for my appointment and had to reschedule after lunch, in an hour. Suck.

I simultaneously discovered a crumpled twenty in my purse, and a diner three doors down from my appointment. I ordered a grilled cheese and coffee. Both were perfect. Rock.

My appointment went well; the doctor was nice and, after two minutes of me being a baby about it, didn’t make me suffer through the glaucoma test [for the unfamiliar: you stick your head in a machine and have to get your eye just right, and then the machine poof!s air on your eyeball, and no matter how much you're prepared for it, you nearly pee yourself every time.] I picked out glasses I love. Awesome.

I stepped out onto the street, looked out, and panicked; then rolled I my eyes at myself. I am forever thinking my car has been towed.

“Not this time!”, I thought. “The parking gods have given me a gift, and I double checked with a guy from a shop. A guy from a shop! He’s a guy! He’s local! He knows what’s going on. My car is just behind that garbage tr… Oh.”

My car had been towed. My cell phone was broken, too, and the pay phone ate about three bucks worth of quarters before I got a connection, in what I call you-should-have-fixed-your-cell-phone-earlier tax. It has to be called something; a phenomenon with a name is not as bad as plain old “robbed by a piece of machinery”.

The cop on the street had given me the wrong number for the tow company, and it took me three minutes on the phone with a bewildered receptionist at a Spanish-speaking nursing home to figure this out. Someone else had their last quarter eaten by the pay phone, and, in an effort to reverse my karma, I gave him one of mine. (Not that I believe in that stuff, but it couldn’t hurt, right?) The cabbie I managed to flag down refused to drive to my neighborhood. I had to take a convoluted subway ride home. Suck.

I finally got home and Rob wasn’t mad, because he’s awesome. I was somehow able to shower, dress, and get out the door again in time to keep my iPhone appointment and see John Hodgeman’s Apple Store talk. (They only let ONE hot girl go ahead of me this time. It’s an improvement.) John was taking questions from the audience, and he answered my question, which was “Who inspires you?”; a total high note way to end the day.

Rock.