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The Recipe

I figured if I put “the recipe” on the blog I would always know where to find it, so here it is…

Deb and I were making dinner for friends and wanted to make the flaming penne a la vodka sauce dish I used to make to try to impress the girls (or so the family lore goes). Already working on our third year of marriage and fairly solidly having already got the girl, it appeared I had forgotten how to make the dish.

In any event, thanks mom, for looking, and John for being far more organized than me and still having the recipe. And thanks Meg, a friend now living in da U.K. (no U.P.) for having introduced me to the dish and having written this out originally.

Yum!

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Back to School I Go - Almost

Well, I am terribly excited because it looks very much like I will be able to start taking some pre requisites (chemistry, anatomy and physiology, etc) starting at the end of this month!

I don’t know for 100% sure, but it looks like I will be attending the Borough of Manhattan Community College, also known as BMCC.

Next steps are trying to get some experience! I can’t wait!

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Happy New Year

Happy New Year from not even 10 blocks from the “dropping ball” in Times Square!

Wouldn’t you know it? We decided to live on one of the streets the City of New York thought would make a good entrance to the melee that is New Year’s Eve in Times Square. In their efforts to keep revelers safe, the entirety of Times Square was cordoned off and everyone (!!!) was wanded before they could enter the Square (see the Times Square Alliance FAQ regarding New Year’s Eve). It was actually remarkably well planned and executed from my point of view. The various viewing areas were essentially cattle pens, or individual cells where you could stand on the streets in your designated area—depending on how early you got there in the day, and they started closing streets at 4pm—while allowing police to keep cross streets relatively unobstructed in the event of emergency. It was fascinating to see. I’m probably not describing it that well, but “cheers!” to the city for managing it pretty well.

I should be clear. We did not get out into this madness for the ball dropping. We just poked around a little bit after a New Year’s Eve dinner (at Thalia—yum!) with our friends Wendy and Joe and Joe’s folks. In fact, since our street was a designated “entrance” for a while, we had to swim upstream to get out of our apartment building and to the restaurant 2 blocks away. It took maybe 15-20 minutes to cover those two blocks, but since we were going in the opposite direction of everyone else they were generally pretty willing to let us by since they probably thought our departure got them that much closer.

This second photo was taken about 9 o’clock on Broadway all the way up at our street at 52nd (remember the “ball” is located down on 42nd/43rd Street and is not visibile from this vantage point). Just to the left of the CNN billboard, you may be able to see a big portable Jumbotron screen that they were using to show the ball drop on for those people on this street. After we took this photo we quickly got out of there since this particular “holding pen” was filling up pretty quickly and we didn’t want to get trapped. We ended up heading back to our Wendy and Joe’s apartment upstairs and playing a round of Trivial Pursuit with Joe’s parents (which for the record ended in a three-way five-slice tie) before toasting the New Year. We couldn’t see much, but you could certainly hear the estimated 750,000 people counting down to 2005.

All that to say… Happy New Year!

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