spring... and a lack of adventures...

Well, 'in like a lion out like lamb' started out accurately for March, with the snowstorm of the season, but so far the lamb bit has been pretty slow coming! but now a few of the spring flowers have pushed on up. here's a couple of pics from central park, taken not for their artistic quality, but to illustrate the season:


The buds on the trees are starting to appear:


It is refreshing to know there's life under all the brown and grey - and soon it will be glorious, I'm sure. we've even had a couple of warm days, but there are still plenty of sub-zero ones to counter-balance it. Central park is starting to pack out, and on the weekends if you're not in early, Prospect park is a bustling highway of runners, walkers and cyclists all doing the exercise thing...

I played soccer again this week - first time since the cracked rib - in this new game, at 7.30 in the morning! fab, great way to start the day. it's an 'intermediate' level with some of the same people from the weekend game, but much faster. no pain or re-damage to the rib, so all is good. hurrah.

We decided we' re not going to do the Brooklyn half marathon - it feels a shame, but we realised how much time we were going to have to put into training, and felt that it wasn't worth it, when there's so much else good here to do... so we'll do one in NZ sometime instead.

No great adventures to report, but we ate the famous magnolia cupcakes with Simon:


And good they were, too, though I'm not enough of a connoisseur to tell the difference between many bakeries in terms of quality. The red velvet cupcake concept (on the left) is pretty delicious, as I think I've mentioned before; that day, however, we opted for the hummingbird (on the right), which was more like a cake, and oh so yum. Oh and we went and ate a huge pastrami sandwich at the Carnegie Deli (v classic, and v expensive!), or rather D and Simon shared one (and I stole bits), and I had a matzoh ball soup. absolutely delicious. but in all my imaginings of this classic Jewish dish, which I had never had before, and had to try in NYC, I had never thought the 'balls' would be as enormous as they were... We also took Simon to Doughnut Plant and the creme brulee doughnut got the big thumbs up!

A rather low key week recovering from Simon's visit... but we saw a sweet film - Sunshine Cleaning, directed by 'our' very own Christine Jeffs... thoroughly enjoyable, and made even more special for us by the fact that the main character (Amy Adams) drove (wait... you better believe it) a tercel, and one exactly the same colour as our old blue-grey one... actually, there's a tercel in the neighbourhood here, but it's gold (how tasteless!), and pretty beat up. Still, it's still a rare car to sight.

Oh, and of course I have to mention that I got proposed to - yesterday - by a homeless man in Greenwich Village. I am walking to the subway to go to work after collecting my camera, and this guy is coming in the other direction, and as he approaches says something along the lines of 'why cain't [pronounces like that] I marry you girl?' at which point I neither point out that a) I haven't said he can't or b) give him a sociopolitical critique of the institution of marriage... I just keep walking, but he makes me smile (he keeps walking, too, and talking away about this marriage), and that is worth something (I wasn't smiling after my $250 camera bill...)

We're off to Arizona tomorrow to try and have some fun - I've got a conference at the end of the week, so we're holidaying for a few days beforehand. Avoiding the 8 types of poisonous snakes (ugh!!), scorpions, spiders and cougars in the Sonora Desert is my main aim! Some days of hiking and holidaying are just what the doctor ordered. and the temperatures. It will still be cold at night, but mid-high 20s and low 30s in the day. Hooray. My adventures this week have been costly preparations for the trip - buying some new hiking books, and getting my camera fixed - US$250! bloody hell, take me back to the film age please, my old SLRs never played up like this digital one. grrr. But the silver lining, if there is one, is that the NZ$ has rallied some against the US$, so it ain't all as bad as it would have been 2 weeks ago. long may it last!

For those of you in the southern hemisphere, enjoy the last summerly days of summer, as we start to feel that we can even dream of it here!

ciao.