NYC

Last weekend, Cute W and I went to New York. All by ourselves. It was a birthday date for me that we fit into our schedule a few weeks late.

We had so much fun! We left on Friday afternoon, and Cute W drove us down to Poughkeepsie, where we caught the train to Grand Central in time to drop our things off at the hotel, a short walk away at the Millennium by the UN (Priceline, baby!). Then we headed to Times Square for TKTS. This was a bit of a tough call. There were a ton of shows that we’d already seen via Proctors, a couple of shows that I wanted to see but that were potentially a bummer/unavailable, and then a bunch of shows we were vaguely interested in. We settled on Mean Girls. It was super-quick to get tickets. I remember waiting in those lines for hours before, and we literally just had one person in front of us. The tourists seemed absolutely adorable. First, there was a young-ish man visiting alone from–I don’t know, some other country. And he’d requested some famous-person concert and the man helping him said that the ticket was $44, and you could see the guy hesitate, like, is this a scam? Is this a rip off? And Cute W and I were encouraging him that this was excellent and it would all be fine. And then there was some mother-daughter pair who wanted Frozen tickets and then hear that the best tickets available were in the 14th row and the mom was sort of bummed out that this was just way too far back and we were like, no! 14th row is better than the 1st row, you don’t want to be looking up people’s noses, you’ll see the stage better, you should do that! So hopefully all the tourists had an excellent night.

We sure did! First we went to Tacuba Cantina for dinner. It was really super-delicious. Yummy ceviche and guacamole and scrumptious carne asade tacos. And we split a fantastic-tasting-yet-also-surprisingly-strong pitcher of margaritas.

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It was all delicious. And then we stumbled our way over to the theater for Mean Girls. I had sort of low expectations for the show, and I was surprised by how much I liked it. It was funny and surprisingly moving, too. We had so, so much fun, and if part of it was the pitcher of margaritas, well then, I highly recommend Mean Girls with a side of margaritas!

On Saturday we actually split up. I went to a Madeleine L’Engle-themed writing conference, and Cute W walked and biked all over the place, including checking out our old neighborhood in Brooklyn. We met up at the end of the day for–you guessed it!–more scrumptious, Yelp-recommended deliciousness. Actually, we headed back to Thai Villa, a restaurant we had visited (and I wrote about) a while back, because we remembered that it was so very excellent.

I can’t find the menu online, so here is something that we ate, but I can’t tell you want it is. Little rice cakes, yes, with cilantro and a pepper and between it. . . umm, I don’t know. some paste of something that was delicious. I can’t tell you what. But it was so good.

I can tell you that this is a Crispy Catfish Salad.

I know. It’s blurry. I was too excited to pause for long. Because this was the salad that we had both remembered oh-so-fondly, and then we were trying to remember which salad we had liked so much, and we figured it out because a Crispy Catfish salad sounds like almost the last salad I would ever order in my life, which is just what I remembered had happened last time. What I should have done is look at my blog, because I named the salad from our last visit. But we’d guessed right. It was so good that I wish that I could shrink into a teeny-tiny person and make a thatched hut out of this salad and live in it forever.

We had aspirations to follow up dinner with music or dancing or comedy, but we were both pretty exhausted form our long days, so we headed back to the hotel instead.

Meanwhile, the girls were all by themselves. J had to get an early ride from M to the high school for a long bus ride to a championship volleyball game. That’s right: Cute W and I missed the championship game. But in fairness, we had planned our city trip long before, the volleyball game was way out in Syracuse, and we were pretty much guaranteed that J would just be cheering from the sidelines (which is what happened, and yes, good for her for being pulled up to varsity and we are so, so, so very proud, but honestly? Did we need to cancel our plans and my registration and drive 2 hours each way to cheer for our daughter’s. . . cheering? Well, if you think so, then you are a better mother than I am). They lost their game. It was okay. Same refrain as M’s end-of-season: “at least we beat Shen.” M kept joking about how she was going to throw a “banger” over the weekend, but. . . I’m pretty sure she didn’t. No, of course not. Those girls behaved themselves.

It was a great weekend, for us, and I think the girls liked having a little Serenity Time away from us. It was lovely to take the chance to have a little date before resuming the usual craziness. This weekend M and Cute W headed off to a soccer tournament, and of course next weekend we’ll have family here for Thanksgiving.