Haunted Windows

We've all heard about haunted houses, churches, castles, etc., but have you ever heard of a haunted window? Well, I guess you heard it here first - they exist!! I know, because my residence provides a comfortable home for such an item. Winter refuses to leave New York, and Spring is too afraid to arrive, so we've been in the high 30's - low 40's all week, and will be so indefinitely. So it's kind of annoying when someone keeps opening the window next to my bed in the middle of the night, in the morning, etc. Naturally, I gave my guests a tongue-lashing and told them to stop opening it. Peculiarly, I didn't get much of a response. Then, one day when they were gone, I noticed that the window was open again, even though I was sitting right next to it and had closed it earlier in the day. My window is opening itself. It is truly possessed, as I am also possessed with figuring out how to keep the damn thing closed....

Well, lots of activities in the last week. First of all, I am quite healthy once again. Surely the rigorous workouts I've given my body over the last week helped out. When I last left you, I was detailing my plans for the week, going to Baraonda's for the Wednesday-night disco party. Well, we stopped by my old roommate Alan's apartment before hand (at around 10:30) and had a pre-party drink. Since he lives a block away from the place, it worked out well that we arrived at the restaurant at about 11:30 and the place was jammin, full of sleezy Euro-trash and gorgeous women, though none as gorgeous as the ones I arrived with ;o). Disco tunes, 70's, 80's, hip-hop, salsa, Mediterranean, Italian, and Arabic (belly-dancing) was all part of the mix. It was pretty fun watching the girls dance. Why can't I have Latin hips?? Thanks to a lack of food for the day, the girls got carried away pretty quickly after a few drinks and so we had to leave early, at around 2:00am. Before we left though, when Kira was waiting for the bathroom, some sleezy Euro came up and started talking to her in Spanish and before she knew it she had a small mound of white powder in her hand. Gee, I wonder what that is. Good thing Vanessa was there to help her throw it against the door and get the hell out of there. Yea, we're talking about serious Euro-trash, which is part of the fun ;o).

Not to be outdone, Thursday night we met up with a "friend" of Vanessa's and Kira's who lives here in the city. After chilling and chatting with some coffee at DTUT, We took the girls out for some real American food at Brother Jimmy's, which serves up ribs, buffalo wings, and every other kind of barbequed item that you can imagine. And cheap, watery beer. So we got our calories for the evening and then headed over to a not-very-UES place called Stir, which was kinda trying to be a downtown nightclub. On the Upper East Side. Yea, it doesn't work too well up here. But we hung out around there for a while before heading home at around 12:30.

Friday night, after my apartment was overhauled, we hit the town at about 11:00 and went down to Max Fish in the Lower-East-Side, my favorite part of the city. I had actually wanted to check this bar out because, as some of you know, it was right outside this bar that an aspiring actress was recently shot. I figured it was in some seedy, cool part of the LES, but no. It was RIGHT in the middle of all the clubs and bars down there. Pretty amazing that something so tragic can happen on a street like that. Of course, we weren't down there at 4:00am like they were, either...Anyway, we met up with Vanessa and Kira's friend again and he helped me get my liquid courage going by buying me multiple rounds of Rum-'n-Coke. Sure, don't mind if I do! He actually brought a friend that he works with who has been learning German since July, so I got to "ueben" my German. I was quite impressed with her vocab and grammar skills in such a short amount of time. I guess it's good motivation when your boyfriend is German and his parents don't speak English!

Saturday was the day of recovery from the Rum-'n'Cokes. Not that I had too much to drink, but all that cheap rum was burning my stomach up. I kept popping pills all day (ummm, Tums), but they had little effect. In fact, I didn't really recover from it until that night. But, nonetheless, Paul and I took the girls down to the WTC site, the Staten Island Ferry (for Statue of Liberty and New York skyline views), and Wall Street before heading out to the West Village to meet up with Cathy and D for dinner at Deborah's. Wow, was that food amazing. It wasn't anything too crazy, just American food. But it was excellent. I see why Paul and Cathy are such fans of the place! So we cruised around and checked out the scene down there for a while, had a coffee at Cafe Reggio, home of America's first cappucino machine. We like their desserts and coffees, so we spoiled ourselves for the evening.

Sunday, I got a little group together to do brunch downtown before the girls realized that they couldn't go :o| . And since the girls weren't going, the group slowly melted away and so just Sean, his "friend" Lauren, and I headed downtown. They were bummed that they couldn't meet the girls, but they'll be around this week to meet up with, I hope! Anyway, we went down to SoHo and found a cool little place called Bread and had brunch/lunch there. Sorry, that name is a little too generic for me to provide a link to. But the food there was excellent! Dude, do you get the picture about the food in this city?!?!? I love it!! Aftewards, I did some tagging-along while they shopped for their upcoming ski trip. The rest of the night was pretty chill. It was Sunday, afterall!

Monday night we chilled again, but Tuesday night Paul had gotten us free tickets from work for the Irish Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Carnegie Hall!!! I hadn't been there yet, so I was pretty stoked about checking that out. Not being a big classical music aficionado, I figured it would be a nice little show and that was it, but I was really blown away by the acoustics and precision of the group. It sounded way better than the classic music MP3s that I play on my little computer speakers (imagine that!!). In addition to the string orchestra, they also had a tenor singing, a poetry reader, and an Irish-dancer-guy. I guess it was tap-dancing, but it was very Irish and the guy was pretty amazing. I can't put into words how amazed I was by this, but I think that I'll add Carnegie Hall to the list of events to attend more often here.

Afterwards, Paul and I took the girls to The View, the rotating lounge on the top floor (~45th) of the Marriott Marquee in Times Square. The views from there are, not surprisingly, very impressive and it's a good spot to mingle with other tourists and gawk at the city from above. I did a little sweet-talking to our waitress and got her to wave half of our cover-charge to make the evening a bit more reasonable-priced, if you can call $15 martinis reasonably-priced!

Whew, that's all I got for now. I have loads of pictures to upload, which I will do at some point in the near future. Maybe even tonight, since the girls went AWOL on me and left me at home by myself :o( ....

The J.