Finger Nails

A while back, I mentioned that I found it odd that since my teeth have been
fixed, I haven't been biting my finger nails anymore. This is strange because
you would think that since I only had two teeth touching each other (prior to
ortho work), I would bite my nails much less than when I have a Robert Redford
set of teeth like I have now. But, that's not the case.

Anyway, my finger nails look much better then they did before braces. I still
mess with my finger nails a lot though, but more often tearing the nail edge
off with my fingers rather than biting them, and this is where it gets weird.
The ONLY exception to this is on the thumb and the forefinger on my right hand,
where the fingernails protrude grotesquely like a girl's until I trim them with
nail clippers.

Why am I driven to savagely trim my nails on all my fingers but these too? I
honestly have no interest in these two fingernails. It's very strange. The
worst part about it is that this is my writing hand and because those two
fingers are critical to my wonderful handwriting technique, there is an inverse
relationship between my handwriting's legibility and the length of said
fingernails :o/.

J. Riley, it's a good thing I work in IT and my typing hasn't been affected :o).
And who would have thought I could write a whole post about fingernails?

These Boots Are Made For Walking

I confess: It's been a heck of a busy couple of weeks! Rebecca from Germany has
been in town and as most of you know, when there are visitors, there are too
many stories and not enough time to blog about them. And on Friday, Summer
arrived in town to visit Susannah, which makes for an even busier and pleasant
long weekend.

On Friday night, Summer and I met up for some $4 salsa classes (that would be
the dancing, not the chips-and- variety) that my Dominican friends had found
on Craigslist and told me about. I realized during the class that my salsa is
royally messed up and I'd been doing things wrong ever since....well, forever.
My problem is that I am much more comfortable with swing-dancing and I've
converted some of the aspects of swing, such as the hand-grasp, to salsa. When
I changed the hand grasp, I couldn't lead my partner as well and of course this
wreaks havoc on everything else that follows. So maybe I'll drop that little
change when I'm dancing socially ;o) .

After lessons, her and I went down to Kirara, which served up faithfully good
sushi like it always does. I'm always amazed that I can go into a place that is
listed as one of the top 100 restaurants in NY at 8:00 on a Friday night, get a
seat without waiting, and have a complete meal for less than $50 for two
people, not to mention the fact that the food is awesomely fresh. We didn't
binge on any sake, which is probably one reason for the small tab, but their
house sake is pretty good anyway!

After my Saturday morning wake-up-call to Peru (I was doing the waking-up ;o),
Becca and her friend came over (they're staying at Paul and Cathy's abandoned
apartment - thanks guys!!) and checked their mail while I got ready to head
downtown to the MoMA when the devastating news from Alex in India came that he
had split with his girlfriend of four years. Naturally, the reaction to this
was like a death in the Hain family and cast a dark cloud on the day to Rebecca
in particular until he sent reassuring emails later in the day that his solo
trip to India wasn't completely ruined.

After checking out the MoMA (free, courtesy of my employer) in midtown, we
headed back uptown and Becca and I continued the bootcamp that she has been
forcing on me - running a few miles on the running path along the East River.
This was my third run of the week and my legs - and knees, in particular -
weren't too happy about the pavement pounding. Becca and Summer both said that
I should try looking at some new running shoes, but I was pretty sure that my
$29 New Balance shoes (with custom $20 insoles, no less!) were just fine. Until
I tried a new pair of shoes on on Sunday and fell in love with them. Apparently,
my New Balance shoes, which I typically wear when walking a lot around town, are
good for just that: walking. So, they will shortly be retired and become my
"dirty" shoes and replaced with the latest pair of my extensive shoe
collection.

I had my third (fourth?) pisco sour party on Saturday night, which was
generously held at Alan and Andrea's apartment, which is much bigger than mine
and features Andrea's cooking skills. There was more drama than usual by the
end of the night and judging by my friends' questionable decisions, apparently
the pisco sours are an aphrodisiac!

Sunday we met up with Summer and Susannah down in Brooklyn to clog our arteries
with cheesy, cheesy grease with a side of eggs at Paninoteca, which was quite
fantastic. After stage one of Saturday's recovery was over, we checked out the
Brooklyn p-p-p-promenade (why do I always have such a hard time remembering
that word?) and then went back uptown to watch Shrek 2 at Paul and Cathy's
apartment.

The evening was capped by Sean, Melissa, Rebecca, and Kerstin attending a
speed-dating event downtown (sorry ladies, I'm taken) while Summer and I went
walking for some roasted chicken before being halted in mid-step by
intoxicating scent of garlic from a nearby Italian restaurant, Rocco
Restaurant. Plans of eating anything else were quickly dashed and we had a nice
dinner of fresh gnocchi with gorgonzola along with spaghetti with garlicy,
spicey, heart-burn-inducing tomato sauce (yum!).

J. Riley, I finally made it home and *crashed*!

Another International Wedding in the Wings??

So I found out about the most awesome feature I've ever seen on a website: flight tracking with Google Maps! Delta airlines actually shows you in real time where the airplane is, it's proposed flight plan, and the number of airlines in queue at the airport, departing and arriving. My fellow geeks at work were less than impressed and said that this feature has been around for a long time, but I had no idea! What would we do without Google...

Taking advantage of my lucrative tax-return and the fact that there are major festivities occurring in South America next month for Easter, I've booked yet another flight to the Southern Hemisphere, once again to Peru, to see my girl Erika again. In true frugal fashion, I did a major cost analysis of the flight down there for four days, but in the end it came down to the fact that if I don't go next month, I won't see her until October-ish, and that's a long, long time to go without seeing her, considering I've only been around her for a day and a half. But we've been talking several times per week since then and are getting along well. It's an interesting experience though...

Since I was planning on going down to Peru in October, I started to day-dream about checking out another country with Erika that I haven't seen instead of going to Peru again. Argentina? Uruguay? Colombia? Some other country that is on the State Department's "Travel Warning" list and for which it is recommended to get ransom insurance? Sounds like a stellar idea to me. I have a co-worker who's getting married to a Colombian girl in September and when I was talking to him about checking out some Caribbean islands in the country, he said that I should come to Colombia in September, go to his wedding in Bogota (isn't that where "Clear and Present Danger" was filmed?), and then head over to the islands. Are you kidding me? A Colombian wedding? Imagine the drug cartel leaders that I could rub elbows with down there! :o/ . But I'm totally gonna try to get in on that. And the islands are supposed to be amazing!

J. Riley, And the Colombian islands? Check this out:

FBI Most Wanted or Local Dive Bar?

I've spent plenty of time in the Lower East Side and the East Village, home of the hipster. Shaggy hair, grease-stained ratty clothing, tapered jeans, etc. I've seen them trying to appear as if they were from the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, and even the 90's. There are the hippies, the grungers, the punk-rockers, and the British-invaders. But we saw a new (and undesirable) hipster classification downtown last weekend: The child molester, complete with the pedo-smile and the big, slightly smokey coke-bottle glasses and everything. It is quite eery...

Rocking "The Look"

We couldn't stop laughing about this guy. We were hanging out and drinking jungle juice way, way downtown at Winnie's, which is borderline Chinatown and the Justice district, clearly in the middle of nowhere near the famous Five Points neighborhood. This place was quite interesting, complete with karaoke, drunk old Chinese guys who would occassionally sing a random song, old ladies in kimono's working the bar, a group of lesbians from England, a group of younger guys passed out on the tables from said jungle-juice, and hipsters dressed so awkwardly that they resembled child molesters :o/ . All in all, however, a great way to spend the evening after stuffing ourselves with Vietnamese food in nearby Chinatown.

This week has been low key due to training classes I've been taking for work, but that didn't stop me from checking out the Renzo Gracie Jiu Jitsu institute in midtown. After getting hooked on Pride FC Mixed-Martial Arts fights, I've been thinking about taking martial arts for a while so I figured I'd check out the infamous Gracie school. They had a free intro course so I headed there in my monkey suit after my training course. The first thing I see when I walk in are 10-feet-tall Brazilians with arm the size of my head. And they were all over the place. Just slightly intimidating.

I ended up being the only person in the intro course that day so I got some one-on-one lessons on take-downs and the reasons why Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is special, notably submission poses like choke-holds and how to put enough force on joints to destroy them, as demonstrated on me by my teacher. "Here's the knee. Here's the ACL, the patella, and here's how you snap it. You can even thrown in an achilles hold and break that in the same move." It was AWESOME! But they are pretty serious at this place and I'm not looking for commitment (well, to martial arts anyway ;o) at the moment so I think I'll just take a Jiu Jitsu self-defense class first and see if I really want to pony up $200 a month to train for the next Pride FC championship....

J. Riley, I now know two take-downs and how to knock someone out with a choke. Too bad I don't have little sisters nearby to practice on. Just kidding Summ, who is coming out in like a week :o/....

Wait, Why is Caffeine Legal?

First of all, I would just like to announce that caffeine is absolutely a drug. I rarely drink it, but on mornings like today (preceded by a late evening on the phone with South America), you just need a little kick to get the brain engine started. But I feel like my brain has been turned into big-block 460 engine with a blower on it. I have to walk around the building a few times just
to release the energy. Yikes...

Did You Know (and why would you, since I haven't posted it) that (almost) all of the pictures from my trip can be found at http://picasaweb.google.com/jhaines/Peru2007?

J. Riley, check them out

Trip Finished

For those of you that don't use Google Reader or any other RSS reader, I finally finished days eight, nine, and ten of my trip to Peru.

J. Riley, just a few more hours of reading for those ;o)

Anti-Valentine's Day, Carneval, and Chinese New Year

The people I hang out with here in NYC can be grouped into the following:
a.) Single and not dating
b.) Married but living 3000 miles away from our spouse
c.) Married but not romantic

This collection of characters makes Valentine's Day interesting and quite anti-climactic. Being Valentine-less, we decided that this year we would all get together to celebrate Anti-Valentine's Day. So most of us got together and met up at Uva for an evening of unromatic fun and some wine to boot. Originally there were going to be three of us, then the group slowly, slowly grew until there were eight of us meeting up. The wine started flowing like water in a river and before I knew it, everyone was in a celebratory sort of mood and I knew that debauchery was on the menu for the evening.

After a few macho master-strokes by some of the well-heeled members of our group that made my night cheaper than expected, Sean (or, rather, the wine he drank) decided that he would buy the first three rounds of drinks at Baraonda, a classy restaurant-turned-club-after-midnight a block down from Uva. Everyone was on board for that so we headed down the street in the freezing weather and bellied up just as the place was turning into the swanky Euro-trash place that we all love. Sean (who earlier in the week had told me that he was out of credit card debt for the first time in 20 years) was ordering drinks (or bottles, rather) out of control and our group was dropping like flies once the champagne bottles started making their rounds.

It was an absolute train-wreck by the end of the night and Sean crashed on my futon and couldn't move the next morning. It sounds like everyone else that was with us was in similar condition, which meant it was a great night :o) . Not bad for a Wednesday evening!!

On Saturday, after my volunteer event learning Capoeira with the kids (I really gotta start taking lessons), I met up with Paul and Cathy and their friends for Ethiopian food at Awash in the East Village. Paul went back to college in California and this was his long weekend trip of the month to visit Cathy and see everyone that he abandoned ;o). I hadn't had Ethiopian in a long time and I forgot how good it was!!

We finished up in time for me to head over to SOB's, which was having a celebration for the kick-off of Brazil's carneval. SOB's is always fun anyway, but for Carneval it was crazy! I got there around midnight and there was a nice 1/2 hour line outside to get inside. Once I finally got in, I found Sean and his friend, but all of the other people that were supposed to show up never ended up coming. A few hours later, I ran into one of the Dominican girls that I had met a few months back and who I had planned on meeting up with that night. My friend Priya and a guy named Ray from work also showed up so we had a nice little crew to dance to the samba music from the live band. We also had a few caiparinhas and mojitos to celebrate with. Being a three day weekend (President's Day), I stayed out later than normal and eventually got to bed at around 5:00am, late enough.

The next day I was up at 10:00 to meet up with Alan, Andrea, Paul, Cathy, etc. for Chinese New Year. I guess we weren't the only ones who decided that a Dim Sum lunch in Chinatown would be a good idea because it was jam packed with people down there. Who's great idea was it to plan Carneval the day before Chinese New Year? Crowds everywhere! After a stressful, freezing walk around Chinatown fighting crowds and finding hour-long waits for Dim Sum, Alan finally steered us to Yeah Shanghai, where a "15 minute" wait turned into almost an hour wait.

The stress finally went away when Alan, utilizing his new Chinese skills, ordered up mounds and mounds of good food for everyone to share family style. The food was absolutely awesome and it felt good to be warm and have a full belly again. The best part? We paid about $10 each for the meal :oD !!

J. Riley, that was an unusual, crazy week believe it or not!

Handsome Devil

I used to be quite the cute kid, whatever happened?






Justy Bobo, thanks for the pics dad

No More Braces!!

The braces are off!!!

Sammy's Halal

You've probably heard about the area where I work: metal recycle shops, abandoned warehouses, truck yards, and auto repair centers. And my building. And no lunch options except a questionable pizza shop, questionable Chinese food, questionable diner food, and solid Thai food. That's about it though. But Jackson Heights (remember Little Columbia?), about 10 minutes away by subway, is abundant in good eats with plenty of Indian, Latin, etc. restaurants.

And Sammy's Halal. I've been ranting and raving about trying this place out ever since last year's Vendy Awards, which rates the best street cart vendors in the city. And Sammy's was #1 for all of New York! Considering how many Halal street carts there are, that's really saying something.

By the time I got to work this morning, I was desperately craving a buffalo chicken sandwich from anywhere. Don't ask me why, but that salty, spicy combination was making me drool at 9:00am. During a coffee break, some coworkers and I inspected the cafeteria to see if there was any sign of buffalo chicken being an option at lunch today (real busy day at work:o/ ) and it was definitely not an option so one of my coworkers suggested that we finally make the trip out to Jackson Heights to see if Sammy's was really all it's been made out to be.

We made it to the street vendor Mecca by lunch time and bowed down to Sammy's plastic trophy as we ordered a $5 chicken and gyro on rice combo with white sauce and spicy sauce and then made the road trip back to the cafeteria to consume our delictable meals. My poor Indian coworker doesn't eat meat, so he was stuck with his standard salad bar meal at work, but Sammy's Halal rocked! Spicy (and salty :-D) , but not overwhelmingly so, with fluffy rice, well-spiced meat, and even a little lettuce. I'll be back, Sammy, don't you worry...

I was sitting in the chiropractor's office today when it dawned on me that I had no idea how many times I've been to Europe since my first trip in 1995. I've been to South America three times, but I have no idea about Europe. And I realize that I'm pretty lucky to be able to just go to American Airline's website and book a ticket to Europe without even thinking twice. The rest of the world has to go and get a visa, but not us. Many people go through their life without seeing other parts of the world, so I am definitely fortunate for this.

J. Riley, I'm not done with my South America trip diary, which will appear below on the dates that they occurred. Lot's more important stuff to write about!!