A Day in the Life....

I've gotten some recent not-so-subtle messages from people saying things like, "Gee, your incessant blogging is swell and all, but what about life with Erika? How are things at home?". And that is a very valid question, for sure. After all, getting married to someone from a different culture, who speaks a different first language, comes from a different lifestyle is bound to beg the question.

To be honest, I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I proposed to Erika back in February. Since we first met in Lima, there was always a comfortable feeling between us that allowed us to be ourselves and understand each other even when things were being lost in translation. I had a choice - I could continue aging and spending long weekends in Lima, or I could take a chance that just felt right. But I had no idea if she and I could get along for an extended amount of time in a single household. We spent one week together in an apartment as a pilot run to see what would happen. She was always confident that we knew each other so well that there wouldn't be anything new that would throw us off track, but I was getting warned by people that "all the little things" are what cause problems - things like choosing which side of the bed to sleep on and the fact that her dog wouldn't eat if she wasn't at home :o/! What if we both wanted to sleep on the left-hand side? In any case, the pilot run went even better than I expected and I got to experience the wonders of a Latina "wife".

After this trip, I was pretty confident that there wouldn't be any major problems, but I still wanted to wait a bit to actually get married once we were in my comfort zone - and outside of her's, juuuuust to make sure. Well, apart from the first day after the red-eye flight home - which was admittedly awkward living in the Bronx (I mean, where do you start with New York when you are living there?), the results have been even better than the initial pilot run.

It is a little strange for me to get used to a new "system" of cleanliness, such as washing the dishes daily, vacuuming and thoroughly cleaning the apartment weekly, and washing towels and blanketsmore than twice a year. Good riddance to this habits of a bachelor! But the partnership of marriage with someone you can call your best friend is a wonderful and efficient thing. You can do so much more with so less time, it's amazing!

For example, this evening. It helps that I live about 15 minutes away from work via a bus (by the way, I now hate MTA buses) because I now get home by 5:30 or 5:45, like today. With summer over and all of the free events finished, I want to start going to the Beefcake Musclemania gym more than once a week like I have been. So I changed into my gym clothes and coerced my other half into going with me for the second day in a row. We hit the gym, did our cardio and beef-a-reeno exercises and got home around seven o'clock. Summer (the sister) says to eat carbs and protein immediately after exercising, so into the kitchen we go to scrounge for a recipe to actually cook dinner. After haggling over a few options, we settled on salad and a pasta. Into the salted, boiling water went the Trader Joe's Spinach and Chive fettucini (buy this now!) while Erika washed and cleaned arugula and basil for the salad and I got the crushd garlic, fresh parmesan, and olive oil all ready to go. Sorry, we're missing out on the protein tonight, Summer - my progression to beefdom will have to wait.

After dinner, it was time to try to kill the angel-food cake that someone made me at work, along with peaches and whipped cream. The kitchen was a disaster, but it had to wait because it was time for me to sit on my ass and learn some Spanish with Rosetta Stone (sidenote: Astoria rocks, we found a church nearby that offers free Spanish lessons! Sign me up, since my wife won't talk to me in Spanish for an extended amount of time, mostly because I revert to English). After Spanish, I jumped in the shower in order to clean the muscle-oil off my body and shave my 8:00 shadow so that I can sleep an extra two minutes in the morning.

With thirty minutes of easy Spanish lessons done, Erika had to start her homework, so back to the kitchen I go to voluntarily do dishes on a weeknight while Erika chats with her mom and gets back to studying. By 9:00, the kitchen is spotless, the trash cans are all emptied, and I am reading about Liverpool's game earlier in the day (we won, of course). 9:00pm, and all of this has been accomplished!

When I lived in the Bronx, it was more like this: Arrive home after an hour and fifteen minute commute at 6:30pm. Relax for a half-hour, change my clothes, get to the gym at 7:30pm. Exercise for an hour, shower, arrive home at 8:45pm. Eat a Cliff Bar on the way home for dinner because by that time, it's too late to cook a full dinner for myself, eat it, and clean up after myself and get to bed at a decent time. The wonders of a great partnership!

So, in summary to this novel of a 45-minute blog, things are wonderful around here, I could write all night about all of the things that I have learned and experienced. But it's been a busy, efficient day, and it's almost time to settle down for the evening :) .

J. Riley, by the way neither of us cares which side of the bed we sleep on :)

NoKnow SoHo?

So my friend Sean just moved to a swanky new location in the city - SoHo, where he pays an exorbitant rent (by New York standards, no less) for a small studio. But that's not the point - he's in a HOT neighborhood! To "celebrate" his move, we decided to go down and visit him and go to dinner and "maybe" have some drinks. Sean is not known for being a penny pincher, so I knew that his move would definitely escalate my budget for dinners and nights out.

Now, I know SoHo. Not as well as other parts of town, but I've done plenty of brunches down there, eaten at some nice places down there, and have done plenty of shopping down there on Broadway. What I realized, though, is that I DON'T know SoHo! I've been there plenty of times, but I can count on one hand (or maybe three) the number of times I've gone out at night down there. And every time I've gone out to meals down there, it has almost exclusively been East of Broadway, which makes sense because there are plenty of magnets in the area directly to the East. But West of Broadway? No, I'm drawing a blank there.

So we head out for dinner, and Sean heads West from his apartment. Strange, I thought, there's nothing West of Mullberry, is there? He suggests that we do some Korean BBQ and that sounds good to us. I'm thinking that Little Korea isn't in this neighborhood, so where are we going? As we are walking around the Gotham-like streets in the western regions of SoHo, I notice just how many places there are to eat there - and I'm sure all of them are way out of my budget! But hey, we deserve one big night out, so we go to Woo Lae Oak, a super-duper snazzy place with appetizers and Korean BBQ out of this world! Sean just moved from Williamsburg and has a huge, nasty beard and uber-skinny jeans (yuck) with his black-rim glasses, and my style tends to lean to the east as well, and we TOTALLY didn't fit into this place. This, apparently, is a classy district, so it was interesting for people watching.

After dinner, we decided to explore the hood. We had mojitos at a few places and explored the bridge-and-tunnel fueled Bowery clubs and some standard (boring) bars before ending up at L'Orange Bleue, a Frenchy, North African type place playing funky African type music that seemed like a good place to park the bus for some Sangria and chit chat. The drinks were awesome there, it was exactly the type of place that I love, where you can spend hours just talking and sipping wonderfully tasty liquids. And that is exactly what we did!

J. Riley, A fun night despite the disgusting weather!

We are Expecting!

I have great news to announce - we are expecting....Erika's residency card! We recently received her travel documents so that she can travel outside of the country and actually come back into the country. In addition, last week she got her employment authorization card so that she can start pulling her own weight around here ;o). That's really all that's new around here, but stay tuned for more exciting updates!

Flavor of the Week

This week I had my quad-annual retainer checkup at my orthodontist. In a show of confidence of my teeth, or lack thereof, I found out that He's going to try a new device that sounds like it's a mouthguard-type thing that will slowly move my teeth to the perfect location, since they are already falling out of alignment, as they have since I got the braces off. I am less than thrilled by this idea, although I don't object to getting my teeth in the right spot. I mean, having a retainer with a bridge across it is hard enough to communicate with, I can only imagine what it's going to be like with this new contraption, especially since I'm supposed to continue wearing it all day and night like I do with my retainer. But I'll give it a try since I don't have to pay for it. I'm starting to feel not just like a guinea pig, but like a guinea pig butterflied on a grill in a place like Peru with these teeth of mine!

Some of you know that I like to try out new ingredients in my kitchen sometimes. First there was quinoa, black rice, and other interesting graines that no one else has heard of. Well, lately I've been using a yummy, spicy, pepper-paste laden with various North African spices called harissa, which can be found in stores like Whole Foods, if you look REALLY hard. I had to find someone that fit the "Whole Foods Geek" mold - you know, the guys who know pretty much everything in the store - in order to find it. Here's a couple super-tasty recipes that I've made using this stuff:

• Harissa spaghetti
• Moroccan chicken
  

The latter, especially, is an awesome meal with a huge variety of flavors and textures!

J. Riley, I added some new blogs that I read to the bar on the right.....

Putaria

Last night, Erika and I decided to go downtown to do some perusing at Barnes and Noble, only to find that the East Village as I knew it has completely changed, I couldn't find anything that I knew used to be there, including the B&N! I guess that is how it works in New York, constant change and if you step off the island for a few months, it'll just pass you right by.

After doing some people-watching at our sidewalk-seating at a little cafe, eating some lobster ravioli, and drinking some sangria, Erika was up for a challenge and thought that we should head out to the dark depths of Queens to Jackson Heights, which is where a significant Latin community is and whose disco's I've gone to a few times, with mixed results. Well, we didn't have much else going on for the night, so why not? We figured that tonight could be a night of investigation, we could check out a bunch of different sketchy discos and hopefully find one half-way decent.

The first place that we went looked pretty nice on the outside and had a few big bouncers in front who insisted I talk to the manager before I go in (??). He told us that it was a salsa/merengue place and it had a nice looking dance-floor, certainly nicer than the other chorizo-fest place that I had been. We went in and checked it out and I was cool with it. It was about 9:30 at the time and, amazingly, there were already a bunch of girls there. Those of you who went out to Queens with me last time will realize that this is certainly unusual. The girls were all dressed with high-heels and short-short-short mini skirts and kind of standing around and Erika immediately identified this place as what she called a putaria (you know, like "tacquiera"), which I thought was hilarious (puta=prostitute). I almost laughed out loud, but I thought the place was going to be the best we could find in this part of town because the music was pretty good at the time. We checked out some other spots nearby, saw some hookers on the corner, and got some money at the bank before going back to the place, aptly called Chuptcha, which sounds an aweful lot like "chucha", probably one of the dirtiest words describing female genitalia. And queue one great Curb Your Enthusiam episode and why not the other as well.

Anyway, so we ended hanging out at this place, getting a table and having some cerveza and, mostly, people watching. The place wall really apalling, but we did manage to fit in some bachata dancing, despite being the only white person in the place. People watching was certainly worth the $5 beers, though. Most of the men were quite a few inches shorter than the woman (probably due to the high heels); when reggaeton started playing, the place was just like Santo Domingo, with girls holding onto a stage gyrating their huge asses up against the man of the moment - it reminded me of a men's room where there's a line of guys urinating (since it looked just like that); despite our table being about a foot above the dance floor, we could almost see underneath these girl's skirts; one fantastic male (I think) dancer who was really into the music and dancing, he was just a joy to watch, even if sometimes he would dry-hump a post(??); and special mention to the bleach blonde "girl" of questionable gender. As far as I could tell, we only saw 'benjamins being passed to the girls for these dirty dances, but who knows what happens when the place closes! When we left the place, the manager said "Did you guys have fund tonight" without a hint of irony. Yea, we said, with Erika laughing and saying "it was quite an experience" :o)

We topped the night off with carne asada tacos at a street-vendor which, still, didn't meet my high Mexican-food standards. They just can't seem to get it right out here!

Today, after a late start, we went and checked out the local free community swimming pool. I had visions of one of New York's free beach (Coney Island) and was thinking about how disgusting this pool would be, but I was in the exploring mood anyway. And the pool was actually halfway decent and seemed to be clean for the most part. But the rules - ohhh....the rules. This place was more strict than a concentration camp! We were told we couldn't go in because we didn't bring a lock (which wasn't mentioned on the website). But we could leave our bag outside with an attendant if we wanted to change outside first. No prob, we were already wearing our bathing suit. So Erica but her wrap thing on over her bathing suit. Sorry, they told her, you can't have a multi-colored wrap, solid colors only. We went inside and had to take a mandatory shower (again, the concentration camp illusion :o/ ), which was somewhat comforting so that people wouldn't take their first bath in a week at the pool. Inside, NY Parks people yelled at us for using a cell phone, saying they weren't allowed. And they yelled at people in the observation area above the pool area, saying "you can't stand there", etc. etc. etc. Of course, there was no problem with kids running around the pool at full speed. That was grounds for expulsion where I grew up! But, it was nice to take advantage of the free pool, even for just two hours or so on a Sunday night.

J. Riley, needless to say, Erika isn't really interested in going back to Jackson Heights for dancing, but I thought it was a great cultural event for a Saturday night :o).

Public Launch

Q: J. Riley, you're quite geaky, where's the website for your Peruvian wedding?
A: With an official launch date of right now, check out http://justin.sixpak.org/wedding/wedding.phtml

J. Riley, I'll notify you of any updates. If you're not on my list for the wedding, speak now or forever hold your peace.

End of the Season

Fall has come early this year to New York, which isn't a bad thing.
August has felt more like September with cool, comfortable nights and
mildly warm days. I've said before and will repeat again: September is
the best time of year to live in or visit New York!

At the same time, many of the summertime activities that I've enjoyed
are also coming to an end. Tonight is the last foreign-film at the
hipster- and artist-filled Sculpture Park near my apartment. Luckily,
my Saturdays will continue to be occupied well into September by my
mid-day capoeira lessons, followed by preparing a protein-heavy lunch
(my responsibility on most weekends) and, as of last weekend, watching
Liverpool games!

A few weeks back, I had my final meeting at the Muscular Dystrophy
Clinic to get my bloodwork results back and find out just how
genetically mutated I am. Naturally, they decided to schedule me at
EXACTLY mid-day 12:30, since the clinic is located about an hour
subway away on the upper-upper-upper West-side in Washington Heights.
This, of course, means that I have to use a sick day for work because
it is almost a guarantee that they will be behind schedule and I'll be
lucky if it takes only three hours for travel and meeting times.

So Erika and I go uptown nice and early and arrive about five minutes
late and are flirting with the thought of eating lunch after the
appointment because the clinic is completely devoid of patients
waiting to be seen. After a 15 minute wait, we get sent to the exam
room. Another 30 minutes goes by before the resident doctors come in
to examine the curious genetic specimen that I am, tapping me with
little hammers to see my muscles cramp up and seeing if my body
functions the same way that it has the past fifty times they have
tested me. And, of course, it did. Same muscle strength, same issue
with my hands, and the new resident doctors sitting behind the more
experienced doctors ooohing and ahhing with every kick of my feet.
Yea, yea, yea, get on with it already, get the real doctor in here,
I'm thinking. I want my damn blood results!

They leave and we wait another 30 minutes for the real doctor and his
resident entourage to come back and perform the same tests AGAIN. And
then, let's talk about your blood results. Or LACK OF. I got blood
taken from me back in early May in my stairwell at my apartment before
going to work, hoping that some neighbor of mine didn't come down the
stairs thinking I was a junkie getting a little morning buzz before
going to the bus station. Despite taking about a gallon of blood,
apparently the testing company performed the WRONG TEST on my blood,
so they had no results.

Ex-squeeze me? Baking Powder? How do you make a small mistake on a
$5000 DNA blood test? Naturally, the doctor pointed the finger at the
company who did the blood test, something about them changing codes
and not telling the clinic, blah blah blah. I didn't care whose fault
it was, the doctor was in front of me and he would feel my fury! I
couldn't believe that they would have me take a whole day off work in
August when the WRONG results came in back in late June and they
didn't notice until now. He apologized (for the blood company, of
course) and said the blood company would do the right test with the
other gallon-minus-one-drop of blood they had left and they could call
me with the results. Gee, that would have been a good option in the
first place!

Five hours later, and we finally got back home. What a waste of day.
The next week, the admin called me and said "yea, the blood company
wants to go ahead and take another blood sample." Of course, I told
them what the doctor said so she was going to call me back after
talking to them. She calls back and says yep, they need more blood! I
was not amused and asked who was going to pay for it this time. "Don't
worry, we'll just bill your insurance". The hell you will, I told her!
Insurance doesn't pay for everything and I am not paying a dime for a
second test or another appointment. They agreed to take care of it (of
course I got it in writing) and now I get to wait for the mosquito to
come back to my apartment and take more blood, followed by another
month of delays and waiting. It'll be great if they come back with the
results and have determined that I was mis-diagnosed the whole time,
like on that show "Mystery Diagnosis". I don't think I'll be so lucky!

J. Riley, time to go prepare for tonight's feature presentation!

Bux Town Wedding

So Erika and I are going to my friend Jeff's wedding down in Charleston, SC in October. Last I checked, it's now August and somehow I hadn't arranged all of my travel plans yet - what's happening to me!!! Last week, I checked the flights down there and they were a whopping $274 each for a direct flight. Doing the math for flight and hotel, I was looking at a grand. Geez, and I'm having a hard enough time paying for my own wedding!

Anyway, I checked flights later in the week only to almost gouge my eyes out when I saw how much flights were now going for. Is this possible? I considered a 12-hour road trip in a rental car but for a weekend trip that's quite a haul and with gas and rental car prices, I'd probably come out even.

So last night, I started the great search for reasonable flights and ended up booking them to Charlotte for $200 a pop. Pretty reasonable price, but that's still a four hour drive to Charleston. So, I decided to use something I've never tried before: Priceline.com . I actually bid $14 for a rental car and got it accepted! With all their scam fees and taxes, it's going to be $100 for the weekend, but that's not bad. Plus, I'm taking a day off on Friday for the flight and drive and it'll be October so the drive should be beautiful. Monday is Colombus Day and is a holiday for me, so that'll be a four-day weekend for us in what is supposedly lovely, historic Charleston, SC.

J. Riley, finally I'll be getting my long-desired road-trip, long weekend. Too bad it's not until October!

Maybe Not Free as a B(ird) Afterall

Last week, I mentioned that one of my recent "Free-B's" was going to
our wonderful neighborhood gym (note sarcasm) Synergy (Astoria, for
the Google searches) for one month, because we were going to quit this
place like a bad habit as soon as we made our mandatory 12th
appearance. Well, just like I have not been able to successfully quit
my bad habit of biting my finger nails, I was not able to successfully
make the 12th appearance within one month in order to quit the gym,
thanks to my lack of ability to count from one to four on my calendar.
Looks like I either have to get used to the terrible spin instructor
or, shocker, have to actually motivate MYSELF to expend energy in the
form of body heat and sweat. Yawn...

Another possible by-product of not being able to get my money back
from the gym is that I certainly cannot now enroll in the capoeira
classes that my heart yearns for. I've been taking the "Free-B"
classes for this Brazilian martial art/dance every Saturday that I am
able to and this weekend completed my third class and have noticed
amazing results in that time. I can almost do a full cartwheel now,
compared to when I started when I made it a quarter of the way before
crashing shoulder-first into the ground. Hand-stands are going to take
some more work, but suffice to say that I am satisfied that I pulled
off a cartwheel and a spontaneous round-house kick while "playing"
capoeira after my class on Saturday. My progress is slow, but we'll
see where I'm at at the end of September when the free classes finish.

A few weeks back, Erika and I completed our requirements for getting
married in a Catholic church by attending our mandated Pre-Cana course
way down in Brooklyn on Friday night and all day Saturday. What I
thought was going to be a forced-feeding of Catholicism actually
turned out to be an interesting class more about our marital
relationship. Poor Erika had to trudge through a workbook that used
highly-complex adjectives to describe various aspects of our
relationship - certainly not things that she's learning in her classes
yet!

Speaking of her classes, she is completing intensive-training English
4 (out of 8) this week and what a difference a class makes! She also
started working part-time yesterday in a data-entry/software testing
type of job, which will be good for her so that she can practice her
English with people other than me. Hopefully they can keep her busy
since she's out of school for a month starting next week!

J. Riley, my hamstrings and muscles in my lower back are still sore
after capoeira on Saturday. The twists, turns, and kicks are doing
their job!

A Memory Worth Preserving

As the tune started playing in iTunes, I was presented with a flashback:

• Location: In my two-tone, manly, muffler-less, '65 Buick Special, somewhere in my stomping grounds of high school and/or possible college.
• Scene: Listening to a tape of Euro hits that I'd recorded during one of three recent trips to Germany.
• Memory: Listening to a power love-ballad from Bon Jovi that I'd heard and recorded in Europe. Just as the song climaxes, the tape hits the end of the side and I'm left wondering if he's wrong, if he's wrong, this ain't a love song :o)

J. Riley, thanks D for rekindling that classic!