Sunday Dinner

The weekend is not complete without a sunday night dinner. Ben, god bless him, has started cooking on sunday nights and rather than help with the dishes, I thought I would write about it...

Tonight we had:

Grilled Chicken Breast stuffed with Goat Cheese with Smoked Cilantro Sauce, courtesy of our man with the grill, senor Bobby Flay.

It was a bit ambitious, as it involved smoking and roasting peppers, blending stuff and then grilling other stuff. A blender was involved (which sounds exactly like our vacuum cleaner - "What are you doing in there"), various peppers, cilantro and last but not least goat cheese.

The end result was executed brilliantly, the chicken was cooked to perfection and the sauce was beautiful... but there were too many flavors and amazingly none particularly stood out (I have been watching way too much Top Chef).

I hope this is the first of many sunday recipes!

Furniture - Some Assembly Required

I am on a mission... an interior mission. Moving from a 450 square foot apartment in Brooklyn (we used to round up to a cool 500) to a 1000plus square foot apartment has been an eye-opening and wallet opening experience. Suffice it to say you can not furnish an apartment with just a couch, chair and TV... contrary to frat boys and bachelors everywhere.

So we have been furniture shopping... let me break it down for you:

Thinking that we could go the vintage and antique route, we started at the Santa Monica Antique Fair at the Santa Monica airport. We figured this event was for die hard bargain hunters so we showed up at the gates at just past 6:00AM (the gates opened at 5:30) and to our shock and awe, most vendors were not even fully set up yet. They were still unpacking their "vans-o-crap" and hob nobbing with other vendors. Most of there conversations started with, "so I have been coming here since 1982, and back then....", this conversation starter is the equivalent of a snooze button and being that it was 6:00AM... well you get the picture. All in all, the Antique Fair was were they send cast offs of the Antiques Roadshow. Nothing to mention just a lot of crap and a lot of vans (which one leads one to ponder, what came first the crap or the vans?)

After this adventure, we headed off to IKEA trip #1 (if you are short on time - SPOILER - we ended up going 6 times), where we got a wonderful knock-off Tulip table and some quasi knock-off clear Lucite chairs (Lucite being the design word for plastic). We bought them because they are "soooo LA" and just in case you did not catch the metaphor - LA is made of plastic, and our chairs our plastic, so in short we have a vacuous yet chic dining room. Dining room - check.


From NYC we didn't bring any of our bedroom furniture, which meant we had to literally start from scratch. While I would have loved to ship my $20 dresser with us, to which I applied a rare paint technique called "crackle paint", we figured the best thing to do was to sell it for next to nothing at our stoop sale. So our bedroom was a blank canvas, bar our lovely Marimekko tapestry that we so lovingly mounted onto a frame. So we headed down to Room and Board... awesome! Seriously folks, if you are even thinking of purchasing furniture and have a Pottery Barn budget, put the catalogue down and check them out. They are awesome!

We went into the Room and Board store and I more or less picked out the furniture the moment I saw it... but I didn't actually purchase it until 2 weeks later because purchasing things above $1000 scares the crap out of me. It may have helped if I bought each drawer, head board and frame separately because somehow purchasing 10 things at $100 a piece does not bother me as much as spending $1000 all in one go. Case in point IKEA - genius, while they don't put the furniture together they do set there prices deceiving low making it so easy to spend $1000 and yet still come out with ten different things. Guilt - none, Bedroom - check.

Between IKEA's trip #2 & #3 we went to the Rose Bowl Flea market that occurs every 1st Sunday of the month. As it's name implies, it is at the Rose Bowl. This place was gigantic, but totally cool. We didn't buy anything, however I did have my eyes set on this handsome little fella.Which curiously enough we saw his twin on another aisle.. its an invasion:


While we did not purchase anything at the Rose Bowl Flea market, we wanted to and that's a nice feeling at a place where everyone is selling shit and aliens.

So I know you are all dying to know, IKEA trips #4 was all about the office or "man" room. I seriously wonder if that room name was invented by HGTV, and it was, than "HA!", we have managed a way to intrinsically de-masculinize your room. So the office has bookshelves, a desk and filing cabinets. The "man" room has guitars, skateboards and recording equipment... grunt, grunt, grunt, scratch, scratch, scratch.

And finally, IKEA #5 & #6 have been consumed with returning impulse buys from trips #1, #2, #3 & #4, oh the beauty of owning a vehicle. The days of taking the IKEA shuttle from Penn station to Elizabeth NJ are long gone.

So to make a long blog entry short (or longer - depending on how you look at it) we are slowly but surely settling in. Only 5 more IKEA trips to go...

Houdini - Escape from Los Feliz

The little cheeky monkey!

Ben said to me when we first arrived, we will know we are settled in when PJ is finally comfortable and less "sketched-out". And I have to admit, we were getting there. We may be reading a little too much into dog-psychology.. but i believe in that transfer or energy crap (and crystals and enya - don't judge).

PJ has had a lot to grow accustom to:

1) Yard - Imagine living a life in which the only time you are outdoors you are kept on a 3 foot leash. Can you also imagine pooping and peeing on said leash? Then all of a sudden you are allowed to go outside on your own free will? Talk about an existential crisis or Cartesian dilemma... whatever you classify it as, it was some heavy shit

2) Skunk - Imagine you are in said "yard" and you encounter a black and white nasty, hissing and scary rodent. For weeks, PJ thought that the yard had a keeper and that keeper was one bad ass, ying and yang looking mo-fo.

3) Dogdoor - PJ no longer has his dog-walker during the weekday, instead we have replaced this service with a dog door. Talk about a shitty deal and only adding insult to injury, we decided to "teach" PJ how to use the dog door after having a little too much to drink. Poor PJ was being pushed through the door, back and forth like some inhumane (but entertaining) drinking game. We learned two things, PJ is a pretty easy dog to train and neither Ben nor I fit through the door.

4) Crappy Dog Park - Oh how we miss prospect park, our dog park is located between 134 and the 5 freeway and has one patch of grass that is quarantined by orange construction mesh. So needless to say, PJ doesn't get off leash much... except for in his yard, when the skunk is MIA.

Taking into account the above mentioned things... the events of Tuesday, April 1st were inevitable.

I was out at a business lunch when I got the call: "PJ has escaped from the yard, some woman has him in her backyard... I am going to pick him up now". My heart sunk as I pictured our little pound puppy scared and alone in our East LA neighborhood, one wrong turn and he could have ended up on Hilhurst or (parish the thought) Sunset. Ben picked him up and brought him back home. He barricaded the dog door with a cardboard box and his drum and then returned to the office.

Then when I was on my way home (6:00ish), I got a call from Ben: "He did it again... PJ got out, some woman called me and they picked him up". Ben gave me the number and I called the woman immediately, "Oh, yeah, hope you don't mind we picked him up. He is just running errands with us, we have him in our car. Where do you live, we will come and drop him off"!

How nice is that! Amazing, I gave the woman our address and they came by 15 minutes later. A cute couple in their early 30's, two toddlers in the back seat and PJ, sitting up and looking out the back seat window. As if this was just a casual playdate. I gave the woman a big hug and asked if I could do anything to re-pay her. At first I was going to offer my babysitting services, but thought better of it, as I doubt this couple was going to think I was capable of taking care of two tiny human beings, when I could barely keep my canine under lock and key. We made introductions, they were incredibly nice and we both went our separate ways.

Back inside the house, I noticed that the barrier for the dog door was intact. There was a tiny 5 inch opening between the dog door and the cardboard box, and there was no way that our lovable but very uncoordinated dog was going to fit through that small space, so inevitably the conspiracy theories started to build.

The leading contender, was our neighbor, we will call him "gay", complained about PJ crying while we were gone. He also has a tendency for parking in our designated parking spot and complaining about the construction going on next door. During one of our interactions with him that started with the phrase, "Hey, I hate to be the annoying neighbor, but..." he mentioned that he used to have keys to our apartment as he used to walk the Chihuahua that lived here before us. Well if that isn't foreshadowing I don't know what is... Ben and I were convinced that our neighbor was unlocking our door and letting PJ out, because he was a passive aggressive dog hater. While Ben and I were mapping out our neighbors elaborate dog escaping plot, PJ snuck around the cardboard box and went out the dog door.

So Ben and I are learning a couple of things while in LA:

1) Our dog is a scheming Houdini who is only 5 inches think (never under-estimate the power of fur).

2) Strangers are incredibly accommodating in our neighborhood

3) Perhaps we should ask our neighbor is he wants to walk PJ - I mean he already has keys

4) Perhaps Ben's theory is not particularly accurate... the dog seems fine, it's us that still can't shake that New York neurosis.

NYC - DC and TEN-A-C

So we finally vacated out apartment in NYC during the first snow storm of the year! We woke up at 5:30 and came face to face with about 3 inches of beautiful snow. But that beauty quickly faded as we realized that we had to trudge through the stuff with all of our belongings. Needless to say that we were quite stressed out but then we remembered that...

We hired movers!!!

So all in all it wasn't bad at all. The moving company we used (moveeast.com) were wonderful and professional and they didn't complain at all... except for one small thing. Do you ever notice in New York City, movers and cabbies always tell you some sob story about how they had some huge job for some disgustingly rich fellow and at the end of the job the exuberantly rich fellow failed to tip the poor overworked and impoverished worker. I have heard this story numerous times and it must be some sort of psychological trick. You hear the story and then you say to your self; "self, you are a decent person and even though you are paying the moving company your monthly earnings to haul your crap across the country, you are going to tip and tip big, thus showing this poor gentleman that you are a decent person and that you understand that hard work should be rewarded and more importantly proving that I am a better person than that rich person that stiffed them last time". Which raises a big question, why would some super rich, billionaire use the same company to shelp his shit across the country as me... as I shopped around for months to find the cheapest service out there. You would think that a man dripping in dollar bills would use a service more qualified to deal with his economic stature. And why would this moving company for the economically normal be dealing directly with this super rich nondescript man and not his assistant, handler or ass wiper. Thus perhaps proving the point that this story is a New York urban myth, passed down from cabbie, to mover, to housecleaner throughout generations. However at the time, I did not have time to make such deductions, I was busy running to the ATM to get more cash out... and I am still better than that millionaire.

We left the city at noon and headed out to our Nations Capitol. Sights of interest:

- Walter Reed Army Medical Center - neglecting veterans near you
- Vietnam Memorial - at night in the dark, reading names by brail
- Langley - if I told you I would have to kill you
- Georgetown Canels - the drained putrid canels reminded us of the subway tunnels, nostalgia

I must preface this already lengthy entry by stating that I have never been a good roadtrip tourist or sightseer, I rarely slow down for photos and turning back is more of less like starting over. That being said we did have a lovely 12 hours in DC, been there done that... writing the blog.

The next day we headed west on 40 and its amazing, the scenery doesn't change but boy do the accents. We stopped at Ruby Tuesday in some town in some state and I accidentally mocked our waitress's accent. I ordered the Turkey burger and she said: "Eye loove the turkey burrgher" (admittedly I have no idea how to write a southern accent - but you get the idea) and I responded "ohhh dew you, than eye'll have dat". Ben kicked me under the table and I managed to smile off the complete and utter insult. Which leads me to a big pressing issue, can you be accentist... as in racist, agist. I think you can.. and I was and I apologize Ruby Tuesday Waitress, I was wrong and I am sorry.

So then we made our way to Nashville and it was awesome. We started off the night with a little karoke, and then headed out to get some good old bbq. As Ben and I walked down the main drag, overwhelmed with Neon Signs and country music we thought to ourselves... where are we going to eat? And then we saw it... an older gentleman, I would safely say in his 70's stumbles out of a restaurant. He is wearing a yellow button up t-shirt, a bolo tie and he is circling his fist in the air, not dissimilar to the cowardly lion, and I swear he was saying "put em up, put em up". The gentleman he was jestering towards was a middle aged man in a starter jacket and break-away pants and surprisingly he was just trying to get out of the situation... but this old man wouldn't quit.. he was moving his fists in a circular pattern (yes, with the palms of his fists facing upward) and if memory serves he was even pouring on a little fancy footwork.. but then the footwork couldn't keep up with his level of intoxication and he fell... backwards... and hit his head on the side of the building. Yes, perhaps this was not the most action packed fight scene, but it was the best restaurant recommendation that we could have ever dreamed up. I don't remember the name of the place but we walked right in.

At this nameless bar and restaurant, we came face to face with one of Nashville's most notorious species - the Cougar! These women were amazing, bottled blond and permed, in there 50's and furious as all hell. They sat at the edge of the bar, sipping on bottle neck beer and lip singing to every country song that the band played while at the same time squeezing their boobs together, doing nasty things to their bottle necked beers and seamlessly licking their lips while not missing a syllable of honky-tonk. It was a spectacle to behold followed by a creepy moment of, "what if that were my mom". After the waitress set down our second round of beers and bbq (mine pizza and Ben's pork) we asked her about these legends at the bar and the waitress simply responded while shaking her head; "You have no idea the things I have seen". It was one of the single most mortified statements that I have ever heard. Leading me to believe that these Cougars have left not only a trail of "didn't know better" drunk young men but a longer trail of decency and dreams... a trail that these poor waitresses have to mop up everynight.

Wow - Bloggin: is tough work

Yes, I know its been over a month since my last post... There has been so much to blog about and yet so little time... so rather than warp to the next level, I would like to spend some time musing about the last month.

Starting with our awesome going away party! In all honesty, I thought the invite would over shadow the party (since I was so happy with my first successful attempt at photoshop) but that couldn't be further from the truth. I can't believe the amount of people and support that we got from everyone, it was so amazing. I haven't been emotional about leaving New York at all... but I managed to break into tears multiple times. There are so many friendships that I have made over the past years and we have all truly grown up with each other, watching our lives change to grad school, marriage, children and promotions. New York City is kind of like having a second attempt at adolescence, a chance to really find yourself and figure out what it is you want to be when you grow up.

The party was at Edge Bar in the east side, my hands down favorite moment of the night was when the bar tender called for me: "Beth, Beth who is Beth". A lot of people started pointing in my direction, and I thought I was in trouble; "Are you Beth?", the bartender asked..."yea", "Well your mom called and she wants me to tell you that she loves you and that she is thinking of you and would like to buy you and Ben a drink". How cool is that? Under normal circumstances you never want the bartender to start a sentence "Your mom called and...", this could only mean a handful of things:

1) you spend way too much time at the bar
2) the bartender is your dad
3) dinner is ready

It was nice to be thought of by my friends, co-workers and family that night. Especially on the night I was graduating from New York.. hey you got to grow up sometime.

Stay tuned for our news on our road trip...

Please don't tell the dog...

I crossed the line... there is no turning back. I am one of those weird dog owners. I saw it creeping up on me for a while... with the four photos of the dog posted on my bulletin board at work and the holiday card featuring Ben, Beth and the dog (signing it with a little paw print - because dogs can't spell - even though our dog's name is PJ). I don't want to even start in with the different names we have for his poop (the duece, triple threat, dangler, mud butt - you get the picture). And finally, when that pug screen cleaner clip started circulating, all I could think about was how I could get my dog to do that (plexi glass and peanut butter?) and I kinda felt unfaithful leaving it up on my monitor for any length of time.

The line was officially crossed last Monday when my spin instructor at the local Y asked me how my dog was doing (as we see her frequently in the park). I told her that he was fuzzy (I don't know why I say that - but I do) and then I told her that we were moving to LA. We then went into a rather surface conversation that one would expect when speaking to one's aerobics instructor and when the conversation ended I said, "Please don't tell PJ, we haven't broken it to him yet"... [insert cricket sounds here]... awkward pause... "OK, I won't" after which the instructor gives one of those breathy laughs (not unlike a sigh) and pivots around to abandon the crazy dog lady (me).

Why would I say such a thing: Please don't tell PJ, we haven't broken it to him yet. What devastation did I think this would cause our little dog? Did I think he would rebel and run off with that little mutt that he has been chasing in the park and open up a bed and breakfast in the country? Would he tip off his dog walker and together they would rob us blind and sell our belongings on ebay?

Nope, none of those things... I am just a weird dog person. Thats right - card carrying!

Truth be told, he doesn't care where we live, and ok, let's face it, he has no idea what moving even means. In all honesty, I am not sure PJ understands the significance of most of these new adventures we are embarking (no pun intended) on. I am still convinced that PJ thinks of Ben as "the other dog" and the only real injustice that he faces is that he doesn't understand why Ben can get on the furniture and he can't and why Ben doesn't get reprimanded for humping my leg. But I digress, home is where the milkbones are, and if I remember correctly, I think they sell those in LA.

Ace and Gary

So if I have not told you yet, Ben and I found a place in Los Angeles. We are going where most New Yorkers go to acclimatized to the good cheer and weather of the west... Los Feliz. Truth be told I figured we would end up in or around that neighborhood... I just hope they don't kick us out when they realize how un-hip we are really are. I guess unlike Manhattan, in LA, they can't really kick you off the island (did I mention we currently live in Brooklyn).


We looked at one place in the neighborhood and the realtor gave us dining tips and a copy of the local paper... and then asked us if we would like to have dinner with him and his wife. Ahhh, the swinging LA lifestyle! I didn't know whether to be horrified or flattered... ok, I was a bit horrified as the guy looked liked Gary Busey and the wife looked like that crazy squeaking dolphin lady. But in the end we put our egos aside and declined the offer, as the apartment just wasn't what we were looking for.

We ending up finding our place through two of the nicest realtors that I have ever had the pleasure of dealing with. Ben kept on calling them Ace and Gary and truth be told, they were the less-than-ambiguously gay duo. Having moved 4 times in New York, I was constantly trying to figure out where their fee was hidden and if we were being swindled... but we weren't. They were just genuine people.

I am still in awe of the situation. It was amazing, realtors that wanted to work, on our schedule and in our best interest. Turns out in Los Angeles, the realtors are paid by the landlords! Novel idea, that the landlord pay a competent realtor to find reliable tenants. I don't want to turn this into an east meets west bitch session, but I think we can all agree that in terms of the rental market... LA wins and not just by a couple of points... it's a landslide and in this landslide, New York is so hideously bad they called FEMA to bail everyone out... which may explain why most of the affordable apartments in NYC are no better than trailers, sitting in a swamp... without an ocean view.

I mean, how can NYC compete, when LA has superhero's posing as realtors...