jennings rampage

And then we watched some television and got to sleep at a reasonable hour.

The morning meeting was gaveled to order shortly after 11am on the back deck. Attending: Curtis, Faber, Jennings. Excused: Siegel. Coffee and cigarette: Curtis, Faber. Clean living: Jennings. With the minutes accepted as read, we moved on to new business: what to do today.

The first suggestion was to hop in the Stratus and head down the shore and enjoy this superior day. But we realized that the Stratus doesn’t run on smiles and good feelings, and when none of us could step up for gas, that plan was tabled until we’re all more employed. The second suggestion was to hop on the train and go walk around Chinatown. The motion carried by voice vote.

Jason and Nick headed to Suds to do up some laundry, and I watched a little college football I didn’t care about before I strapped up and went for a jog to break a week-long streak of excuses. I did my usual 5K up and down Riverside, came home and showered, and the three of us headed out around 3pm.

We popped out of the Canal Street train station into a dense sea of tourists and traffic, and I knew Jason was a happy man. The Dumpling House was our first stop, where fried pork dumplings were five for a dollar. Recommended. Next, we headed up to Rice To Riches, where I suspended my moratorium on eating at puns or plays on words to have a bowl of rice pudding. They have like twenty varieties of rice pudding! I liked that a lot, Jason and Nick not so much. Oh!! And Jason and Nick saw Miss J from America’s Next Top Model in the ice cream store next door. I made like I was going back to look because I totally wanted to, but they gave me a quick “really?” and so I missed out. Which is too bad, because Miss J provides the rare opportunity to say, “she totally has prostate cancer.”

From there, we walked through Little Italy over to SoHo up to NoHo to Union Square, where we sat quietly for a few minutes. We went to the Trader Joe’s wine store for some $3 Two Buck Chuck (thank you, higher excise taxes), and then walked over to the 1 train at 14th and 7th. The pedometer puts that walk at 3.22 miles. Had I known that, I would have had an excuse not to jog.

The 1 train wasn’t running downtown past 14th Street, because it’s the weekend and that’s how it’s been every weekend since I’ve been back. The uptown train pulled into the downtown platform, and everyone got off except for three people who looked a little confused and weren’t speaking English. They clearly wanted to continue downtown but didn’t understand the announcements, and I think they were speaking Spanish, but I wasn’t 100% sure, and if I wanted to tell them, it would have sounded like, “eso tren no va, uhh, downtown? Ustedes necessitan el tren dos o tres alli,” while I gestured grandly to the other side of the platform. (I don’t think it would have sounded even that good. It would have been more like, “no tren aqui, otro tren, otro tren!”) But in the end, I said nothing and failed. The train took off uptown, they looked very confused, and got off at Penn Station to try it again.

We got home around 7pm, and sat on the deck with our laptops and Yelped the places we went today. That’s what we did. This is what the Yelp homepage looked like for a moment after we were done:

That’s really what happened.