In My Head

My morning:  Got up at 6:30 AM (instead of 4:30 AM).  Left home around  7:40.  Arrived at train by 7:45.  Easily found a seat as ours is the first (or last depending on direction) stop.  Rode to my connecting station where I got off the train, walked 5 steps to the other side of the track, waited for the masses to get off my connecting train (and on to the train I was on).  Easily found a seat on the nearly empty train.  Arrived at Grand Central at 8:10 AM.  In office by 8:15 AM.  How great is that?!

I left work at 5:00 PM today and expected to arrive home by 5:30.  Unfortunately, I somehow missed my connecting stop and rode the the train about 5 stops beyond before I realized.  Damn it!  I was paying attention too!  Ended up getting home around 5:55 PM.

We left our place to go for dinner around 6:20.  Walked leasurely there & back, took our time eating, and were back by 7:35.  In CT we rarely ate dinner before 8:00 PM….  Life is good.

Corner 26 Taverna, 26-02 23rd Ave, Astoria, NY 11105, 718-777-5511 (Cash only)

For dinner, Hubby and I decided to try a local Greek restaurant called Corner 26 Taverna.  A small place, seating up to 20 indoors and maybe 15 outdoors, Taverna is homey and personal, almost like sitting in someone’s livingroom or terrace. There’s a hostess and a waitress–and she’s the same person, a friendly Grecian lady.

The menu is simple and includes traditional Greek basics. Some of the best ones to try are the appetizers including the zuccini & eggplant patties and the fried cheese (be sure to drizzle with the accompanying lemon).

As an entree I had the fried whiting and scordalia.  Whiting is a  lite-flavored flaky white fish (reminiscent of the kind you find in a frozen fish patty).  On my plate were 4 fried bodies of whiting (sans the heads) accompanied by scordalia, cold, ground mashed potatoes & fresh garlic.  The scordalia was tasty (as long as you like garlic).  The whiting was rather flavorless… nothing to write home about.

The hubby had the beef (not lamb) gyro platter which was huge and satisfying.

By the way, gyro is probably the most often mispronounced food name. Even its fans usually do not get the pronounciation correctly - whether it is mispronounced as “jee-rohs,” “jai-rohs,” “gee-rohs,” The correct Greek pronunciation is “yee-rohs.” Learn it. Love it. Live it! (Or spend the rest of your days sounding like G.W. who pronounces nuclear as “new-kew-ler” instead of “new-clee-er”.)

The prices were very reasonable.  For $50 we had 2 appetizers, 2 entrees, a caraffe of white wine, and a beer.  Tasty bites of sweet semolina & cinnamon cake were free.

Yesterday after lunch, the hubby and I tried a café frappé (a foam-covered iced coffee drink pouplar in Greece in the summer) at a local Greek dessert & coffee place.  While I’m not an iced-coffe-kind-of-girl (if it’s iced, I prefer frappuccinos), I can say that it was tasty, light and refreshing.  A definite must-try.

Our tub is big… wide and knee deep (and I’m tall).  It’s so nice to shower in and will be great for soaking.  It also has a wide ledge - great for soap/shampoo and shaving my legs.  Our old tub had a normal-sized window in it (including a wooden ledge).  We had rigged up a modified shower curtain to cover it, but whenever we showered the window curtain would fly over and attack us.  It was a constant battle.  So nice not to have to deal with that anymore!  The bathroom does have a window, but it’s completely frosted and high above in a little alcove so there’s no chance of providing a show.

Our medicine cabinet also fits everything we need with room to spare.  It even has 3 sections which I anally oranized into his, hers, and community.

(Perhaps too much information, but I had to share.)

We broke down and got digital cable because it was either nothing, satellite, or digital cable.  (Basic analog cable is apparently no longer offered in our area.)  Anyway, there’s over 1000 channels out there!!!!!  Perhaps in the NYC area only, but there’s like 30 Spanish channels, and a handfull each of Jewish, Middle Eastern, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, etc channels.  It’s crazy!

While flipping through the channels yesterday, just to see what we have, I happened upon a Chinese guy doing Tai Chi in a mountainous meadow… narrated in - get this - Spanish!

Tonight, while eating dinner, the hubby and I caught the last 30 minutes of Trading Places (you know, that kick-ass Eddie Murphy & Dan Aykroyd movie) uncut since we have the premium channels for free during our first month.  Man, I forgot what it was like to watch movies on TV without all the curse words and nudie scenes cut out.

Speaking of nudie scenes, after Trading Places, I paged through the menu again and happened upon Big Sausage Pizza 13.  (An on-demand channel, so it wasn’t available unless we paid - which WE DIDN’T!)  Anyway, here’s the movie synopsis for that one:  “Hungry women fill their empty mouths with hot meat.”  The hubby and I couldn’t stop laughing.  The funniest part is that is was 13.  That means there were 12 other Big Sausage Pizza movies before it!

Our dog, Charlie didn’t really seem to go through an adjustment phase for this move.  Having had grass on which to do her business for the passed 12.5 years, she seemed to have no problem making on the pavement.  Go figure!

We took her in to establish with a new vet today, which, by the way, was located only 6 blocks away.  The vet, a younger female, was the best vet we’ve ever been to!  She treated Charlie so well.  Sat on the floor and let Charlie come to her to get to know her.  Gave her treats.  Talked to her.  Talked us through her examination telling us what she was looking for, what she found, and what to watch for.  Thankfully, Charlie got another clean bill of health.

Today the hubby managed to get our office in order.  No more scary piles of boxes.  Our desks are at a 90 degree angle from each other.  Charlie, always needing to be as close as possible to the both of us at the same time, found the perfect spot in the corner of the angle (right in between us).

Taverna Kyclades Seafood, 3307 Ditmars Blvd, Astoria, NY 11105 (718) 545-8666, www.tavernakyclades.com

At around 1:30 PM today, the hubby and I decided to break from our unpacking and took a walk to find lunch.  There are a lot of choices in the area, and today’s was Taverna Kyclades Seafood at 33-08 Ditmars Blvd, (a Greek place).  While Astoria is populated by a wide variety of cultures living together in harmony, it is still primarily Greek.

I had the grilled calamari with boiled dandylion greens.  The calamari was excellent.  I’d never had cooked dandylion greens, so I figured I’d try them.  While not awful, once was enough.  They reminded me of that canned spinach Mom made us eat when we were children.

The hubby had the Greek burger and “fries”.  OMG, that was a yummy burger!  The fries consisted of potatos sliced into thin rounds and fried… a fond memory of Mom’s fries.

The restaurant is located right next to a fresh produce market.  In fact, our seat was right next to some of the fruit.  It was quite pleasant to eat our meal with the fragrance of nectarines, peachees, oranges and melons permeating the air.

This passed Saturday, the hubby, the hound, and I moved to Astoria, NY (a neighborhood in the Queens borough).  This was our first big move using movers.  We packed, they moved.  It was SO great to have professionals do it!

We moved from a two-story, two bedroom duplex with a basement to a smaller one-story two bedroom duplex with no basement.  Like our move from TX to CT, we had to pair down even more in preparation.  We thought we’d paired down enough….  We were wrong.

This was our office minutes after the movers left.  We had them start shoving boxes in there because there was nowhere else to put them.  Yes, what you see is boxes as deep from the back wall to the door and as tall as from floor to ceiling. No kidding.

Between Saturday night, Sunday, and today, the hubby and I have been working diligently to unpack and discard even more things that we don’t need or use.  At least the purging is cathartic.

Above photo was our kitchen after about an hour’s worth of unpacking.  Cool thing about kitchen:  the drawers, when pushed will slow down when almost closed and then slowly close themselves.  At our old place we had to wrestle the drawers open/shut.  Also, the kitchen cabinets are deeper/roomier than they appear.  All our stuff fit!

Even though our new place has smaller rooms, the storage and use of space is a lot more efficient.  So much that our things fit pretty well.  Plus we’ve never lived in such a nice place.  It was completely redone (wood floors, ceramic tile, huge tub, stainless steel kitchen appliances, granite counter tops, etc).  The unit above us houses four similarly aged people:  a girl (Jamilla) and her husband (Matt), Mike and Jerod.  They seem like really cool people.  In short, our place rocks!  Sorry, but it’s exciting!

Our dinner on move day, typical of any move, consisted of pizza.  While I continued to unpack, the hubby took a walk down the street and got us a pizza margherita (mozzarella, garlic, basil).  Speaking of walks, since we now live in NYC, there’s no need for a car, so we sold ours.  No more car payment, car insurance, or expensive gas to buy.  Our monthly unlimited-ride subway ticket cost $81.  That won’t even get you two weeks worth of gas!

The subway is literally 2.5 short blocks away and will take us wherever we want to go.  Our Metro card is also good for buses, though we won’t really need to ride them.  On top of that, everything we need with regards to goods & services is within a couple blocks from our place.  It’s so great!!!!

UPDATE:  No, I didn’t win the gold medal.  The opportunity never presented itself… thank goodness!

… that I might win a gold medal tomorrow!  Stay tuned. 

Tomorrow is moving day for us, and we’ve spent the last few weeks preparing and packing. The packing part seems never-ending, but there are a few upshots to the whole process…

Best Parts of Packing:
• Taking inventory of all that we own.
• Remembering the stories attached to objects.
• Spending time with my husband, even if it’s not the most fun time.
• Appreciating what we own.
• Getting rid of what we don’t want or need.
• Listening to old CDs we found in a shoebox.
• Locating a lost receipt we thought we’d never find.

Worst Parts of Packing:
• Getting everything done while working and dealing with daily life.
• Stressing about whether or not we’ll get everything done.
• Realizing that, despite our best efforts to pare down, we still have too much stuff.
• Tripping over boxes on our way to the bathroom.
• Eating take out because our cooking supplies are packed.
• Misplacing the phone charger and dealing with a dead cell phone.
• Feeling like we’ll never finish.

What we learned: “Stuff is not passive. Stuff wants your time, attention, allegiance. But you know it as well as I do, life is more important than the things we accumulate.“