NYX

On Tuesday, I taught my last class of the semester. Time flies! I also made it to my nephew Porter’s preschool Christmas Concert, which was mucho cute but not so mucho in tune. By late Tuesday night I was shivering uncontrollably despite being huddled under every blanket in the house; Wednesday I suffered through a crazy fever complete with panicky hallucinations. The contents of my fever dreams were just lesson plans and to do lists, unfortunately—I’m no closer to unlocking the Hill Street Blues cipher. But by Wednesday night I felt a lot better, which is good, because this morning Lisa and I flew down to New York City for the weekend, which is where I’m writing this post.

We’re sub-sub-subletting an apartment in the East Village from a friend of a friend. It’s hilarious: it has one hugely impressive room with a giant picture window, a 10’ Christmas tree, and a high, vaulted ceiling… but that’s it. The bed is on a platform about two feet below that ceiling—you climb up a ladder through a trap door to get to it. Whee! We just had an astonishing multi-course dinner with our friend Drew who consented to take us to a crazy excellent yakitori place in the city, only very recently defiled by gaijin. Chicken sashimi—yes, it's what it sounds like—is alarmingly good.

Standard whoo travel bla bla bla post (plus a photo appropriate for the day). That is all.

Edit: Oh yeah, the other thing about the place we're staying in is the way we got the keys. The person whose place it is is actually in Canada this week, so she got a friend to drop a set of keys off at the corner deli, "Sambas, the Deli of Life." It was only when we arrived and Sambas, the deli-owner of life, said he had no freakin' idea what keys we were talking about that it occurred to me how fragile this plan was. One Seinfeld plotline later, the keys were revealed to have fallen behind the meats. Hakuna mazoola, all will be well, the circle deli of life.