Thursday night (which was technically when our weekend began because we both took Friday off to take a day trip up to New Haven and eat pizza), we arrived home from dinner, went to turn on the lights, and:
nope.
Our first blackout of the season, whee!
I am sad summer is ending, obviously.
I'm also SO EXCITED summer is ending, because the Hudson Valley in autumn is like a kid who's been practicing for a performance all year long and finally gets to put on his costume and go on stage. I've now become one of those people who actually reads Westchester Magazine and calendars upcoming events in her iPhone (although that is the only Westchester Mom stereotype I will concede to...aside from, perhaps, a not-so-hot understanding of exactly what is going on with the highways and parkways and throughways around here and how one might learn how to navigate them within this century), and one of the events that I calendared way, way back was this one:
Kendrick and I have been wanting to spend a full day in the city at some point this summer - Chinatown, Little Italy, that kind of thing - and decided that this weekend presented the perfect opportunity: my parents were out of town, so we could both help them out by looking after their animals and spend two whole days in NYC, with no need to drive back and forth in between.
Kendrick had school stuff going on until late on Friday, but I thought hey, I'll just drive in by myself with Indy and the dogs and all our bags. It'll be fun!
Ehhhh.
Took a moment for a Robin Thicke dance break in the diner...
Discovered that the tree we planted in March appears to still be alive (not any bigger, but alive is a good start)...
When I was a little kid, my parents' best friends lived in upstate New York (near Warwick, the town where we went apple-picking last fall and did our bed-and-breakfast trip a few months ago). They had two kids just a little older than me named Ali and Matt and one a little younger named Nicky, and one day every summer both families would head to the Orange County Fair.
Here's my first time ever at the fair, in 1983.
For any kid - but especially a city kid who didn't often see things like ponies and carousels - it was paradise. Obviously I thought Ali and Matt - 3 and 5 years older than me, respectively - were the coolest people in the entire world, so the fact that I was allowed to follow them around on short parent-free journeys to get a funnel cake or get our photo taken for a souvenir was exciting almost beyond what I could wrap my head around. Mostly what I remember was that the carnival felt big...impossibly big, like you could spend entire summers there and never explore it all. And the rides seemed so fancy and advanced, like something out of a Spielberg movie.
When it's this hot out, there's nothing to do but dip yourself in the pool over and over...
Then invite over friends (that's Kendrick's ex-Harlem Shakes bandmate Todd, now of Arms, and his girlfriend Mona)...
Usually weekends feel like they fly by, and Monday morning arrives and I'm all sad because I wish I had an extra day to spend with my guys.
It's Monday morning right now, and I do still wish I had an extra day, of course I do...but this weekend we did it right. Honestly, we packed so much into the past two days that it felt like an entire summer's worth of...
well...
sprinting.
