ON THE SIDEWALKS OF NEW YORK

I'm sitting here in my new world, the airport. I love airports. Our flight is an hour late because of thunder showers in NY, but for a change, I had actually checked, so we didn't come out until 10 pm. Our wonderful neighbor Anna drove us out, which makes life so easy. Mike is going to paint our bedroom ceiling while we are gone, so we spent a lot of today scraping paint and trying to get the room ready. We got it a lot better than we would ever done it for ourselves if we were the painters. He has gotten lucky and got called back to do some sub work, even though he's technically laid off. That means, though, that he went to work at 5 a.m., then came home and watched the kids while Heather worked, then is going off to work at Tower tonight.
Now it's Thursday night and we've spent our first day in New York, a good deal of it sleeping, I might add.  Martha is having a hard time, but she does have a good caregiver, Racile, and they seem to like each other. 

Racile and Martha went off to doctor appointments which seemed to be all over town, and John and I went up to 97th and Broadway where there is a new Westside Grocery, a rather nice place whose main draw seems to be that it has a lot of ready-to-eat food.  On the way up we stopped at a new-to-us bagel place (but that's just because we usually don't go that far up Broadway) which had the best bagel I've had, and I like many bagels in NY.  This shop appeared to be run by Asians, at least at the front counter, even though I think it's called Lenny's.  On our way we saw a nice piece of chalk art, not quite completed.

We passed Walgreen's, where they apparently only let three people in at the time and actually have someone blocking the door to see that they don't get too many customers. We passed them four times today and each time there was a little crowd waiting to get in. And there are three other drugstores within 2 blocks.

Then we went to the 99 cents and more store, which I think is a hilarious name. We were looking for a couple of boxes or baskets to put our socks and underwear in so we don't have to keep rummaging around in our suitcases. They had some plastic shoeboxes for $2.50, but they were pretty cheesy. Eventually the manager gave us some recycled cardboard boxes for free.

But wait, there's more. On the way home, we found a THRIFT STORE on Broadway. By the way, this tells you a lot about the economy. A few years ago, neither a thrift store nor a dollar store could possibly have afforded the rent on this part of Broadway.


 This is a pretty sad thrift store, but right inside the door was a display of silver baskets, pretty much the right size for holding our miscellaneous junk so we don't leave the ledge in the bedroom looking junky, and they were a dollar apiece. So, of course we bought them.

The rest of the evening was dinner, wine, conversation, cat petting and bed. Oh yes, it was nice and cool here today. I even wore my sweater, and it's expected to be cooler tomorrow. Then the temps will move back up into the 80s, but not the extreme heat.