Thanksgiving Follow-Up

In follow-up to the post the day before Thanksgiving, I found a dress to wear to the wedding on Friday, then proceeded to leave it in the closet. I blame M - who didn't want to pack the garment bag with his suit and my dress. Wednesday comes around and he calls to say he's on the way, but traffic is bad, so I should bring down the luggage and the dog and he'll pick us up in a few minutes (after I've schlepped half of it downstairs). Anyway, I run back upstairs, then get the other suitcase, forgetting that he was going to put the garment bag in when he was done changing.
Traffic getting out of the city was horrendous, so we didn't get in to the in-laws until 12:30, where they were still waiting up for us (which was sweet) and wanted to chat for an hour or so (which was frustrating as I just wanted to crawl into bed after an 8-hour drive. When we woke up, we saw the gorgeous blanket of snow that was waiting for us, and the dog, who thoroughly enjoyed it. See the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kIgFMbumBU

Thanksgiving Plans - Men are Dumb

We're heading off this evening to drive to the wilderness of western New York, where my in-laws are located and, so far, the trip has been somewhat of a black box. For instance, I found out over the weekend that Thanksgiving day dinner will actually be at M's (the hubs) aunt and uncle's house. No big deal.
Then last night, M called his parents to let them know that we may stop halfway if we don't feel like making the entire drive (7 hours) Wednesday night. I hear him chatting with his mom, and talking about a wedding. When he gets off, I ask if his parents have a wedding to go to over the weekend. "Yeah, but we were invited too, I just kind of forgot about it," he says, as we were in the middle of packing. Of course, my thoughts turn to what I am going to wear, and he is completely useless. "I guess the women will wear dresses," which means nothing, since he's from a small town that recently hosted an episode of "My Big Fat Redneck Wedding" (may not be the actual name of the show, but you get the idea, even if you haven't seen the show). I packed as well as I could, not really having many options, but I found a gray dress that doesn't seem too inappropriate (or likely to induce freezing). Men are dumb.

New Job

As you might be able to tell from the last post, I managed to find a job! It came about as a bit of an accident, and is a little bit of a long story, but I'll try to condense it and bullet it out.

• one weekend I am somewhat depressed about the job situation and expand the search to include medical office management, which I have done, and could do well, but would not be the most exciting thing in the world, especially after going to the trouble of getting an MBA
• the woman from the agency that had one of the listings I responded to called and asked me to interview with her
• I go and interview with the agency and they send me right over to a plastic surgeon's office, whose primary concern is that she wants an employee to stay with her for at least two years
• The interview goes well and she asks me to come to the office for a trial run (2 hours working with the current manager)
• She offers me the job, wants me to come in for a couple days the next week then full time, I tell her I need to talk to the hubs because he hadn't been home the past two nights and had no idea what was going on
• She interprets this as some sort of weakness, and says she'll continue to interview until I give her an answer, at which point I say that I will let her know later that afternoon
• I email her (her preferred method of contact) that I would like to accept half an hour after leaving the office
  
• The next day I receive a call from the recruiter saying that the doctor "was referred someone else by a colleague and wanted to go with her," so both the recruiter and I got screwed
• Next Monday the recruiter tells me she has another position
• I go to the interview, everyone is very nice, and they hire me, while telling me that they would prefer it if I look for other jobs while in my probationary period, so that I know that I really want to be there
  

Teeny Tiny Women

With the onset of winter has come complete bafflement. Although winter has not officially started, this was the first week where it was actually cold (highs in the 30's). Cold means cold, and I had to switch coats today, from my red trench to my black wool coat, because the red one is just too thing for the cold, and especially the wind. What baffles me are the young women, who happen to be (maybe) a size two, who I see in the morning on my way to work. There are at least 10 of these women running around in tights and a short, thin, almost-gauzy dress, with a short coat.
What are you thinking?!?! It's cold!

Shoe Zen

Among other news, I did manage to find myself employment, which is great, but most importantly means that I was able to buy myself the sort of boots that I have had my eye on for quite a while (basically since fall officially started). For this outing, I decided to go to Macy's, for several reasons:

• I checked out DSW online and couldn't find the style I wanted
• Macy's is having a boot sale
  
• I went online and got the shopping pass coupon for Macy's
• Macy's is two blocks away and DSW requires a subway trip

I got to Macy's off of 34th, and, not wanting to ask for directions to the shoe department, just started heading up the escalators. The escalators at Macy's might be my favorite thing about the store, because they are still made out of wood:Looking at it now, this is not the best camera work (thanks, iPhone), but you can get the general idea. Unfortunately, I was meeting J for lunch, so I didn't want to search around for the really cool set of escalators where even the treads are wooden.

Escalator-awe aside, the shoe department at the big Macy's is amazing. I kept not seeing the store directory, so I just rode the escalator until I saw a sign pointing me in the right direction, on the 5th floor. Now, I had decided to go alone because my shopping habits strain even family ties. I like to circle the store to see all of the options available, before jumping in and trying something on. I settled on three finalists and captured the attention of the salesperson, who whipped out the PDA to "call" my shoes from the stockroom. She scanned them in and the people in the stockroom just paged her after they had them ready and she brought them over.

I tried each pair on, and one of them was a clear loser, since I hadn't noticed that the boots didn't have a zipper, just stretch sides. How can I get my jeans to stay down in the boot when I have to pull the boots up? J pointed out (later, at lunch) that I could have just gone out and purchased a pair of skinny jeans, but I don't think that I'm built for skinny jeans, or buying jeans just to wear with a pair of boots. After much pacing, mirror examining, and sending pics to my sister, I finally decided on the "right" pair:OK, this picture is horrible, but you can see the huge-ified here.

Christmas is Coming!

Normally, I dislike the fact that Christmas advertisements start so early, and actually, I feel like they haven't started as early as they would have without a giant recession in place. Well, not the television commercials, anyway; I have received multitudinous emails from various retailers extolling their Christmas wares.
I think the reason I am so excited about Christmas this year is that it's our "first" Christmas together. My current mission is to make/find/buy Christmas stockings for us, which is quite a mission. In my family, we used the same Christmas stockings the entire time we were growing up, and only got a new set a year or two ago, when a few fell apart due to old age. I've started looking around, and right now I love these:

Pottery Barn

My obvious concern is that in 15 or 20 years they may seem somewhat dated. The good thing is that I have plenty of time to find/make/buy some.

Leaves Change Color?

OK, OK, I know that leaves change color in the fall, but it really just doesn't happen in Houston, for a few reasons.
1) Most of the trees in Houston are pine trees, which means that they don't change color - they go from green to brown, then immediately fall down.
2) We don't have autumn inn Houston, so generally leaves die all at once when the weather goes from being 70 to 30 in one day, then fall down when it rains the next day.

Imagine my delight when I was walking the dog one day and saw this explosion of color while I was entering the dog park:It was somewhat of a surprise that the leaves had turned, since it had rained all weekend and had been several days since I had been able to visit the park and, thus, see trees.

Why Do I Attract Creepos?

I usually wind up taking the dog down to the dog park at Madison Square Park two or three times a week. It's a short walk, and it lets her get enough exercise that she doesn't turn into the "terrorier," which keeps shoes and rugs unscathed.
The dog park is usually great - sometimes I'll take something to read, others I'll just watch the dogs romp and play. Two days ago, I took Sasha to the park, plopped down on one of the benches that encircles the trees, and occupied myself watching the dogs. About ten minutes later, some guy plops down on the next bench over, which was odd since the entire other side of the bench was open. Now, I don't mind talking to people I don't know, but strangers who are, well, strange, are another story. Luckily, after a give a few one-word answers to questions about the dog, he decides I'm not the chatty type and picks up his phone to call whoever he was supposed to be meeting. A few minutes later, he picked up the plastic shopping bag full of kickboxing gear and headed out.
Ten minutes after that, a very nice-old-man looking gentleman comes in, plops down a bag and sits down in the same spot. A few dogs came over to check him out and start going crazy (in the good way) and licking his face. It was somewhat heartwarming, except usually people try to get dogs to stop after a while; at some point, obsessive licking gets annoying. Not this man, he says, "Be careful, puppy, I lick back." Fortunately, he did not actually start licking the dog, but I decided that then was as good of a time as any to head home.

New Blog

So, I found a new identity and spot for my blog. Catholic Wedding Girl just didn't seem to make as much sense as an address. For the past few days I've been thinking about a new web identity, and though seemingly obvious, this address came to me last night right before I fell asleep (as all good ideas do). I'll be posting from www.nycnewlywed.blogspot.com from now on, and I hope everybody sticks with me.

On Why I Won't Use Just Any Grocery Service

I joked when we moved here that the first thing I mastered was ordering groceries online. "Mastering" may have been an overstatement, as I may have forgotten to add some things to the list, and completely missed the fact that I could get toilet paper and other toiletries for a few weeks. Otherwise, ordering groceries online has been so much easier than I imagined, and I haven't even tapped into the plethora of prepared foods available on the site.
Until this past weekend, I never realized that the reason online shopping for groceries was so easy was that Fresh Direct has such a friendly site. We received a pack of coupons in the mail, and we couldn't resist one that offered $30 off a $75 order. Their site was horrible. Searching for items didn't bring up the most exhaustive list of possibilities in the world. It asked for specific weights on the meat, not how many of something I wanted. There were also items that I needed, but wasn't sure if they were what I wanted, like a meatball/meatloaf mix (is that pork and beef or does it have seasoning?).
I finally put together the order, and set it up for delivery the same night (which was nice). They called a short while before it was delivered to check on some things that they "didn't have." The first was the meatball mix, she said they had turkey or beef, which I assumed to mean ground turkey or meat, but actually meant frozen, pre-cooked meatballs, yuck. They were also out of the frozen edamame I needed for a recipe. When we finally got the groceries, I pulled out the bag of oranges and realized that there were additives in the oranges, specifically a coloring additive (for an orange?). Needless to say, I will not be using that service again. Back to the tried and true for me.

Trekking around the City

The other day we were trekking around the city the other day, heading back to the Apple store, when we saw the FAO Schwartz store. Of course we had to stop in and take a tour, even though we didn't have any pressing toy shopping needs (otherwise the entire piano scene in Big would have been wasted). The ground floor is actually a little underwhelming: there are board games and stuffed animals, along with a candy store.
The true amazement hits when you go up the escalator to the second floor, where the wonderment starts, as off to the left, you see the Hogwarts store, where you can buy your own Gryffindor scarf or hat, which I jokingly threatened to do for my husband. The store seems to go on forever, there is a LEGO section (be still my dorky child heart), complete with giant LEGO sculptures, right next to the DUPLO and Playskool sections (which the husband had never heard of), which brought back tons of memories.
Through another doorway was the board game room, which contained every which board game ever known to man, including twenty-something versions of Monopoly. The next room was an even bigger trip down memory lane, as it was "the room with all the little plastic figurines." Probably not the actual title, but descriptive nonetheless. Now, I don't mean the little plastic figurines of farm animals that you could buy in the grocery store, but the somewhat higher quality, slightly bendable ones that came from somewhere else, apparently FAO Schwartz (and after some internet searching for photos, Target). What did we see on the shelves but these:
I couldn't believe that they still sell Smurf toys, and now I know that FAO Schwartz has them, and so does Target. Seeing them brought back so many memories. I loved the Smurfs, we even took Smurf vitamins at one point (my mom stopped when she realized that we didn't actually want to eat blue vitamins - I only wanted purple Gargamels).