Entries from June 2009 ↓

In our house we’ve got pairs of cups and saucers that sit on top of the coffee machine, latte cups and espresso cups, and we use them every day because there’s always 2 of us having cups of coffee … as you know, one of my favourite pastimes is to have a coffee and bikkie gathering. But, there are a couple of one-offs: a Ritzenhoff latte glass that Basel Lisa sent me years ago and my new present from New York, a ceramic version of the classic blue New York takeaway cup.

I only get to use either of these cups when the Mister is not around – so typically once every 4-6 weeks when there’s a Xero product release and he has to get up in the wee hours of the morning to go into work, or stay there all night like he did last night – and because a) I have to drink my morning coffee alone and b) because the cups don’t have a mate, they’re referred to as a ’sad cup’.

Maiden voyage for the New York sad cup this morning. Good brew too!

Great weekend in Blenheim with urban family but MAN it was cold there. Who knew that within a 20 minute flight the weather could be so different. We just about got blown away with vertical needles of driving southerly rain to get out to the plane on Saturday morning, took off to the south and with such strong wind gusts the pilot had barely reach max run-up speed when we leapt into the air and arrived in Blenheim 20 minutes later to a gorgeous sunny still morning. And a really crunchy frost! Similar thing coming back yesterday – left a beautiful cold orange bathed scene as we flew over wintry vines into the sunset into a wall of black cloud just off the coast of Wellington into one of the roughest landings I can remember, and I’m pretty good at the flying sideways landings but last night’s was particularly horrifying because we touched down and cruised on the 2 back wheels for quite a while before they could bring the nose down to taxi. Again the howling southerly! We had sub-zero temperatures on Saturday night and they had -4 last night!

Here’s the lovely orange sunset back over the Marlborough Sounds

However got to catch up and eat baking and delicious corn fritters and walk the dogs and have lots of lovely Aidan & family time.

Reading is still a favourite

As is posing for the camera (check out his cool new cap)

And here he is making his second favourite noise to DA!, bla-dle-la-dle-la-dle-la.

Frost! Not that it’s easy to see frost in the city but the roof over the road had a thick white coat on it. Off to Blenheim this weekend where it’s forecast to be MINUS 2 overnight! Packing the slippers.

Every time I walk through the Harbour City Centre it seems that Kirks has taken over another little shop or corner in there to use as one of their departments or to continue to sell things they couldn’t shift in the sale, although I don’t remember there being a sale lately so I hope they’re not going to have stuff on sale *all* the time because it takes away some of their exclusivity.

Anyway, yesterday, one of these little stores was selling a bunch of crockery and Mario Batali cookware and such. And there was a whole 2 (albeit small) shelves of orange crockery! Jugs, sugar bowls, plates, mugs, bowls and cups! Wonder what I need want …

Just snapped this on my phone on the way to get coffee before the next deluge of rain. It’s getting colder and colder as that big black cloud a way down the end of Willis Street comes up town.

During the Moore Wilson’s shop on Saturday I got ingredients for a dinner I dreamed up while there when I saw a great big container of fresh beans. I had the idea for a potato, bean and spinach salad thing. With some kind of buttery dressing thing.

So tonight we just chucked it all together to see what would happen. The dressing I made was crushed garlic, juice from 1 lemon and a decent amount of olive oil that I then whisked a fairly generous amount of melted butter into – it soaked into the hot potatoes and beans and all that together made the baby spinach wilt nicely.

Very tasty and we decided very healthy – all that green!

With all the fog and rain today we decided to make something a bit wintry and different. For some reason I had a memory flash of a Turkish chicken thing (you can see I’m still on my chicken and rice theme) that I’d printed off the internet and put in my folder of recipes to make one day and never had.

I found the recipe, I’d printed it in 2003 and it’s still on the internet today albeit slightly updated! I was a bit dubious about the actual orange segments in it after having marinaded the chicken in orange juice all afternoon and thought that a whole green capsicum would be quite overwhelming, we prefer the sweeter red/orange capsicums but as always, we followed the recipe exactly when making it the first time around.

It looked nice and colourful in the fry pan

And when all the flavours had simmered together tasted fantastic! The orange and capsicum had mellowed so much, the chicken was really tender and the whole thing was just delicious.

So another one to add to the list for when visitors come for dinner!

Here’s the recipe from the eCook website: Turkish Style Chicken Casserole

Had quite a few picnics in New York this time around with it being our first summer trip there.

Breakfast ‘picnic’ at Ninth Street Espresso in Chelsea Market

Lunch in Central Park

Lunch in Chelsea Park

Waiting to order from Shake Shack for the burger picnic dinner in Madison Square Park

Lunch in Union Square

New York felt like going home this time. Everything is beginning to feel very familiar and other than the initial confusion about whether you’re looking uptown or downtown after you get out of the subway for the first time, we’re really beginning to get to know our way around. I even had a Metro pass from our last trip which I just pulled out of my wallet and topped up!

Here’s the quick day-by-day run down.

Day 1:

Late start after arriving at the hotel at 4am, and it rained solidly all day. Gumboots everywhere being worn as a fashion item. Went over to the Chelsea Market for a late coffee at Ninth Street Espresso.

In the rain outside Chelsea Market

Decided to spend the day getting some jobs for people at work over and done with. Note to anyone who wants to post, FedEx or UPS a bottle of wine across the States: you can’t. We traipsed around in the rain to each place with the wine, frayed tempers, muttering at the guy from work who’d wanted it posted. Bad news arrived via email mid-afternoon – Yankees game that night was postponed. The Mister was inconsolable. Went up to Morrell’s for dinner to drown his sorrows and got some New York baked cheesecake from a diner on the way home to eat in front of the late shows.

Day 2:

Up early and out to the Bronx to Yankee Stadium to see what to do with the tickets from last night’s game. A couple of other games that weekend we could’ve gone to, but no good seats. Tickets can be used to enter any other game within a year, or the postponed game now scheduled for September or a full refund seeing as we’re from out of New York (still deciding, could be a good excuse to go back again soon!). At least the Mister got to touch Yankee Stadium, little by little he’ll get in to see a game!

As close as the Mister got to a Yankees game

Fine warm day (27 degrees), so headed back down towards 5th Ave, wandered around Bloomingdales, had lunch in a very green Central Park, headed on down to Madison Square Park to catch up with our New York friend for coffee, and finally got to Union Square Cafe for dinner. Very nice and a bit more up market than I thought it would be and great service. Walked the 20 blocks home in a very balmy 20-ish degrees.

Day 3:

Headed out to Chelsea again to find the other cafe that we’d read rivaled Ninth Street Espresso and had won this year’s Time Out New York Cafe of the Year Award, Cafe Grumpy. Coffee was pretty good but not as good as Ninth Street Espresso however we certainly felt very cool being there even if very straight – and the 2 guys next to us were certainly very grumpy with each other so perhaps that’s where the name comes from! Walked around Chelsea on our way back uptown to get another job done for someone at this amazing huge electronics store where you ‘order’ your purchase from an ‘agent’ and it is retrieved by a robotic arm in the basement somewhere and rides in little glass elevators and a conveyor belt on the ceiling in little green buckets up to the counter where you pay and pickup on your way out! Saw some really amazing huge old brick buildings and tree-lined streets when walking up through Chelsea.

Huge brick building in Chelsea

That night Sara and Lucy arrived and we went to the extremely hip outdoor Shake Shack in Madison Square park for fantastic burgers outdoors for dinner and then walked up to take in the bright lights of Times Square.

Day 4:

Took the girls down to Ninth Street Espresso to prove to them that you can get decent coffee in New York if you know where to go then headed right downtown to show them around Ground Zero and Battery Park where they got a look at the Statue of Liberty even if across the river. Had a poke through the Century 21 outlet store seeing as we’d never been there then headed up to Union Square for a picnic of sandwiches and sushi from Wholefoods. Then it was back up to Macys to get glammed up with posh make-up from the Estee Lauder counter, then on with the posh frocks and back down to Wall Street for the Webby Awards.

A very cool night, saw quite a few famous people from both the internet and Hollywood worlds – Seth Meyers, Lisa Kudrow, Sarah Silverman, Molly Simms, Jimmy Fallon, Martha Stewart, Beeker, Cameron Diaz and Tim Berners-Lee. We sat at a table with a group from NASA which was pretty amazing and went to a dreadfully loud underground club in Chelsea for the ‘after party’. We only lasted about an hour there, then stayed up until 3.30am back at the hotel writing up the blog post about the awards for work (http://blog.xero.com/2009/06/google-sexy-fun-addictive-xero/). There was a wicked thunderstorm a little while later – thunder sounds so different there, I guess because it rattles around the tall buildings so sounds a lot closer and louder.

Day 5:

Home time. One last visit to Chelsea to Ninth Street Espresso seeing as we were all so dreadfully tired and in need of one last coffee then a wander through Greenwich Village and Soho before heading back to the hotel to get our bags.

Wandering along Bleecker Street

When we came out to the taxi there was the most solid and brief downpour I’d ever seen – I think New York was crying because we were leaving! It was enough to set me off, I don’t know why I can’t leave that town dry-eyed! The flight back was without delay although we were lucky to leave pretty much on time from JFK as the rain earlier in the day had caused a bit of a backlog on the runway. Planes were being re-routed around the storm clouds and unlike planes in New Zealand, they seem to be stacked 3 layers high in the sky so you can’t just go higher or lower or turn left to avoid a thunderstorm because there’s likely to be another plane in the sky to bump into. I amused myself for the first hour or so on the plane listening through the headset to the pilots of all the planes in the area talking to the air traffic controllers – the Texan’s are particularly amusing.

Got back 2 days later and managed to get into work by 10am a couple of hours after the flight landed. It was a reasonably tiring day but I did get quite a lot of work done and even managed yoga that night although I must admit almost fell asleep during the little rest time at the end!

Here’s something I wrote on the plane that I’ve only got around to posting now.

–

I can’t sleep, I don’t know what time it is or where I am and I am so uncomfortable as we fly over little orange patches that are towns in the black of America at nighttime – into what I think is New York at 4am. We’re 3 hours behind schedule and I’ve now been awake for about 24 hours because I didn’t get much sleep this time on the Auckland – Los Angeles flight. Obviously I can’t publish this now but I can write down some stuff from along the way so far.

Best inflight snack ever on a domestic flight in NZ has got to be Abe’s mini bagel crisps, natural.

I was not impressed with some guy in the airline lounge in Auckland who hogged one of the 4 public computers there. He got a great bowl of smelly food and a couple of beers and just made himself at home. Mind you so were a lot of other people. I guess that’s the problem living your life on Facebook and blogs and online chat, there’s no concept of jumping on to a computer to quickly check your email, which is what I wanted to do and would’ve thought was polite behaviour in a crowded room with only 4 computers and others circling to use them.

There were lots of groups of people travelling and I’m always amazed by the amount people eat and drink when waiting in the lounge. Must be the free food mentality – the 2 groups of 4 either side of us had so many beers and glasses of spirits and great plates of what looked like mince and chips and rolls with ham. God, I can’t think of anything worse than being full of mass produced, over-garlicked food and dazed and red-faced from alcohol just before a long haul flight. Especially when that’s exactly what you get in the 1st 2 hours of the flight anyway!

I felt pretty good when we got to LAX and was positively brimming with anticipation at stepping out the terminal doors into the sun – we were only half a dozen back from the front in the immigration queue and only had 2 hours to fill in before out next flight and I prematurely wondered why people moan about transferring through LAX. We’ve never had a bad time there.

Except this time, my fingerprints were ‘blurred’. What? I mean that one other time my fingers were too clean for them to get a print and I had to try again but this time I had to be escorted to the ‘Secondary Inspection’ room. It was near the baggage carousel and so the Mister waited out there for the bags but could see me through the glass sitting on a hard plastic seat with 20 other ‘naughty’ people. As time past I realised that it was me and a room full of Mexicans, each one of whom had some visa problem and they were all being called in turn from their place in the pigeon-hole system of queuing to be questioned about one time or other they tried to enter the country with out a visa. When one guy was being questioned about a particular situation in 1968 I began to realise just how long I was going to be there. And one of our bags was VERY slow at coming off the carousel and both the Mister and I were beginning to get concerned about our dwindling connection time, and had to communicate through hand gestures and ‘read my lips’ because I wasn’t allowed out of the room and we both had to stay behind our respective lines, scared out of our wits of doing the wrong thing with all these uniformed people with guns all round the place.

And then with 45 minutes to spare the bag popped out of the hole, they called my name, I answered a few questions and we were on our way. Who knows what was really wrong with my prints, and why they didn’t redo them and why they seemed to have no record of my previous trips to the U.S. (unless they were all questions to test my accuracy). We got to have our lovely we walk in the sun, past bushes of beautiful hibiscuses – you know you’re in a sunny climate when you see a hibiscus – and into the domestic terminal to find our flight to New York, no queues at the security checkpoint and we didn’t set off any alarms. Just enough time to get a coffee and scone and a couple of sandwiches for our dinner on the flight. Hopped on our 757, laptop ready to watch 4 or 5 episodes of Lie To Me.

Then the dreaded ‘excuse me ladies and gentleman …’ damn flickering fuel light. Mechanics had to come. I’m sure this exact same thing happened last time! So we filled in the 20 minutes it was going to take them to fix the light by doing our first ever Sudoku in the back of the inflight magazine. We’d done about half of it when we got the bad news that it was going to take an hour to replace the fuel filter which had turned out to be the cause of the flickering light. However we were allowed to de-plane. Never had that happen before! So most of the plane emptied and hung around in the lounge as requested. Then more bad news, more than an hour to fix so they were going to shift us all to a different plane due to arrive in an hour or so – so, could everyone get back on the plane, get all their stuff off and then make sure they were back at the same gate at 7pm when the next plane was due to arrive. MAN! Many people were getting very short-tempered, shouting at the airline staff and I commiserated with a guy from New York who’d been on the flight from Noo Zeeland 22 hours ago and just couldn’t stand a 2-hour delay!

So we settled down with a couple of magazines to wait when unexpected news arrived 10 minutes later – plane was fixed so we could board in another 10 minutes! Of course my first thought was to worry that we wouldn’t be able to leave on time because many people had wandered off to spend the hour in a bar or shops and would only return at 7pm. So off I went, much to the embarrassment of the Mister, searching the terminal for flight buddies to tell them to get back to the lounge because the plane was fixed – managed to fin 4 of them. The people I found didn’t seem to recognise me so they probably wondered how I knew they were on the flight! Just observant! One of the people I found was the guy who’d come from Noo Zeeland, he was in a bar talking to a woman and was just putting his hand into his jacket, I think about to swap phone numbers, I hesitated for a micro-second but then figured he wouldn’t regret my interruption if it meant he wouldn’t miss his flight! So we were finally on our way 3 hours later.

God I hope it’s nearly time for the descent.