Orange is not a colour, it's a state of mind

Bit of an orange-themed day today which was very cool. Plus another trip down memory lane – to Ninth Street Espresso in Chelsea Market.

In my mind, better than their cafe at Ninth street although theoretically they should be the same. There was a bit of a buzz at the bar because of a piece in the New York Times this morning about New Yorkers finally taking their coffee seriously – a write up of cafes where coffee is all about the art of espresso, single origin and chemex. We’ve already been to a couple of the places listed and have got the paper to tick a few others off the list.

We got some flowers from the corner store last night, such colorful places – who can believe you can get so many orange roses for $10? Slowly adding a bit more orange to the apartment!

We had lunch at a very orange cafe called Forty Carrots,

then the long-awaited dinner in the restaurant above the Museum of Art & Design that glows orange at night – it does and has spectacular views over Columbus Circle and Central Park.

So it looks like our breakfasts will not be as ‘posh’ as we’re used to – have to get used to drip filter coffee and bagels.

First supermarket trip was to Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods in Union Square. Probably a mistake because both were incredibly crowded (the Trader Joe’s checkout line started at the entrance and snaked right around the back of the store!) and we didn’t know where anything was so had to crawl up and down every aisle. In the pasta aisle when I went to put our stuff in the trolley I realised The Mister had walked off with someone else’s trolley! We’d been walking a while so we had to scratch our heads to remember what the last thing was we put in our own trolley to back track. We found it abandoned by the oil and fell into uncontrollable giggles when we realised some poor person now long gone from there turned to put their oil in the trolley and it had completely vanished. After a quick switercheroo of unwanted items we rushed off and The Mister never let the trolley go again!

Well except for here when you have to take the trolley up the escalator to the rest of the supermarket and checkouts – it rides on it’s own special escalator next to you. Hmmm, I was the only whirly-girl rushing around taking photos of it!

First decent cup of coffee today, walked about 27 blocks to get it – Ninth Street Espresso – was totally worth it and I picked up a little lapel pin to wear on my jacket. Was so excited I forgot to take a photo and now I can’t find the one I took a couple of visits ago when we first discovered it. They’re using a different coffee now, roasted at Intelligentsia Coffee Lab in New York.

I only every dreamed it. Who would’ve thought that just last week I was coming home to this view

And now I get to come home to this view

Here are some other photos out each window of the apartment with the view stretching from the Woolworth building downtown, around over the East River, uptown to the Chrysler and at a pinch across to the Empire State building.

Absolutely incredible.

We’re here! Spent our first night eating huge slices of pizza and drinking beer and coke and watching the Oscars (that we’d seen being set up in LA) in our hotel room. First full day in New York we had 2 things to get done – bank account and ‘move in’ to our apartment.

Opening the bank account was pretty easy – sat in an office with our passports and a lady and filled out a bunch of paperwork, entered a bunch of passwords, smiled into a camera, tried out temporary Visa debit cards under her supervision and we were done! Money available immediately

Los Angeles is a big sprawling place. We’ve never stopped here before and thought we would this time. The climate sure is intoxicating, even though they’re coming out of winter (judging by the winter clothes the locals are wearing) it’s still quite temperate and still has a landscape of blue sky and palm trees. We’re staying in a fantastic hotel on Santa Monica beach – here’s the view from our window.

Getting anywhere is a mission. We met our New York ‘land lady’ for lunch yesterday in Beverly Hills and she was absolutely horrified that we went there on the bus. I told her we were only in town for 3 days and she responded in the best New York accent ‘SO?!’ I guess you’re supposed to hire a car. She said everyone drives, and everywhere is 20 minutes by car. For us, everything is an hour by bus! It seems to be the transport system for crazy people from those who rant at you for no reason, ranting at themselves and shouting at pamphlet ads to removing their suit to reveal a Superman outfit underneath!

Quick list of stuff we’ve done:

• Walked along Santa Monica beach & explored promenade shops
• Gone by bus up to West Hollywood to meet Rick & Julia on the night they were also in town – walked the Hollywood Walk of Fame looking at all the stars and batting away dressed-up movie characters wanting to charge you to have a picture with them (on your own camera) and people flapping tour brochures.
• Gone by bus up to Beverly Hills to meet Sandy for lunch. She was lovely! Pure New Yorker, brought out to LA for work (ex film producer! and we watched her actor son in an episode of the TV show Numb3rs last night!) who told us lovely stories about the LA psyche and her life. It was such a great thing to do and she totally trusts us to live in her apartment. While we were at lunch The Mister was asked for ID – she said he should feel very chuffed about that – everyone here is cut and injected to look younger (and actually looks the same, which everyone does!) so he’s feeling all springy and youthful now!
• Wandered along Rodeo Drive – was a bit disappointing, not sure why, I think they whole glossy big shops with doormen thing is a bit overwhelming if you just want to have a poke around. It’s like even when out for a stroll you have to prove you can afford to be there.
• Went down to the Santa Monica pier and The Mister played some arcade games (some old shoot ‘em up game he hadn’t played since he was a teenager), got a strip of photobooth photos (your booth is so much classier and QUICKER @freezingkiwis), saw lots of random stalls with merchandise that could involve you: your face in a photo with the ferris wheel behind, your name on a grain of rice, you as a small clay sculpture, your future as predicted by the tarot cards. We went back after dinner and rode the ferris wheel – yes ME on a ferris wheel. It wasn’t until we had our tickets and were almost at the front of the line that The Mister told me he’d never been on one before! It wasn’t so bad
• Had some bad BAD coffee – been here 3 days and only had 3 cups. And the first was only half the bucket of searing hot milk I was presented with. The latte they serve at breakfast on the veranda of our hotel (such a cool place to have breakfast) is drinkable if you leave it to rest for 15 minutes!
• Gone by TWO buses up to Universal Studios in the sometimes torrential rain – not sure what I expected but it wasn’t really what I expected. Expensive day at a theme park although the 2 tours we did were pretty good although designed for mass reproduction – studio tour and special effects stage. Had a bit of my first cinnabon – it had some kind of gooey icing on it and I don’t think there was any real cinnamon present, was some kind of reddish cinnamon paste. Oh, well, I was excited to do it!

Santa Monica was very cool. Would visit there again.

So The Mister was in a jam (ha ha!) earlier this week – challenged by the partner of a guy we work with that HER jam is better than his raspberry jam. It started out as a harmless try-the-jam-at-home-on-your-toast kind of challenge but escalated into so much more – Al Brown of the very well know Logan Brown restaurant in Wellington waded in with support for the challenger, famous judges were lined up, Old Bank Arcade where it was held was jam-packed (ha ha), announcement of the event and write-up afterwards were in the paper and apparently the NZ Gardener magazine has put up their hand to sponsor it next year – WOW!

It was a great little get together – a really fun non-work, community thing to do left everyone in good spirits, even the loser, The Mister

I’ve put 2 posts about the event on the Xero blog: Xero jam session and Jamtastic!

So I’m receiving increasing pressure to blog which I will hopefully have time for while we’re in the States but in the meantime hope you’ve enjoyed the little rush of them over the last week. I’ve just had no time to sit down and do them when I get home and they’ve been floating around in my head bothering me. It’s weird that I have that feeling that I just have to get everything done before we go – at this rate I’ll have finished all my work before we get there and have none left to do – ridiculous because I’m not stopping work when we get there! Well, except for the first week off.

Anyway, it’s about this time of the night I find myself home at the dining table. Yes working. I often glance up to the traffic coming around from The Terrace and I always notice that many of them go over the double line onto the wrong side of the road. Some not so much, some a lot. Some so much that in the space of an hour there could’ve been some very bad accidents were a car coming the other way at the same time. The corner is pretty sharp, but there is a warning sign that it’s a left-angle bend and most people at this time of the day must be on the evening commute so surely realise how sharp the corner is.

So, in manner of nosy old woman twitching net curtains in a cul de sac, I decided to take 5 minutes to tally up how many cars came around the corner and how many went wide enough to be riding on the double yellow line and see whether any went way over.

The tally from 6.25pm – 6.30pm

• 65 – number of cars that came around that corner in 5 minutes
• 42 – number of cars that tracked a ‘good’ line around the bend
• 20 – cars that were close too or on the double yellow line (I define that as wide)
• 3 – cars that went OVER the yellow line (and a scooter!)

I was rather shocked!

Don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but on TV programmes and in movies, whenever someone leaves their job they seem to do so with only one box. A brown or white file box, often with a lid and sometimes with a plant. Seems a bit dubious to me because I seem to have a lot of stuff around and under my desk, not to mention the collection of orange pens and post-it notes.

However, today we packed up our desks in the likely event that due to Xero’s continuing growth spurt new people will need to sit at our desks while we’re gone. After recycling my non-essentials I was very surprised that I have stuffed my 3 years at Xero into ONE box! Includes my collection of orange things, cup, framed pictures, the Xero User Guide when it existed in book form, a ream of orange paper and more!

It now waits in the storeroom with my special orange chair for my return.

So that’s our desks spring-cleaned, and the apartment – have scrubbed pantry, shower (with a toothbrush even!), fridge, balcony pots; emptied, scrutinized and repacked cupboards under stairs, basins and hot water cupboard and we’re now down to eating strange meals to use up bits of random food from freezer, fridge and pantry. And to top off the weekend The Mister went next door to see our neighbour who we don’t see for months (so she probably wouldn’t've noticed we were gone) to tell her about a stranger coming and going from our apartment only to be greeted by a stranger staying there while she was away – looking rather rumpled and disturbed in a bathrobe so he’s quite embarrassed. Dammit. The first time I’ve ever got him to go over to the neighbours and that. Now he’ll never go again. Sigh.