Monday, December 27, 2010

An Eventful Holiday Weekend.

Quite an eventful holiday weekend, all in all! TQ moved to Brooklyn on Thursday the 23rd. I had him over for dinner afterwards & then on Christmas Eve Day we went to his new place & unpacked. Christmas Eve, we had the most amazing dinner at Purple Yam. It was something like an eight-course meal, with the main event being the most scrumptious spit-roasted pig, which they made in the restaurant's garden -


They had very nice live music (including a few selections from A Charlie Brown Christmas - still a little incredible to think that CBS wasn't really sold on the Vince Guaraldi Trio, can you imagine any other music working as well?) -


and this is the final course, a lighter-than-light lemon souffle - we actually tried to leave after the ice cream, because we were too stuffed to eat another bite, but TQ went to thank Amy (one of the owners) for a wonderful dinner & she wouldn't let us leave without trying it! I'm glad, too, we certainly didn't need it, and we couldn't finish it, but oh, how delicious.

Christmas Day we slept in a bit & then (as I'd mentioned) headed out to the club for an afternoon paddle.


It was a wintery day, although beautifully quiet. We ended up doing around 9 or 10 miles at a nice steady clip, going around the smaller islands of Jamaica Bay with a lunch stop at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge (I wanted to scout the take-out prior to taking a special guest, a gentleman who's writing a guidebook for Long Island Paddling, on a paddle next week - it's an easy one but I do like to double-check).

Probably not enough to work off the excesses of the night before but it still felt good - and it's always incredible to have the bay entirely to yourself.
We only saw one other boat out from 2:00 launch to twilight landing

And it was Marcus Demuth on his Epic V10 surfski -



And we didn't see him for very long!


Seriously, we were laughing because we didn't launch a terribly long time after he paddled off, and we are not exactly slouches as sea kayakers go, but by the time we came out from under the bridge at the basin, he was nowhere to be seen. That's fast.

We went on to have a great paddle & then the final stop of the evening was at this wonderfully over-the-top Christmas display in Canarsie -







Nice festive end to the day.

Boxing Day, we were supposed to go to Queens for lunch with an old friend of mine. Unfortunately he had to cancel because he wasn't feeling well but I think that it was probably for the best that we only went to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden instead - we'll reschedule the dinner & as it was, I took this picture right around the time that we were supposed to be at J's.
TQ's a good driver & getting home from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden was not a problem but getting home from Queens might have been trouble.


So of course that was the Great Boxing Day Blizzard of 2010.

And yes, I did take more pictures. Of course!

I've put up 3 blizzard galleries on Picasa -

First was more from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It was interesting, they had some areas open that are usually closed in the wintertime - we wondered if maybe they did that as a special treat for those of us who come out to visit the garden on a cold & snowy day.
From Boxing Day Blizzard, Brooklyn Botanic Garden



This afternoon, TQ & I went out to get some lunch, pick up a snow shovel if the hardware store had any left, and see if there was any way for me to get to work. Of the three goals, only lunch worked out, but I did take the new camera along, got some nice pictures, and despite the lack of snow shovels at the hardware store, we did manage to get the Mighty Taurus more or less cleared out through kind loans of shovels from neighbors. We started with TQ wielding this broom but we did end up with shovels for both of us. Thank you neighbors!
From Boxing Day Blizzard - Day After, afternoon walk


I've posted the best of the "morning commute ha ha" pictures here, I'd grabbed the Optio because I was actually going with the intent of going to work - you saw how well that worked out but as usual I had fun taking pictures & there were a few more too.
From Boxing Day Blizzard - Rush Hour


Tomorrow? Fingers crossed for getting back to work.

1 comment:

O Docker said...

I'm something of a jazz nut.

Well, OK, I guess I could have left out the 'jazz'.

But my latest favorite album is a recent re-release of some of Guaraldi's standards - most of which weren't on the Charlie Brown Christmas album.

It's sad to think that he would have been largely forgotten were it not for the popularity of that TV program.