New York City

Benjamin turned 40 in April. I had to be in New York the following week for work, so we decided we should go up on his birthday and spend the weekend in the city. (Incidentally, my work meeting subsequently got cancelled so I had to buy an extra ticket to come home which kind of sucked. But anyway.)

We stayed at a new hotel right across the street from Carnegie Hall, conveniently called The Carnegie Hotel. It was small and quiet - only four rooms per floor. We could also see Trump Tower from the window, which of course is not a bonus. The streets all around there are blocked off with permanent NYPD security stations and cops all over the place. THANKS, TRUMP.

We were only a couple blocks south of the park, so we spent some time time wandering around there.

Here's Ben doing that thing where he won't smile for a picture because he thinks he looks dumb, so instead he just looks mad.

On this trip we decided to hit some of the smaller museums we hadn't visited before, so Saturday morning we headed toward the Museum of the City of New York on the Upper East Side. However, due to a bathroom emergency by someone (NOT ME) we ended up popping into the to the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Museum as it happened to be on the way. The Cooper Hewitt turned out to be awesome! It's in Andrew Carnegie's old mansion and was worth it for the building alone.

There were also all sorts of weird exhibits too, though. Lots of 1920s memorabilia (jeweled cigarette cases, flapper dresses, etc.) and a whole series of rooms about how designers use scraps to make something new. There was also an entire room devoted to complicated miniature staircases. It was right up our alley.

The Museum of the City of NY was good, too. I love a nice history & culture museum.

We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday morning. It was extremely terrible. There were way too many people and it was hot in the sun and UGH. I'm not going to do that ever again. It started raining then, so we headed back up to Midtown and went to the Morgan Library and Museum. Another great museum filled with oddities! I saw a molding of George Washington's face!

The next day we went back downtown to try to find the oldest part of town. Ben is always really into this sort of thing.

We found it! Look how old these little buildings are!

After this we walked to the Tenement Museum to learn about the Irish people who emigrated in the 1800s. I had been there once before a couple of years ago and remembered it being extremely bleak, but our tour guide this time framed everything in a not-as-terrible light. I was kind of disappointed, to be honest, because I had talked up the horror quite a bit before we got there.

We ended Sunday with a comedy show at the UCB Theatre, which was super fun. Then we walked back to our hotel alllll the way from the Lower East Side to Midtown.

We ate our faces off the entire time, but I did not take any pictures of the food. Restaurants visited included Momofuku Ma Peche, Marc Forgione, Dianne & Elisabeth, and a random pizza place on 10th Avenue. We were supposed to have a final dinner on Sunday night, but our brunch at Marc Forgione was completely ridiculous and we couldn't fit in any more food.

Before we left for the airport on Monday we did another loop through the park. The tallest building here is a new residential structure. I looked into it in the cab and the top floor penthouse is for sale for EIGHTY TWO MILLION DOLLARS.

I love New York! I mean, I always kind of hate it by the time the trip is over, but then I love it again immediately after a couple of days away.

First Annual SMARTS Reunion

We moved away from LA twelve years ago, and I hadn't been back at all until last year. And then I went again in April! My best high school friends decided to have a reunion weekend to celebrate our 40th birthday year, and picked LA as the location. 

I took an Uber from the airport to Hollywood and he drove me through downtown. Look! That's where I used to work! Downtown LA has changed so, so much in twelve years. Tons of new skyscrapers and development.

We stayed at the W Hollywood, where we got a good rate thanks to one of my internet friends. The location was perfect, right at Hollywood & Vine, fairly central and walkable to lots of stuff. The first thing we did, after hugging and crying, was get lunch at Shake Shack and then manicures & pedicures. Fancying up for the weekend! It is always so freaking good to see Erin, one of my top people in life since we played Mastermind together in the 3rd grade.

We had a drink on the hotel patio, and then quickly decided to never have a drink there again as the cheapest thing was $17. OH, Hollywood.

The first day we went to the La Brea Tar Pits, which somehow in over four years of living there I had never visited. It was cool! Right there in the middle of town!

The LA County Museum of Art is right nearby, so we popped in there for a while as well. One thing about traveling with girlfriends as opposed to Ben is that everyone is on board with asking strangers to take your picture.

We spent an extensive amount of time trying to choose cheap tourist t-shirts so we could all match. For some reason, 90% of the t-shirts on Hollywood Boulevard are sized for tiny people. I had this experience in New York, too - I don't know what's up with that. Surely tourists in general are not smaller than the average person. Unfortunately even the largest of this hot number did not fit us.

We went to dinner at Musso & Frank, an old Hollywood landmark. We had a very outgoing waiter who told us all about how Frank Sinatra used to sit in our booth.

The next day we took a star homes tour, which left from a very weird little office in a seedy strip mall but turned out to be super fun. This is Richard Simmons' house. Poor Richard Simmons!

And this is the view from Leonard DiCaprio's estate. I took a bunch of pictures of other houses but now cannot recall who any of them belong to.

REG BEV WIL

At the end he drove us up to Mulholland for views of the city and the Hollywood sign. I miss LA! Too bad it's completely unaffordable and the traffic is insane and it never rains.

We then took an Uber to Santa Monica, to walk from the pier down to Venice. Erin wrote SMARTS on the beach.

Here we are in our matching shirts! I don't know what I thought life was going to be like at 40 back when we were all cruising the Belt in St. Joe at 16, but I know I never pictured us in matching t-shirts at Hollywood & Vine.

We decided to make the SMARTS reunion an annual event, and already picked the dates for 2018 so everyone would block the time on their calendars. It was a perfect weekend - there is nothing like spending time with people who've known you literally your whole life. We need more of that in this world.

Cats! Cats! Cats!

We've had Doki and Mike just over a year now. Making the snap decision to take these two cats in has turned out to be one of the best things I've ever done in my life. They are a freaking delight. 

It's been really gratifying winning Mike over. He was so suspicious of us in the beginning - would dodge his head to avoid petting, even hissed at times - but now he is a big love muffin. He's still irritable, no doubt, but he follows us from room to room now, and happily sleeps on the couch and allows us to pet him while we watch TV.

He wasn't very fluffy when we got him, as they came to us as outdoor cats, but he is QUITE fluffy now.

Doki is still small, but mighty. She remains the boss of the house despite being 2/3rds the size of the other two. Papaya used to be afraid of her, but has since realized Doki doesn't actually want to hurt her, just to chase her around and make her feel bad about herself. She does this to Mike, too. It's equal opportunity bullying - classic Napoleon syndrome. She's never irritable with us, though - she climbs into my lap and settles into purr there for hours if I let her.

All in all, they get along well and every day it's the highlight of my day to come home and get to see them all hanging out together.

Papaya is still a weirdo, for the most part. But she's pretty.

Mike likes to lay on his back like this but gets very irritated when you try to touch his stomach. It's mean! Don't do that if you don't want belly pets!

Seriously.

The lesson I have learned through this impromptu adoption is that I love cats. All cats. I guess there might be some bad ones out there, but it isn't true that I need to get them when they're kittens and raise them and all that. I loved these guys instantly, and I love them more every day. I can't ever imagine having fewer than three now. I want all the cats always! Thanks, Grandma Betty.

Oh ho! Still alive.

I was cleaning up my iPhone photos today and realized we have done lots of stuff I have not put on the blog. Once I did try to make a post about something but the app wasn't working right and I got mad and quit.

Firstly, here is my hair. It's been two years, more or less, since it started growing. At this time in 2015 I was pretty much still bald.

It is verrrrry close to all staying back in a ponytail. Maybe 6 weeks away. I read recently on a Stage IV survivor's blog that having her hair back is "everything I dreamed it would be, and more," and IT'S TRUE. And I don't even have all my hair back yet.

That said, it's weird looking like a normal person now. People don't know I had cancer unless I tell them. And it's starting to feel like something from my past, rather than something happening in the present. That feels dangerous, to not be constantly vigilant about cancer hovering over my life, but it also feels necessary, because for more than the first two years after that surreal moment I got the news, I spent most of the minutes of every single day paralyzingly afraid.

I'm not really afraid right now. I think it's because I finally realized I can, in fact, control how I feel. I can decide how to deal with it. And right now, I feel fine. I know that if it does come back, I will regret these healthy days wasted feeling afraid.

It's interesting, though; every time I see statistics - like 99% of small localized cancers don't recur - I'm pleasantly surprised. Gosh! 99% is pretty good! Yesterday I read the results again for the Taxol/Herceptin study for treatment of Stage I cancers, and discovered anew that less than 1% of women had distant metastasis after three years. Two years ago I wrote about that right here on this very blog - you'd think I would remember it - but I know I didn't believe it at the time. Now I believe it, I guess. It's a lot easier to believe when you're 30 months out and nothing bad has happened.

[YET.]

Trip Report: Day Thirteen/Fourteen - Paris (THE END)

We took it easy on the last day. My fever was gone but I still didn't feel great and was pretty concerned Ben was going to come down with it at any second. We decided to go up to the top of Tour Montparnasse, just down the street from us, but it was too cloudy at the top.

We had two major goals for the day: find macarons and buy some art for the house. The macarons turned out to be easy. I was kind of wishing we'd set that goal earlier in the trip, because it made me realize in retrospect that we hadn't placed a high enough priority on dessert.

Then we walked up to the Seine to the little art stalls along the river near Notre Dame.

We found a couple of good ones! Maybe soon we'll get them framed and I'll post some pictures.

Then we went to a Thai restaurant for lunch. It was so good, exactly what I needed. Nothing better than tom kha gai when you're sick.

We should have bought more! These were gone instantly.

I got a bunch of French medicine, too. All their medicine is behind the counter and you have to ask for it, so that was kind of intimidating, but the lady spoke enough English to hook me up.

Then we started packing. Our flight was supposed to leave at 7:50am and I had recently learned that you're supposed to be at Charles de Gaulle THREE HOURS before your flight, which was disheartening. Even more disheartening, though, was when I got this email at 9:00pm, literally as we were putting our stuff in suitcases.

Ugghghhhhh. We were supposed to fly from Paris to London to Raleigh, and the flight to London was cancelled because of fog. FOG. IT'S LONDON. I called British Airways and they helpfully said they could book me on a flight to New York which would then have an eight hour layover before heading back to Raleigh by midnight. Hey, no. So then I spent 45 minutes on the phone with a very nice gentleman with American Airlines who fixed the whole thing up. We ended up not leaving Paris until 10:45am instead, which was much better for the wakeup time. They booked us through Miami with only a four hour layover. Great.

Unfortunately, despite central Paris being clear and calm, there was a weird blizzard at the airport. I tipped our poor Uber driver an extra 20 Euros because I felt sorry for him having to drive in it. We did board the plane on time, but then sat there for three hours before takeoff so they could do de-icing. It was rough, man. Ben was starting to get the fever and I was still sick (but fortunately, wearing my new sweatpants, so at least I was relatively comfortable). It was hard to see how we were going to survive sitting on the ground at CDG for 3 hours followed a 9 hour flight followed by a layover in Miami followed by yet another flight and then a drive to our house from RDU. Plus it seemed like we would probably miss that 4 hour connection, anyway, given that we'd have to pass through customs and retrieve our bags and all that and had wasted 3 of the hours on the de-icing situation. I was convinced we were going to spend the night at a Miami Airport area Hampton Inn.

SITUATION: BLEAK

When we landed in Miami, though, we got special bright orange priority passes which we flashed along the customs/baggage/security procedure and everybody rushed us right through. VIP! By the time we were at the gate for the on-time Raleigh flight I felt filthy and exhausted and delirious but so, so relieved. WE MADE IT.

Now it's 27 days later and I am still not over this cold, by the way. It's been a real horrorshow of a January for both of us (and really, all of America, but for different reasons). I've been to the doctor three times and Ben's version of the illness turned into freaking pinkeye for a while. But we are on the mend, mostly, and after a couple of weeks of never wanting to get on an airplane again for the rest of my life, I'm already googling ideas for the next trip.

Trip Report: Day Twelve - Paris

France became the third country in which I have bought Strepsils. We may need to stop going on vacation when it's cold outside.

I didn't feel too bad other than a scratchy throat, though, so we set out for the Orsay Museum. We saw this on the way and I asked Ben if he thought it was a real cat show but apparently that's a ridiculous thing to wonder.

The line for the Orsay turned out to be crazy. Even the Museum Pass line. We were kind of sick of big museums, anyway, so we popped over the the Orangerie instead so I could make Ben look at the rooms specifically built to display Monet's water lilies. There was also an exhibit of American art, featuring the American Gothic painting! They did not allow pictures in there. This exhibit was one of my favorites from the trip, though.

There were surprisingly few people in the water lilies rooms. Ben complained about how boring the paintings were, so maybe that's why. Maybe everyone thinks they're boring.

We had skipped the line at this place with our Museum Pass too, and when we left the line was crazy. I really could not believe how many people were at the tourist sites on this trip.

We walked over to the neighborhood around the Opera House to see some fanciness.

It was fun looking at the windows of high end jewelry! In France they have a law that says you must show prices for anything displayed in a window, but there must be an exception for wildly expensive jewels, because none of this stuff had prices on it.

Then we actually went shopping for a while at the Galeries de Lafayette, the world's first department store! Oh, and I bought some sweatpants at Benetton to wear on the plane home.

This was an alarming trend I noticed over and over - so many people wearing nude pantyhose! Let's all hope that doesn't make it to America.

Ben drug me all over the place looking for this dome he'd read about in a guidebook. It was pretty awesome, I have to admit.

So fancy!

After this we were super hungry and in an inconvenient location for our metro line, and the situation deteriorated very quickly. We ended up inside a packed metro station at Chatelet and no trains were coming, with more people pouring onto the platform every second, and then some guy started walking back and forth shouting things in French in a threatening manner, and we got the hell out of there. I'm sure it probably would have been fine, but I kept thinking, "this is the moment when people convince themselves somebody isn't going to do something terrible and then they all get killed by a maniac." So anyway, we grabbed a piece of pizza for sustenance at a little place near Notre Dame, and then took a cab back to the hotel, where I quickly discovered I had a fever and was all shivery and pathetic for the rest of the evening.