Week in Review

Sunday: Yardwork. In the morning, the yard didn't look so good. In fact, it looked like something out of a Vietnam War movie:

View from the back patio

From the patio and looking toward the right.

It was quite a jungle. This seems like a good time to mention that my mom recently saved me about $150 in yard care equipment. I told her a couple weeks ago that the hardware store was getting in some rotary lawnmowers and that I was going to buy one and cut down my lawn, which had gotten out of control. Without even seeing my "lawn" she suggested that my tall "lawn" might actually be mostly weeds and that perhaps I could just pull them out. It turns out that I had almost no grass at all, and the weeds came up in big clumps. I have no idea how she knew this. Some kind of motherly intuition, I guess.

I yanked them out as best as I could, and cut back a lot of the branches from my neighbors' trees that were extending over my side of the fence. I bought a hoe (insert your own joke here; no, seriously, it's OK - it never gets old) and turned over all the soil back there. Cleaned my tabletop and swept all the concrete.

Five hours, 96 ounces of water, dozens of bug bites, a good sunburn, and numerous minor cuts and scrapes later, this is how it looked:


Monday: Free New York Philharmonic concert in Prospect Park. This was a great event that Monica put together. She didn't put together the whole concert event, just our friends' outing to the concert event. Beautiful night, stunning sky, and this orchestra is a pretty competent outfit. Wine and a Thermos full of margaritas. Pretzels, hummus, chips, veggies, black bean salsa, dark chocolate, chorizo, cherries, goat cheese, and chocolate espresso beans.

Jesus, what a bunch of yuppies.

Broke out my picnic backpack.

The view from our spot.

Bonus.

We even night-capped it with a couple pints of beer at the bar after the last of the fireworks. Heck of a Monday.

Tuesday:

That's right, strawberry margarita night at the Gordon household. I don't really have much to add.

Wednesday: My stomach wasn't feeling too good in the morning (no correlation to Strawberry Margarita Night, of course) so I stayed home from work. I had Season 1, Disc 1 of The Wire on a DVD from Netflix, which I got around to joining on Sunday as I'd meant to for about four years. After watching the three episodes on the disc, I walked to 7th Ave, opened a video store membership, and rented the next two discs. By the time I called it a night and conceded that the day had really gotten away from me, I'd watched the first eight episodes.

This show was going to disappoint me if it were anything less than the best drama I've ever seen. It's cool that it's living up to my ridiculously high expectations.

Thursday: Best miscellaneous NYC street exchange involving me, so far this month:

Black guy: "WOW! There he is! There the guy who gets all the chicks!"
Me (continuing to walk, nodding): "Ha ha!"
Black guy (louder, as I'm walking away): "HOW DO YOU DO IT?!?"

It seems to be a commonly held belief amongst very slightly crazy black guys that I get "all the ladies." It started with the homeless guy in Georgetown a few years back who looked and sounded exactly like Samuel L. Jackson who swore I got all the "bitches" because "YOU A PRETTY MUTHAFUCKA!" More recently, a dude on the subway came up to me to say I must get all the ladies because of this nice hair. And of course, if you ever grilled with Trevor and me in front of the 187A, you noticed that black people were much more forthcoming with the props for our outstanding year-round grilling operation than were white folks. This led us to the conclusion that "BPLU" - Black People Love Us. If you're not familiar with the excellent blog of the same name, you should be.