McSurley's

Morning weigh-in: 182#, 15% BF

I went on a day trip to NYC yesterday. I'd totally forgotten that we'd all made plans at Friday's dinner to go in on Sunday, until Lori P called Saturday night, finalizing the plans and and asking what time I thought we should go... oh, oh yeah, going to the city yes yes of course I remember...

Anyway, we drove in to Jersey City ("we" being myself, Doug & Lori, and Kris & Eric: Eric did the driving) around 9:00 AM, parked at Pavonia Station and took the PATH train to the World Trade Center, aka Ground Zero -- the train goes right through the hole where the buildings were, stopping where I'd guess the original station was. Very weird feeling, the biggest buildings in the world used to be right over our heads.

We didn't have much of an itinerary, just planned to find ourselves at the Guggenheim at some point in the day. Our first stop was for brunch at a vegetarian place in or near the Village; the food was very good, despite an "if you have nut allergies leave now" CYA warning on the menu. We then went walking around, browsed a few funky shops, looking at the buildings and the people. At one point we found ourselves outside CBGB, and at another point we were outside McSorleys and decided to stop in for a quick one -- I was the only one who'd ever been there, so I bored regaled them with tales from my misspent youth, some of it misspent right there in that very room... The place hadn't changed much, a little quieter maybe, almost empty but it was still early on a Sunday afternoon. Cat sleeping on a chair by the coal stove, patron and his dog at the bar, a few elderly Irishmen talking quietly, and the bartender and waiters as um, brusque as ever.

Two stops: we hit The Strand, a huge used/discount bookstore (I got three books from the Loeb collection: Julius Caesar's Civil War and The Gallic Wars, and the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England), and Paragon, a huge sporting-goods store where Lori found cycling shoes at a ridiculously low price. Strangely enough, they said "Lori" on them, probably a contraction of "lorica" but you take what omens you can get.... By the way, did I mention that these stores were huge?

After that we made our way uptown via the subway, then over by the park to the Guggenheim. This was kind of a disappointment since the main exhibit was mostly Aztec sculpture; we found the "recent acquisitions" wing and also checked out their permanent Kandinski collection -- also managed to find a Chagall or two -- which was cool, but not really cool enough at $18 apiece for an hour or two of gawking. (We got there at about 4:00, left a little before their 5:45 closing time.)

Back outside, a little walking and back into the subways down to the Village again, find a place for dinner before heading home. A bit of work, hungry walking in the cold before we found a really cool place whose name I can't recall, just a pub really, but with pub food that really hit the spot. After that was the PATH ride to the car and the drive back to Pennsy; I was home by 11:00.

An observation: Lori pointed out while we were walking around downtown, that very few people we saw were fat, and she attributed it possibly to the fact that they all walked wherever they went. I wasn't ready to agree just then -- we were near NYU, lots of the people around us were college students or starving artists, ie the sample could have been skewed in any number of ways -- but by the end of the day I had to admit she might be on to something. There were very few overweight people. A strange contrast, once you noticed it, to the Red State - Blue State rhetoric and imagery. (To be honest, many of them looked smoker-thin rather than really fit or healthy.) (BTW: There was a recent article about the difference between thin and fat people, that difference being about 300 calories per day of fidgeting.)

RIP George Mitchell: I found out today that a friend of mine, a former co-worker, passed away on Friday. He had colon cancer years ago but beat it (it seemed pretty mild), was laid off maybe a year later. I heard that he'd been sick again recently, another bout and that's what took him. He was maybe fifty five, sixty at most: wife, daughter in college or just graduated, and a son in the Army (West Point alum). It must have been a pretty low-key affair, the funeral was Sunday which seems pretty quick.

UPDATE: Just got back from the gym, spin class with Colette, where I ran into Pieter Cooper before the class. He was one of the kids in the Chain Gang junior racing program, but I remember him from even earlier, when he was about fourteen and would go on the Genesis MTB rides -- now he's in college (actually , he should have already graduated, the slacker). Small world, time flies...