Escape From New York: Christmas in Chinatown, Then New Year in Raleigh

Folks, for some reason, it's hard to get back to blogging after two weeks or so of not doing it for whatever reason (laziness). Why is that? Is it because it's a challenge to logically present all the idiotic, useless things bouncing around in one's head since Christmas that probably nobody wants to read about? Maybe.

So anyway, one way of getting through this blogger's block is to just force you guys to look through photos of all the stuff I got up to on my Christmas vacation! So this post is going to be HUGE because there's lots of territory to cover and I'm impatient to get it over with. Or, if not HUGE, it's at least going to have a lot of pictures, which the illiterates among you will really lov. Onwards!

Jimmy and I had our usual Christmas-day-in-Chinatown face stuffing. The picture up top is my curry chicken noodle soup and above is Jimmy making his way through beef something-or-other with rice. His hand is blurry because he's eating fast, in order to eat more. After Christmas, I headed down to Raleigh to see the family AND to have a Tune in Tokyo event at Humble Pie downtown on the 28th, yay! Stella didn't want me to go:

But I did, and here is the only picture I have of the event because I forgot to ask folks to take pictures. :(

Yes, that's a Hello Kitty toaster on the display table and no, you can't have it.

Willis, my friend Dani's cat, was devastated that he didn't get to go to my reading but he made himself feel better by eating a couple cheeseburgers and getting even fatter. Ok, bummer alert:

As some of you may remember, my Dad died last December 29. Well, this year on that day I went to lunch with my mom and my brother Kevin, then we went over to the Columbarium where his ashes lay and visited for a little while. It was a nice, sunny day, and it was thoroughly lovely. Mom's doing very well!

I think it was the next day that Kevin and I went on a walk behind the art museum, and there were some fun installations on display. The above one was my favorite because it was made of tires, and I love rubber.

Then I went over to my friends Ruth and Mike's house for steaks and met my friend Deana's new baby, who is a peanut. Oh my God he was just mesmerizing...

On New Year's Eve afternoon, Kevin and I went downtown to Fayetteville Street because we heard there was going to be a Ferris Wheel in the middle of the street. I wanted to ride it! Sadly, the line was way too long because it was the only fun, non-alcoholic thing on offer at the time, so we didn't bother. But we did keep walking because I wanted to see the big acorn that always drops from a crane as Raleigh's answer to Time's Square's juicy apple. It wasn't hoisted onto the crane at the time so I was able to get a close-up.

There was also ice skating happening...

But we weren't in the mood for that. What we were in the mood for was alcohol, if I'm being honest, so we went to the Raleigh Times bar and had a few very large draft beers while sitting outside and enjoying the view of folks gathering for the evening's festivities. We stayed there until it was too dark and cold to enjoy ourselves and then made our way back through the center of Fayetteville Street and what we soon realized was a parade. I love a parade!

After stopping in at Brewmasters to stuff our faces full of THE AWESOME FOOD THERE, we walked through Nash Square back to Kevin's car and for the first time I saw the firefighters memorial that had been erected there in 2006. It was all lit up so I took a picture...

Also, do you like dogs, especially puppies? Then you would love Kevin's young pup Griffin, who is so hyper and excited that he's very hard to photograph. But I managed to get a decent shot of him when he was briefly still behind the fence of Kevin's back yard.

And here's another of Griffin and his buddy Youna, who is also an attention hog and never sits still, so I had to move away to take this one, therefore they look like unhappy prisoner dogs but they are not!

On my last night, mom, Kevin and I sat around the table and I finally got Kevin on video playing his teeth like a xylophone, which I've been meaning to do forever. Enjoy this clip, kids...

And that is all! Happy New Year, six days late when it's old news and no one cares anymore because Michele Bachman's husband will never be First Lady, which is so sad!

Escape from New York Part II: Chicago

Ahhh, Chicago. The Windy City. Home of the Bulls. (The who?) The Cubs. (The what?) The Bears. (The which?) Second City. Oprah. And Chicago-style pizza. Is it home of anything else? Probably. Check the internet.

You might remember (you won't remember) that recently I did a post about my visit to Chicago, during which I ogled a wonderfully random and tacky statue of Marilyn Monroe. Well, at long last, here's some pics of the non-Marilyn parts of town.

I was in Chicago to take care of my friend Rachel's cat while she was away in California. I was very nervous about being responsible for someone's cat and house, but Rachel had this very reassuring message on her microwave, which calmed me down a little.

Unfortunately, the next morning I put a to-go coffee cup that apparently has metal in it in the self-same microwave and nearly blew the thing up. (Rachel, I'm so sorry.) But the good news is that I didn't burn the house down or accidentally kill her cat. So I consider the whole thing a success.

Anyway, on to the photos.

Here's one that Rachel took of me in Boystown before she left. As you can see, things get pretty blurry in Boystown.

The top photo and this one above are of, I don't know, two lit-up white brick towers in Millennium Park? With films of women making various facial expressions while cascades of water fell down over them? Pretty alluring.

Was a TOTAL tourist and went to Gino's East for pizza and I'm not apologizing for it because it was delicious. My only criticism is that their pizza display out front is kind of misleading. I was expecting to actually be able to climb on top of my pizza to eat it. But I gotta say, the best meal I had was at Kuma's Corner, a burger joint where all the different types of burgers are named after heavy metal bands, the way God intended.

I got the Kaijo, which I guess is a Japanese metal band? I don't know, Google isn't much help with this, but it's not important, because this is what it looked like:

It was the most delicious plate of heart disease I had all week.

Here are some shots of beautiful downtown Chicago, and Millennium Park. So clean!

And now the pictures I took from the Skydeck at the top of the Willis Tower, formerly known as the Sears Tower. There were these glass balconies you could step onto and see directly below you, which provides a great opportunity to suffer from vertigo.

And then the glass broke, and I started falling, but luckily my return flight picked me up and whisked me into a comfortable cruising altitude.

That's downtown Chicago in the center. Bye, Oprah!

Escape From New York, Part 1

Okay, okay, at long last, what everyone (i.e., no one) has been waiting for: the first bit of texty yammering about my vacation, which happened a hundred years ago. As you may not even remember, I recently went down to NC to visit momma and go to the mountains and the beach/get a savage tan/eat Bojangles cajun chicken biscuits. But before we get to any partial nudity, let's spend this particular post having a look at the latest additions to mom's Shakespearean Tragicomic Plush-Doll Display. Mom, see, loves stuffed animals and spooky hand-painted dolls. And she likes to display them on her living room ledge as if they're having a little tea party (before they eat you in your sleep). Above, from left to right, is the bear she bought last March in Asheville, a new plush collie, a poodle (?), a fluffy white kittycat, mom's beloved doll Victoria, and a pink bear, because why not?

Also, here is the doll cabinet in the guest room. I had to try to sleep while these dolls just sat there, looking at me, salivating.



And another plush kitty sitting at the top of the staircase to laugh as you as you fall back down in horror, just like in Psycho.



This bear is so cute he deserves a picture of his own.



Oh, and what is that I see over there, in the corner of the dining room, lurking next to the china cabinet? It's a fake tree, yes, but what's that beside the tree?



It's the attack of the Unseasonable Santa. And he's pissed. Just look at that maniacally evil face.




Anyway, it took me a while to recover from all of this, so you'll have to wait until Part 2 to see pictures from my visit to several western Carolina mountain churches (frescoes!) and footage of our eastern-NC scuppernong grape shopping spree.

Get back to work.