Walked down to my favorite pizza shop for one last slice just now. As I was crossing the street to go in, the guy behind the counter sees me and grabs a slice of cheese pizza and throws it in the warner. Then when I come in he's like "ay, I see you coming...I throw in a slice for you". So I guess I regular there. I'm not sure whether to think that's a good thing or a bad thing?

Went out for one last evening with the regular gang, Shelly, Krista and Bulent. Nothing too exciting. We walked around alphabet city and got some dinner, then hopped around to a few bars. The girls swore that the bartender at the Belgian bar we were at had a crush on me, but I'm not convinced.

I'm anxious to get home, but pretty sad to leave my friends behind here. I'll miss them. I'm definately planning on a trip back next summer, (if not sooner)

Went out for a couple drinks with Fiona, my first roommate when I arrived in NY, last night in Williamsburg and had an excellent time. Not really because we did anything particularly exciting, or went to any unique places, but because we had a good time hanging out with each other and I feel like I've made an actual, honest-to-goodness friend. Something that doesn't happen to me as often as one would think. I've met a number of new people here in the last three months, many of them I'd be happy to get in touch with when I return, but nobody else that I'll keep in touch with on a regular basis after I leave. So making the realizition last night that we had become what I refer to as "first-hand friends" made me pretty thrilled.

We did actually go to a couple cool places. The first place had a couple great musicans playing acoustic. There was only the two of us at the bar, and a couple at a booth in the corner, so I felt kindof bad when we left them...playing for an empty bar, because they were really good. We tipped them a few bucks and walked down to somewhere new. The second place had an open mic night, where we heard an wide array of "talented" people. There was a really bad piano player, and incredible guitar player/singer, some more bad experimental music, and this other guy that did a number of solo pieces which included spoken word, a drum machine, a piano and a saw. He was very odd, but extremely captivating and creative. I love open mic nights. I definately want to find some when I get back home.

One of the things I'd really wanted to do while I was here in NY was to see the live taping of a show. My top choice was Saturday Night Live, but The Daily Show or the Late Show would have sufficed. Since I was down to my last couple of days, I realized I wouldn't be able to get in on any of them, so I moved to plan B, which was watching good ol' Al Roker do the news outside of the Today Show taping in the morning. I haven't seen the today show in probably a decade, but I remembered there being what looked like hundreds of excited fans crowded around holding up signs with witty sayings on them about where they're from (witty to them anyway) or their home sports team.

I had to wake up at 6:30 am and bike up to Rockafeller center before sunrise to get there on time. It was cold out, and I didn't have a hat, but it was a beautiful day, so it wasn't so bad. It's kindof nice seeing the city wake up (or go home, depending on who you're watching)

the live taping at the Today Show. not so exciting. The filming area was empty 99% of the time

Just across the street is the famous Rockafeller Skating rink. And it's already in Use! I can't believe it's almost wintertime.

I made it to the taping right at 7:00, and saw the crowd huddled around the fenced off taping area. It was really an anti-climatic event. we stood around watching the TV monitors outside that aired the show from inside for a half hour. at one point, when coming back from commercial break, they panned the camera across the crowd for four seconds. That seemed to excite everybody else, I wasn't very amused. If you had been watching you may have seen my head poking up from behind the fat lady in the pink coat screaming and waving her gloved hands. The highlight of the morning, I guess, was when good ol' Al Roker (why do I always feel the need to put "good ol'" before his name every time?) came out and did about three minutes of news outside with the crowd behind him. he was in and out in a couple of minutes. lame. By that time I was getting bored so I went to get some coffee next door. I guess I missed the 5-10 minute segment where the whole news crew came outside and did their number outside with the audience, but I didn't really care by then. It was obvious to me by that point that this live taping was designed to amuse joe and jane suburb from smalltown USA, not me.

The rest of the afternoon I went on a fabulous autumn bike ride all around central park. Stopping every now and then at a cafe to get myself a little treat or cup of coffee or bowl of soup to warm me up. The leaves are just starting to change colors and fall in the park (next week will be beautiful I bet), and I hit up some areas of the park I hadn't been to.

One of the skating rinks in Central Park

View of Central Park. you can see that some of the leaves are starting to change already

Finished up my trip around fourish in SoHo where I did some shopping and for the first time in three months, bought something for myself. Two things actualy, a coat and a warm hoodie. mmmm, I'm so glad I have a coat now. no more freezing while biking over the bridge!

Well, the chili competition has come and gone. I didn't win, or even place in the top three, but I don't really care, I've finally fulfilled my lifelong dream of competing in a chili cookoff. Being vegetarian, I wasn't able to sample most of the competitors entries, but I did try the two other vegetarian varieties (One of which took first place) and they were good, I mean really damn good, so I feel pretty good that I at least walked away with a free t-shirt and some free drinks. I better start training for next year! anybody want to make some Chili when I get home?

Nothin' like a crock of chili to get the night started off right.	Krista Taste Testing for me.	The Competition was looking tough...
We each prepared a tiny dixie cup of our chili for the judges.	The Judging Team.	This guys was very proud of his Crock
Bar patrons enjoying the fruits of our labor	Announcing the Winners	The winner proudly holding up the gargantuan BrUCE trophy.

I just finished my last few minutes at my Job. damn it feels good to be self employed again. and what a hellish last couple of days it's been. Now I can get on with being a lazy, unemployed sloth.

Shelly Suggested we go down to Chelsae last night to check out some of the galleries. I guess all of the galleries in the neighborhood open up their doors for art openings. She wasn't kidding, there were dozens of beautiful artist's lofts and galleries open to the public. People meandered in one building and out of another, while grabbing the occasional glass of wine or beer that was being offered to anybody who wanted it. (and I did!). A lot of the buildings had a gallery or two on every floor, so we could just start at the top and work our way down from gallery to gallery.

One particluar space had a series of realy intricate, oversized oil paintings featured naked girls flying through the air in some sort of tornado catastrophy, and seeming smiling and having a great time in all of the paintings. It didn't occur to me right away that the model for every painting was the same girl. At one point, Shelly noticed a crowd of people in the back corner huddled around something going on, so she went back to investigatge. she came back a couple minutes with a mysterious smile on her face and just said, "You've gotta go check out what's going on back there.", she wouldn't tell me what, just explained "I'm not gonna ruin the surprise". The place was packed, so it took me a little time to weasle my way back there. I stood on my toes to look over somebody's shoulder and lo and behold, there under the stairway stood a naked girl, rubbing what seemed to be pumpkin insides all over herself. I arrived just in time to see some dude sticking a dollar bill up her ass. (I'm never using paper money again, who knows where it's been!). The girl happened tobe the same girl that was the subjet of all the paintings in the place. I'm not sure if she's the artist or not, but I'm quite confident she's a little screwed up in the head.

I wish I had known about gallery night months ago. what a great way to get out and spend the evening, all for free. Definately a must-do for anybody else visiting. Hopefully you won't stumble across the same creepy display as I did.

Got together at Melissa Maerz apartment in Brooklyn on Wednesday for the big Project Runway Finale. This time I came prepared, having had just watched three episodes in a row the day before, I felt like I was all caught up with the drama. A dozen or so of Melissa's friends showed up, and what ensued wasn't much unlike the last Project Runway party I attended, which was lots of wine drinking, philisophical conversations, and shouting at the TV screen when somebody we didn't like does well. It was fun, but there were armwrestling matches, so I guess it wasn't QUITE as cool as the last time.

And as usual, the subway was screwed up on the way home, and took me the wrong way, and My trip home took nearly two hours. dumb trians. I love 'em though.

I check out this site every now and then to see what stars have been hanging out in my neighborhood. I haven't seen any personally yet.

http://www.gawker.com/stalker/

I've been in my new place on the lower east side for about a day and a half now. I hauled my big-ass bag through the subways and dirty streets on wednesday morning to the place I'll be staying for my last week. This place is on the fourth floor of an apartment building right neighborhood with lots of bars, shops and restaurants. Kindof a punk-rock neighborhood. The apartment is pretty small, just two bedrooms and a kitchen, with no living room, which doesn't bother me too much since It's not like I need the space to entertain company. One downside of this place is all the construction outside. There's a couple new condos going in on this block, so I have to put up with jackhammers, machinery and your miscelaneous clanging throughout the day. Again, I'm not an easily irritable fellow, so I'm not really concerned about it.

One thing I do have to say about the guy I'm subletting from is that he's an abslute slob. If he made an effort to clean up before I showed up, I'd hate to see the place before. Its not so much that there's random stuff strewn about everywhere, but there's no sort of means for putting anything in a proper place, so boxes and books are stacked up precariously against the wall, towers of VHS tapes and CDs balance on top of the TV, Strange knick-knacks, bottles and jars are piled on the windowsills. It gives the place some interesting character.

I met my roommate yesterday too. Her name is Kat, and is in a pretty well know band named Holy Hail. I guess they just opened up for the Rapture for a few shows in Europe this last month. I live with a rock star...cool. She's actually staying somewher else this week, and a couple of her friends are staying in her room. I haven't seen either of them yet. I guess they're doctors or something, and only show up to sleep, and then are up at the ass crack of dawn to go to work again. I'll be surprised if I see them once this week.

I made it into BrUCE. (Brooklyn Underground Chili Extravaganza). I emailed Barcade the morning after they selected their ten contestants to see if I was in. Turns out my name wasn't drawn, but a little schmoozing got me first in line on standby, and somebody cancelled right away so I'm now officially in! I've gotta start getting my recipe together! and come up with a name for my chili too! If anybody has any good ideas send them to me. The Contest is on Sunday, I'll be sure to bring my camera.

This weekend is the annual "Art under the Bridge" Festival in Dumbo, a brooklyn neighborhood not too far from me. Shelly and I decided to check it out. It's a lot like Minneapolis's "Art Crawl", but just think more places to go, and closer together.

Shortly after we first got to the neighborhood, we spotted a group of ladies all clad in pink from head to toe, frollicing through the streets. Some with inflatible ducks, or oversized umbrellas in the shape of a duck, Beckoning passer-bys to follow them for the cruise with a overly fake brittish accent. Naturally, we followed them. We had to wait at one point while they danced in the middle of the street for 5 minutes for a band playing on the street corner. What our leaders turned out leading us to was a free half hour comedy cruise on a NY's water taxi all the way up and down the East River, where we some some really spectacular sights of the night skyline, and learned all about how to do water aerobics if we fall over board and how to compliment our fellow boat passengers on their ravishing mustache. (I still have my fake mustache in one of my pockets somewhere)

Afterwords, we hopped around to a couple gallery parties, where we herd some bands play in a couple incredible warehouse-space art lofts. One particular place had some really incredible grafitti art on display, as well as some shocking b/w photos of gang members with guns and heroin addicts shooting up. I also especiall liked the port-a-potty done up to look like a giant slot machine, with large-bold sign letters constructed above it saying "Jack-Potty". How wonderfully childish. I love toilet humor :)

A stop at a little mexican dive bar offered us the most delicious styrofoam plate of "Super Nachos" ever. Who knew that a microwave could create such a culinary masterpiece? Complete with sour cream out of a squeeze bottle!

One of my favorite exhibits was a couple guys how managed to hook up a text-message enabled phone to a display that projected onto the outside of a building outside, so anybody could text a phrase, secret or story to a number and it would show up in text, 10 feet tall, on the side of the warehouse for all to see. Made me want to think of some way to use the same idea. I'll toss that one around in my noggin for a while, maybe I'll come up with something.

the night continued on for a while, with a stop in the lower east side at the "Pink Pony", where we got a $7 beer (never going there again), then back to the old stanby...the Alligator lounge in Brooklyn, where we got a free brick-oven pizza with a beer. I wasn't even hungry at that point, but how can you turn down a free pizza? you can't, that's how!

Free Museum friday was upon me, and I had a few hours to kill before dinner reservations later on, so I took the train up to 89th street to check out the Guggenheim museum. The entire museum was almost entire dedicated to one artist, an architect named Zaha Hadid. Seriously, I'm far from being fascinated by architecture, or even very knowledgeable about it, but this exhibit blew me away. This architect does some stuff with design that I didn't think was possible. It was a trip well spent.

http://www.zaha-hadid.com/

The Guggenheim museum itself was pretty spectacular too. It's a frank Lloyd Wright building, and has a spiraling rotunda that circles up 6 or 7 levels around central open-space lobby. neato-toledo.

Shelly's Parents were in town last night and they treated all of us (them, Shelly, Krista, Bulent and I) to an awesome dinner in the meat packing district. The $80 seafood plate we shared was amazing, the bottles of wine flowed freely and we managed to make it through the meal without upsetting any of the waitstaff. Afterwords we went down the street for desert and another bottle of wine at a pretty hip place that had beds we got to lounge around on.

There was a little altercation at the end of the night when a passing limosine sparked a compulsive decision to take it home, as if it were a regular yellow taxi. We were fine with the $40 price, What we didnt' realize was that the driver wanted to charge us an additional $25 each time somebody got out. Shelly had "some words" back and forth with him, and we ended up getting out at Union Square, which was about 8 blocks away, with a grumpy driver letting us out and charging an average of $5 for each block he drove.



Good news is that I managed to catch the last L train home so I didnt have to take the 3-transfer detour through brooklyn. Yas-a-matazz (Shelly's roommate) was entertaining some guy in her room when I returned, So I didn't her at all when I got home. (nothing new there)