Sunshine and Gridlock

It was a fine weekend in the city of New York. I got off to a good start Friday afternoon with a new top 10 and JKE. A note regarding the JKE post, don’t click through on the E-poster if you are easily grossed-out.

Saturday the sun was shining all day long. I went for a little run early in the morning with my friends from church that I will be doing the 1/2 L.I. Marathon with, weekend after next. It was beautiful running weather. I hope that I can get a couple more of those in before the race so that I can have some semblance of faux-training done. If nothing else, for the sake of my joints. After the marathon last year, one of my knees hurt for almost a week, especially every time I went down the stairs.

After the run I went home and made waffles for Reagan. She had to work Saturday, which was a total bummer, so I figured that maybe waffles would could help to ease the pain a bit. After she left for work I laid down for a sec and almost took a nap, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not with the way that the sun was shining outside. So I called some friends to go skating with me. We went down to the Riverside park, at 108. It was not crowded at all. I was still kinda pooped from running, but I was able to squeeze out a session that lasted a couple of hours. I was really sketchy, especially at first. I’m not sure if that is attributable to the fact that I haven’t really spent any time skating since last year, or that I was tired, or just old. Anyway, one of the guys who came with me, I had never skated with before. I only met him like twice before, and Reagan knows his wife. He was rocking old school vans slip-ons and jeans. I was a bit curious to see how well he could skate. It is pretty safe to say that he owned that park from the minute we stepped through the gate. It was really fun to skate with someone who has such a deep bag of tricks.

By the time we were wrapping up at the skate park, Reagan had somehow convinced her boss into letting her bail early. So we picked her up on the way home (kind of). Reagan got subway for lunch and I ate a whole pizza! Hahaha. Then we took a quick power nap before going to see Piper. Doug and Tamara came with us for the visit. It was pretty fun. We had her on a mat on the floor again. We got dinner at this place in New Brunswick, afterwards. The drive home is where things really got fun. They were doing construction on the upper level of the GW. So by the time we got north of Newark, traffic was pretty much standing still. Eventually I cut through one of the dividers and we took the lower lever, which wasn’t much quicker. I ended up spending about 5 hours in the car on Saturday, hahahah. Insult to injury was the fact that even when we got back, it took us another 1/2 hour to find a spot (and it was not close to home).

Sunday was Stake Conference. It was pretty cool. My favorite part was coming home, eating some delicious Reagan-built lunch and taking the most massive nap of 2008. Amazing. We decided not to see Piper yesterday because of the increased security for all bridges and tunnels, because of the Pope. We didn’t want a repeat of Saturday night. Plus, today is Piper’s 11 month birthday, so we are going to go visit her after work. Reagan got her a new dress for the event. I’ll be sure to put up pics later this week.