Snow!

It snowed today in Hoboken!  Completely caught me off guard, but I was excited because I got to test out my new toy… macro photography extension tubes.

Got this shot of a snowflake! I have others to post, but this is all I uploaded for now…

Super excited over it, I tried taking some pictures during the last snow, but it was really icy, and all the pictures were just white clumps.  We had a few hours of AMAZING large white fluffy snowflakes.  It was important that they floated nicely down, because when they go fast they get all twisted and messed up. Who knew snowflakes were so complicated?!

 

Walking around

Walked with the baby to his playgroup today.  I decided to leave the stroller home and use the ergo.  I’m SO glad I did! the sidewalks were a mess.  glass and debris everywhere!

His group was in the heart of town, so it was my first time walking that way since the storm.  It was the first time I felt pretty scared in that area of town.  Lots of homeless garbage picking, and other people with pickups doing the same.  They were having a blast.  Definitely made me think twice about flea markets.  These people are totally going to resell the tossed furniture.  I did pass some objects that made me stop and go hmmmm. Like some giant wine barrels.  Those were really cool.  But a) where the heck am I going to put a giant wine barrel in a 1 bedroom condo, and b) it was covered in black sewer water… um, yea, so no thanks.  I also passed tons of Ikea furniture.  People love their Ikea Expedit  bookshelves!  side note – I’m using the 4 square one as a changing table in the bedroom, it’s awesome.  We also put a 4 tall one in the closet for the baby’s clothing.  It holds pretty much everything of his except the hanging stuff.

The building across from Ian’s old rental was a mess.  It seemed like everyone on the 1st floor lost everything.  I had to cross to the other side of the street because I couldn’t even pass.  The amount of debris was overwhelming, it was literally from against the building into the street. 

After the playgroup I passed by that way and they had the road blocked off and people sweeping up the street.  The sweeping kinda helped… it also makes everything a more consistant shade of grey/brown.

Baby was screaming his head off, he did NOT want to be in the ergo, so I took him out and carried him.  We stopped off at antique bakery for some whole wheat bread.  I’m so happy that place survived.  One of the last few places left in the country that still bakes bread over coal.  It’s really old school and I love it.

Later in the day I did my public duty and voted.  I took a walk down Garden street to get there.  I could not believe how bad it was.  I took a short video of my walk and posted it to youtube.  It was my first time using imovie.  I think I’m going to be hooked.  It’s no avid, but its the only video editing software on my laptop, so it wins.

Click here to see my You Tube video of walking down Garden Street.

Voting was easy, only about 3 people on line in front of me.  They had it in a different location then when I last lived in Hoboken, so I’m glad I double checked.  I was happy it was still not far from Empire coffee.  My voting ritual is vote, then go to Empire.

Hurricane Sandy- phone pics

Didn’t go out much today. Helped out some friends still without power and needed a warm place to visit and a hot shower. Its very sad walking around outside. There are tons of nice people handing out free food, but I refuse to take anything. I got my power back and it would be just wrong in my opinion. They are predicting a nor’easter this week. I’m ready to go back to Cali! I need to buy some snow boots ASAP. ( long rain boots wouldn’t hurt either) actually a canoe would have been pretty useful.
I never posted some of my phone pics from the storm. Here are some pics I took Monday afternoon, right before the storm. Everyone was out getting their last few minutes of walking outdoors in. We all knew the clock was ticking.

Tuesday morning:

Our communal charging station and microwave. This was our lifeline and sanity saver.

Almost time

It’s getting really close to our move. Packrat container gets delivered TOMORROW! OMG! It looks like its going to be a real late night packing tonight. Local guys should be coming around 2p tomorrow to move our stuff into the box. I still have a closet that is untouched from packing!

I did something yesterday I never dreamed I would do. I donated my freezer stash of milk. I know…. I KNOW! I can list the vast comments going on across the web about this. Believe me, I thought of all of them. But, after you think about it for a while, you realize it is actually a really beautiful thing.

A little adopted baby girl who doesn’t handle formula well and thrives only on breast milk now gets all the same health benefits my baby got. 🙂

I’ll have to start a new stash in NJ, but this was a much better option than throwing it out and/or dealing with the craziness of trying to ship it. Shout out to Eats on Feets! I didn’t know this organization even existed and I might continue to make some donations in New Jersey.

Since we are on the food topic, here is a fun fortune cookie fortune I got this week! How appropriate!

Thnks fr th Mmrs

Last Saturday in Newport Beach.  It has been one busy week, and I slacked a bit on the blog.  I’ll try to be better… try 🙂

We had car #1 picked up by the shippers.  This car had to be shipped… no way we were going to attempt our 16 day adventure cross country with a baby and dog in a two door with no middle back seat.  That would have been asking for craziness.  Bye Bye car, hope to see you in New Jersey!

The apartment is getting filled up with boxes.  We are still trying to sell some of our furniture, hopefully we do sell it and its sooner than later because we really need the floor space for boxes.  

I’ve been procrastinating packing the outdoor stuff.  We sold our patio set so at least we won’t have to pack that up.  One thing I must take are my garden frogs.  I’m going to make room for these guys on our Hoboken Balcony. Hopefully next to some tomato and basil plants.  Gotta have fresh tomato and basil for the yummy mutz.  Flowers will be figured out later on.  We have our priorities. 😉

Doesn’t seem like we are going to make it to the Huntington Library Gardens… boo. 😦

We totally slacked on packing so there is no way.  Maybe next trip out here.  We are now going to be one of those who have vacation in Newport Beach, no more being locals.  But at least now we will be Hoboken and NYC locals 🙂

I’ve been getting excited about taking the path into the city with Gobo.  I am really missing the meatpacking district and chelsea market.  I’m also getting tired of driving and can’t wait to go back to walking everywhere.  Good think I’m getting tired of driving before we start a 16 day road trip. I’m guessing I’ll be whining on here about being in a car by… oh… 2 hours into the drive. Ha!

Time to get serious about moving

We have about two weeks left… AH!! If you were to come into our apartment, ignoring the recycling center of broken down boxes, you would never be able to tell that we were moving.  I feel that we are just going to throw everything into boxes at the last second and sort it all our in New Jersey.  Hmm… that sounds pretty good actually…

Car #1 gets picked up next Wednesday to get shipped.  That is going to be weird.  When I found that out my first thought was, Oh-Em-GEEE! how am I going to get to the nail salon?!?!… Second thought was, H*ly Cr*p! We need to pack.

Going to try to make more soup tomorrow (erm, today.. it is 1:12am).  I can’t believe I’m going to have 16 days of no cooking.. actually, its going to be longer than that.  I have to pack my pots/dishes at some point…

That’s right, 16 days. We reduced the trip by 1 day.  Sorry Elvis, you didn’t make the cut on this trip.  We did get to throw in one stop that deals with a musician… SUPER SUPER excited about this stop. I won’t give it away on here, just saying we are SUPER excited!! If you know us in real life you probably could figure it out. I’m going to try to keep our stops a surprise on here. 🙂

Did I mention how excited we were for this musician themed stop?

Sort, Shred, Recycle, repeat…

Ok, so now I really feel like I’m living in a recycling center.  All that paper that we’ve been scanning… well now its getting shredded. Instead of tossing it we are using it as packing material.  Win for the planet, and win for us not having to buy packing material.

However, we are still not packed… so all this shredded paper is now in garbage bags. I’m sure Sophie is going to have a field day when we leave her home alone with it.  Its already on DS’s radar, and he keeps crawling to try to ‘sample’ some of the tasty looking shreds what keep popping out of the bags. Yea, its fun times over here.

I remembered to take a pic of DS eating breakfast this morning…

He loves his oatmeal and apple sauce.  He started making his happy sounds while eating, super cute.

He is wearing his Kushies waterproof long sleeve bib.  I LOVE this bib.  We have a bumkins long sleeve bib too, but I like the Kushies ones the best.  I think its also a little more natural made than bumkins so I feel better with him using those.  If you do BLW, or just have a messy baby, I highly recommend getting water proof bibs, especially the sleeved ones.  I wash it in the sink with some dish soap after he eats and hang it on the rack outside to dry out.  It is so incredibly easy.  I am curious how it will work hanging stuff to dry in hoboken… I remember I used to just use a rack in the foyer, but that won’t really work well now.  I’d like to try to use the balcony, but it can get pretty windy out there.  If you see some Kushies bibs blowing over the Hudson… it wasn’t me.

Yummy Banana…. check!

We escaped some moving responsibilities today and made it over to Balboa Island.  If you are ever in Orange County, definitely take a day trip over there.  Balboa Island is part of Newport Beach and is a cute little beachy town. We are still a few weeks away from tourist season so it was pleasant.  We walked around the town and I got to eat my frozen banana… hooray!  They were all out of heath crunch (boo), but I did get to order my 2nd fav… rainbow sprinkles with oreo pieces… yum!

Our favorite Balboa bar / Frozen Banana shop is the Sugar & Spice.  A balboa bar is a square chunk of vanilla icecream on a stick… when you order they dunk it in chocolate and then put your toppings on it… super yum!  When you order the banana you first have to pick what size.  I find that extremely funny.  They then unwrap your frozen banana and dunk that into the chocolate and roll in your toppings… yummy!

They have this one and another shop called Dad’s on the same block… each one claiming to be the ‘original’ frozen banana.  We are partial to S&S.  Everyone here has their loyalties… you are either a Sugar & Spice fan or a Dad’s fan.

We might need to make another trip back before we leave… I consider these yummy treats fruit so its ok.  😉

Super

What a surprise, we did more paper sorting! I can’t believe how much paper can build up over 3 years. Good thing for the scanner.

I kinda slacked with the research today… but it’s still early, its only 12:40am… we are making some last leg adjustments so some plans are going out the window.. nothing final just yet… but the trip is still 17 days.. aah!

I did sneak out to get a picture of the super moon. I admit it was bright, when I walked out on the patio I could see the light from behind the building… but it wasn’t as big as I expected. I walked around to the path area to get a clear shot. Its my first real moon shot, I’m proud it actually came out 😉

Now that I know how to photograph the moon, knowing me, I’ll probably start getting obsessed with it. I’m already looking at our itinerary to see where along our drive I could look out for cool shots of the moon…

It was more complicated than I expected… did you know that the moon moves relatively fast so you should use a higher shutter speed? I looked up tips before I attempted it, and it was true. So now that’s my new fun fact. I’ll probably start telling people that during times of awkward silence…

Tomorrow we will make more of an effort to cross some things off out must do before we move list. Hopefully there will be bananas involved… 🙂

Mine mine mine mine

More sorting today.  Sounds boring… but you try sorting papers while tending to a curious 6 1/2 month old and his curious Welsh terrier.

More planning underway.  I’ve got the first 3 or so cities done.  My workflow for picking out where to eat is check food network map, compare to route.  Cross check reviews with yelp.  Then do a yelp check to see if food network missed something.

What I’ve learned so far.

1- Guy goes to a city and eats in lots of places, but makes different episodes out of it.

2- about 75% of the places only got around 3-4 stars on Yelp.

3- People on Yelp either love the place, giving it 5 stars, or hated it and also hate guy for sending them there, giving it 1 star.

So pretty much if a place has 4 1/2 – 5 stars and has over 100 reviewers, I’m betting its pretty good.  Any other ratio and its a gamble.

Weekends here in southern cali are dwindling.  Of course May grey is back… cause its May and all.  May Grey June Gloom.  I had never heard of that phrase prior to moving out here.  It’s no joke.  Please don’t waste your $ going to ‘sunny’ southern california in May or June.  Unless you are going to Palm Springs… It’s always sunny there it seems.

Things we still need to do in Cali-

1- Go to Huntington Library Gardens

2- Santa Barbara. We would love to go there again, but realistically that won’t happen, but I’m keeping it on my list just because.

3- Eat another frozen banana (I like mine 1/2 rainbow sprinkles and 1/2 Heath crunch fyi – yum!)

4- Go to the Ritz in Laguna Niguel – its pretty

That’s all I can think of at 1:05 am… wow I really do pretty much post at the same time.  Probably because DS decides 12:30am is the ideal baby bed time…

Luckily we aren’t staying in some hotels more than 2 nights… they are going to hate us, haha.  We are going to be one of ‘those’.  If you see people with a baby and a dog checking into a hotel, be afraid. Heck, I’m afraid for myself 🙂