The Perfect Dinners

I want you to imagine me lying face down in a green polka dotted dress on my boss's unmade bed with my lower legs hanging off the back. Now imagine my boss in her nightgown with the phone between her chin and shoulder on a call to South Africa while massaging my lower back. This is what I was doing at 1pm yesterday. What you were you doing? Honestly, I thought I'd experienced the height of awkward situations years ago, but this was on a whole new level. I absolutely love her, but when Lynn gets her mind set on something, it HAS to happen or else nothing else will get done the rest of the day. So when I mentioned that my lower back has been hurting and she insisted that she massage it, I knew that my few futile attempts at saying "no" were worthless. I was just laughing into the giant white comforter thinking "there's NO way this is happening. I'm not actually getting a massage from my boss on her bed while she's in her nightgown and on the phone with a South African client." This is real life, people.

What else is real life? That I live a 10 minute walk away from the most AMAZING park in the world: Brooklyn Bridge Park. Two nights ago, Kevin, Brittany, and I had a roommate date in this breathtaking setting. We ate world famous Grimaldi's New York Pizza (best pizza I've ever had...Brittany didn't like the crust...but I'm pretty much obsessed with all of it) on a bench with the Statue of Liberty shining in the distance to our left, the Brooklyn Bridge towering over us on the right, and the Empire State Building, Freedom Tower, and all of Manhattan's famous skyscrapers straight in front of us across the river. Brit and I just kept repeating "there's no way we live here, there's no way we live here." But we do! And we also have the most awesome roommate in the world. Kevin is HILARIOUS. He's Chinese- Cantonese being his first language- but was raised in Australia. Brittany's question of the night: "So did you learn Chinese or Australian first?" Some people call Australian "English," dear Brittany, but good try ;)

We ended up having a Chinese culture lesson. Here are a few things I learned about Chinese food that I never wanted to know: 1. They eat dogs, not cats, 2. They eat baby ducks that are about to hatch by boiling them in their egg and then eating the ENTIRE grown fetus (I called him a sick, sick baby duck murderer the rest of the night), and 3. Lobsters scream when they're boiled. So maybe that last one isn't strictly Chinese, but either way, I don't like it. I don't know the anatomy of a lobster's vocal chords or if it's really just the shell steaming, but anyone with a working moral compass who puts a live animal in a boiling pot of water and then hears screaming should find that experience extremely disturbing.

After that lovely dinnertime conversation, we got ice cream and walked the path along the river. The weather was flawless (unlike this weekend when we're supposed to get a category 2 hurricane...) and everything was perfect. I couldn't have asked for a better night. It was followed up by an EQUALLY perfect night last night with Jim, Lindsay, and Lindsay's two older brothers. Andrew, her oldest bro, lives in South Africa (that place seems to be coming up a lot in this post) and Chris lives in VA, so we absolutely had to get together with both in town. The sibling dinner was an inexplicable amount of fun. First, we grabbed drinks on the patio of a cute little restaurant in Brooklyn, where I got to hear Chris's account of his proposal (he got engaged two weeks ago!) and gush over how amazing it was. Between him and my own brother, they really know how to do it right! We also had the pleasure of my white wine being spilled all over the table by the waiter. Lindsay shrieked as though a sewer rat had just crawled up her leg, then in her haste, knocked over another glass full of water. Definitely a memorable moment...at least Andrew's iphone that was on the table was salvageable.

After drinks, we went back to Jim and Lindsay's, where Linds made gourmet pesto pasta. Dinner was a riot. We all sat around the dining room table telling stories (like the boss massage) and cracking up to the point of tears...well, at least for me. I always cry when I laugh. It's so annoying. Though I did get Andrew to spit out some of his red wine when describing a hilarious incident at work. The night was one that nobody wanted to see end, but responsibility called, so I left at 10:30 to get home and to bed. Right after crawling under the covers (actually just the sheet...us poo' folk don't leave the A.C. on overnight), I received a pleasant goodnight present when one of my best guy friends who I don't get to talk to very often called. I've mentioned him on here before, actually- Smithers, from Busch Gardens. He always puts me in a good mood, so I slept well after catching up :)

Well, back to the grind at work today...or as K-dog/Aussie roommate likes to say, "another day, another dollar." (Insert Australian accent)

Oh, I forgot to mention: I was mistaken. The view from our bedroom window is downtown Manhattan, not downtown Brooklyn. You'd think I could have figured that out based on the Empire State Building staring at me...check out this sunset from our window: