Back From the Wilderness

Whoa. 

I've been away so long that Typepad logged me out of my blog publishing-y thing. And I couldn't remember my password. Or the real, actual word I'm thinking of when I call it my "blog publishing-y thing." 

So we went to New York! It was fantastic. I think I finally succeeded in gaining a million pounds, thanks to Travelocity and Restaurant Week and Mario Batali's Eataly where I ate pasta and then had a cheese plate and more pasta for dessert. Or maybe that was considered pre-dessert. We were there for like, four hours and didn't stop eating once.

That was also where I spent a good 45 minutes staring at some poor random guy a few seats down from us at the crudo counter that I SWEAR was on an episode of Law & Order or something, only to realize once he got up and I was actually sitting directly next to Andrew Zimmern.

You will all be terribly proud of me, I think, for managing to NOT start pointing and shouting "BIZARRE FOODS! Hey! You're BIZARRE FOODS! What up, BIZARRE FOODS. I TOTALLY CAN'T THINK OF YOUR REAL NAME RIGHT NOW, BIZARRE FOODS."

Jason, always the bad influence, was all, "Do it. Go say hi. Buy him a glass of wine. Totally dork the hell out. It'll be funny. You can write about it on your blog."

You know, counter seating is totally underrated. It's really easy to kick people in the shins at that angle. 

Anyway. Bizarre Foods Andrew Zimmern remains blissfully ignorant of my entire existence, as God probably intended. We were supposed to come home on Thursday, but then it snowed, and we had to decide whether we felt like spending a million hours watching the lousy-with-delays departures board at Penn Station, or like staying in New York another night and eating some more instead. 

In summary: I am fat now. It feels real good.

Also: BAM. 22 weeks pregnant. 

I swear, five days ago everybody I met was like, "You're pregnant? What? And you're HOW far along? You're barely even showing!"

Behold, the power of cheese, you guys. 

We finally got home on Saturday, only to find that our house had no electricity. It went out sometime very early on Thursday morning, in basically a total repeat of the LAST time we took a vacation in the dead of winter and then returned to a Snowpaccalaccalypse and an extended power outage. This time, luckily, we missed most of it, as our power was restored after we left to go kill a couple hours at the mall, where it was warm and well-lit and not awful and we could at least surf the online real estate listings to see if we could afford to move someplace else that wasn't so prone losing electricity for days whenever like, a goddamn bird decides to nest in a load-bearing tree next to our power lines. (SPOILER ALERT: No, dammit.)

Anyway, I know I'm forgetting about a million things I wanted to tell you about, but I really need to get back into the flow of things and posting over at the still shiny and brand spanking new Moxiebird and Mamapop and Alphamom and do SOMETHING about the four frillion unread emails I let pile up last week -- though at this point, that "SOMETHING" is probably going to involve the "delete all unread emails" function and praying that I didn't miss anything too important. But then! Back to life and business and blogging as usual, with exciting kid-related photo essays and whining and probably more talk about cheese. God, cheese. It's just so awesome, you know?