I woke up at 6:25 to check in for my flight the next morning before falling back to sleep for another two hours. Angelo went out to get bagels and spreads. I had a poppyseed bagel with a little bit of both scallion and vegetable cream cheeses.
Before Catherine and I headed into Manhattan, Ellen was going to drive us to this collectibles store in Forest Hills to check out some comics, sporting goods, and I even heard they had some wrestling merch. It was the same place Catherine brought my Revis jersey. Of course, if I'm going to fit in it, I'll have to put on 25 pounds...We got to the store around 11:55 and it turned out they didn't open until noon. So we just took the C train into the city until we got to Greenwich Village. She walked me a couple of blocks to Our Lady of Pompeii church where we caught the last half hour of a Catholic service. I'd say there were maybe 25 people there. It was nice enough, although I had trouble understanding a lot of what the priest was saying. I declined to participate in communion. Afterwards, we walked to the lack where they have a wall of dedications with these little golden plaques that look like leaves. One of them was for her grandfather, Pasquale, from all of his grandkids.
Then we walked past a 9/11 memorial that had hundreds of different handcrafted tiles. For lunch, we went to Jekyll & Hyde. This place is a restaurant that pays homage to horror and science fiction movies and culture. On the wall, we saw the werewolf, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, skeletons, etc. They had one of those creepy English butlers who made us his spies. He called himself Dalton Ravenswood and he asked us in that creepy kind of British way to name ourselves. I said we could be named Mr. and Mrs. Smith, after the Brangelina movie where they both played spies. And the bathroom isn't even marked, I had to push open a bookcase! We snacked on chili nachos, which were okay and Catherine enjoyed a bowl of French onion soup.
We hit up Rocco's bakery, where I destroyed a huge piece of crumb cake with the powdered sugar on top. We just don't have cake like that in Chicago, at least I've never found it. Excellent. I would have liked to have grabbed a piece of cheesecake, but it's just so hard to compete with Junior's. We also passed by Sticky's, which is a chicken finger joint I saw profiled on the Food Network a month ago. If I had an appetite, I definitely would have checked it out. But we wound up shopping at a bunch of thrift stores. We found a lot of horrible clothes, beat up electronic equipment, old music and movies, and even a few VHS tapes on how to have better sex. For $1.99? At the Army/Navy store, Catherine got fixated on this black Canadian officer jacket and I took a photo of her wearing it along with her dark sunglasses.
We left the Village around 5:00 and headed back to Queens. Francis and Lauren came back from the beach of us and the six of us feasted on burgers, hot dogs, excellent cheese and garlic sausage, roasted zucchini, pickles, and pasta salad. For dessert, we had berries with fresh whipped cream and I snuck in one of those Italian sesame cookies, one of my favorites. It felt like eating in the North Pole, since Ellen jacked the A/C up as high as it could go. Catherine, Lauren, Francis, and I stayed in the kitchen talking about whatever and the whole time, I was wondering if we could put on a bonfire. Of course, they took an unnecessary shot at the Jets and I took off downstairs for five minutes. I really don't need a girlfriend who's going to act like a prick. I just don't.
Anyway, around 9:30 pm, Lauren left for home, Francis went upstairs, and Catherine and I went downstairs and watched Forever Young, an old Mel Gibson movie. Three minutes in, I figured why she picked that film. There's only two songs in the entire film and one of them is "The Very Thought of You" by Billie Holliday. And they play that song at least five times throughout the film. Enough details there, I'll just let that be...I thoguht it was an okay film, maybe a little sappy. After it was over, we watched the last two minutes of the Jets pre-season loss to Carolina. I didn't really care that Tebow was unable to drive the team to a touchdown on the last drive, it's not gonna be the situation when the regular season begins.
We spent a last couple of moments togethger before saying good night. But I guess we just weren't ready to let go just yet. We fell back together...Took another half hour for the night to finally end...
Woke up at 4:20 and got the first flight of New York out at 6:30. I'd like to thank the large man in front of me who leaned his seat all the way back in my lap as well as the two women one row behind me who yelled at each other in Spanish for the entire 2.5 hour flight. They really made that trip a pleasure and a half...
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