Beans, boats, bridges, and burgers

Tonight is dedicated to a lot of scenery backlog. For once, NO medical news! Hoorah!

We start off with a cellphone shot of the Brooklyn Bridge, taken a week ago Friday on date night with my sweetie. We had drinks and snacks as we ambled our way down Front Street, near the South Street Seaport, starting off at Nelson Blue which had all New Zealand wines and beers. The frat boy atmosphere indoors was ignorable when we sat outside in the cafe area with its lovely view of the Brooklyn Bridge, sipping wine and grazing on their small plates (nothing to write home about, but fine on a pleasant summer evening). Then we ambled over to Stella Maris for another drink.

And then from this past Thursday, a belated shot of the semi-peaceful garden seating area of the Jackson Hole Burger across the street from the boob hospital. I took this (cellphone) photo when I was out grabbing lunch, post-onco visit, pre-chemo drip. It was very soothing, if you ignore the jackhammers pounding away one block over. Heh.

Well, hey, all that infrastructure stimulus spending had to go somewhere, right?

And then yesterday, after I made my sweetie waffles for breakfast & he went to do further battle with his kitchen renovations, I spent hours maniacally cross-stitching and rotting my brain watching hardbody-superspy Sunday on USA: Dr. No -- which I had never seen before actually (it took me 15 minutes to figure out that some of the characters were supposed to be Chinese... since they were all portrayed by Caucasian actors!) -- followed by The Bourne Identity -- which I had seen, more than once, but still enjoyed -- and then the very beginning of Casino Royale.

So you will understand why I desperately needed to go out and DO something: I ran out the door during the parkour sequence of Casino Royale, before I got sucked in by the sight of Daniel Craig reprising the Honey Rider rising-from-the-sea beach scene.

It being another beautifully cool (if slightly humid) summer day, I took off for a 2.8 mile semi-brisk jaunt down Riverside Park to drop off a book at my cousin's apartment in Lincoln Towers. Et voila! Yet another cellphone photo of scenery which caight my eye. Alas, the phone couldn't capture the clarity of the view over NJ (!) -- I mean, can you even tell there's a boat in the foreground? -- but I think you get the idea.

And that brings us up to date with tonight's insanity: I accidentally made a gigantic 4 bean salad: black, garbanzo, kidney, habicheulas, all because I am in love with my new Williams-Sonoma veggie chopper. (This is in addition to the tuna salad with bell pepper, scallions, and cilantro I made for lunch tomorrow.)

I blame/credit my sweetie's mom for this infatuation, since it was her chopper which I used for the bean salad I made for the pool party last month.

Tonight's extravaganza also had: cilantro, green bell pepper, cucumber, scallions, corn, and tomato. The dressing consisted of black pepper, dijon mustard, olive oil, lemon juice, and vinegars (balsamic, red wine, apple cider, and white). You can see why with all of these ingredients, I wound up with a giant VAT of salad. I mean, the big blue bowl you see here is the Tupperware bowl I use for mixing cake batter! Ponder the endless portions.

Ergo, it will be the de facto side dish at this week's knitting night with the ladies. HA!

And I will desperately need the knitting night tutorial, since the instructions for the Knitpicks pattern for their adorable looking Little Bubbles sweater is infuriatingly obtuse. I mean, who the hell writes instructions like this?! "Rows 1 and 3, do this... Rows 2 and 4, do that... Row 5, see the instructions for the other thing we want you to do... Rows 6 and 8, do something else entirely, but then on Rows 7 and 9..." PAH! I've been itching to try making this sweater 'cos it looks so cute, but I knew the pattern / directions would suck massive wind, and I was right. (At least the machine washable yarn, Comfy Sport, is supersoft. Even my engineer agrees on the baby-worthy softness quotient of this yarn.)

So I will be re-writing the instructions in a more helpful format from start to finish (I had planned to do that tonight, but well, I got sucked into the kitchen by the veggie chopper). While this will be a royal pain in the a**, it will have the side effect of helping me understand what the hell the directions are supposed to be. At least I will have until the beginning of August to finish the sweater for my greatniece's 1st birthday. Wish me luck!