New York Pictures

You guys are cracking me up! Those are NOT our best pictures. The ones on the header ARE my favorites though. Those were all pictures that we took. You can ooh and aaah over those all you want to. :)

Second Thoughts

zzzzzz..... That was a real Snoozer! Instead of posting each day of New York seperately, I'm going to go ahead and write one about the highlights. I wrote that last post pretty late last night and I was bored this morning reading it. Stay tuned for a better post about NYC.

New York City, 9/23/07

Holy cow - I'm actually going to start on a New York post! Saturday we arrived in the evening and after checking into the hotel we walked up 5th avenue forever just to take in the sights. We walked on over to Times Square and got a bite to eat. It was mostly uneventful.

Sunday we picked up our tickets for a tour on the double decker buses all around the city. We took the "Uptown Tour" which is pretty well self-explanatory. We drove around uptown. After the bus tour we walked on over to the Manhattan Temple and stake center to attend Sacrament meeting. It was quite interesting to walk around the corner and all of a sudden - it was right there like it came out of nowhere. We walked inside and went up the elevator and walked out into Utah. It totally was laid out like any other stake center - you just had to take an elevator to get there. I forgot my temple recommend (idiot!) so we weren't able to attend a temple session. One of my greatest regrets...

After Sacrament meeting we got back on the bus and took the "Downtown Tour." Each tour was 2 to 2.5 hours long and it was great to be able to see so many sights and have the buildings pointed out to us. We managed to get a pretty good tour guide for this tour and he told us that he would be doing a "Night Tour" later on that evening. The Night Tour took us into Brooklyn and we decided to try and catch his later tour since he was from Brooklyn and we figured he'd have some good insider information to give us. Unfortunately, it also covered much of the Downtown Loop so we got a bit of a repeat of all of that stuff. Still, he did a nice job with Brooklyn. Being on a moving bus at night wasn't very conducive to great photographs, but the skyline was beautiful. Tours ended up taking up most of our day, but it seemed like one of the more Sabbath appropriate options we had and we felt pretty prepared for Monday.

These are not the best pictures that we took, nor are they pictures of the most interesting things we saw. They are merely pictures were at least decent, that might possibly be of interest to you, the reader, and that I might have a comment or two to say regarding. Remember, when I am commenting on a picture, I always write below it.

Empire State building behind one of the many beautiful churches around the city.

Looking straight up the Empire State Building. It's hard to even realize where you are because you can't see the top of it.

Tiles decorated and put on a fence honoring the victims of 9-11.

I'm pretty sure this is a statue of the men who built Rockefeller Center. It was actually built on a truck - so it could move around the city.

Trinity Church - SO pretty, especially the neat cemetary on it's grounds.

Manhattan Bridge

I can't remember the name of this building, but apparently in a Superman movie Christoper Reves flies right up this building. Is that interesting, I'm not sure. :)

This is a view from our hotel room on the 10th floor. When we looked out the window we could see this playground on the roof of our hotel. That seems impossible how I explained it- the building was not just one solid rectangle with rooms on every floor. The first floor had the check-in counter, conference rooms, a small cafe, etc. The 3rd floor had a fitness room, the 4th had 2 indoor pools, the 6th was all offices, 8th-13th floors were rooms, and I didn't mention the others because I'm unsure what they were used for. Anyway, the roof ended in the center of the building right over the 4th floor pool. That means that all the rooms above the 4th floor could look onto that roof. SO, I'm not sure what floor the playground roof was at, but it was at or below the 10th. Trust me.

The view just above the playground.

Here's the Central Library at night (Ghostbusters anyone?)

Here's the best we could do with a nighttime skyline from Brooklyn.

The sewers were steaming all over the place. It was so hilariously weird.

Rockefeller Center - no Christmas tree yet and we just BARELY missed the ice skating. I belive they were starting that October 6th. THAT would've been fun.

Here was a window shot of FAO Schwartz. They closed earlier that night than we expected. We went back Tuesday just to realized that we missed it again. FINALLY on Friday we managed to show up when it was still open. You would think that I could read the sign and remember what time they closed for crying out loud. I really enjoyed that place. I think we have another picture or two that I'll comment on for the Friday post.

I hope that was at least a decent start. To be continued...

Home Improvements

I know I'm disappointing all of you by not posting about New York City. I'll get there. In the meantime, this is what has been taking up all of this week's attention. Our kitchen floor went from this:








To this:








They also retiled our bathrooms which were previously carpeted. Yes, I'm thrilled. No, the tape wasn't permanent.

Vaseline Remedy

So, I have a carpet cleaner. I first used some water and Dawn and the handheld attachment on the carpet cleaner that has suction on it. I thought that would be a good idea - scrub with Dawn and have the residue sucked out at the same time. Then I used the normal carpet cleaning solution and cleaned over the area continually for about 10 minutes. Next day... totally oily carpet. Cool...

Turns out, when you put a paper bag on the carpet and then use a warm iron on top of it, the brown paper bag soaks up the oils. I used 6 brown paper bags and was STILL getting Vaseline out of the carpet. It is not out completely - I just got sick of ironing. I'll go at it again later.

Not My Favorite Part of the Day

Does anyone know how to get Vaseline out of carpet?

Arrived Safely in New York City

We're here and as you can tell - it's been very overcast and incredibly humid. We flew in above these gorgeous clouds, but I was really hoping to be able to see a neat view of New York City from overhead. We made it to the hotel without any trouble from JFK Airport and had some time to take a night walk over to Times Square and get some dinner on the way back. My nostrils are on high-alert as the smells here are so pungent. There has been no hint of a breeze so everything seems to sit and fester while we walk through one cloud and into the next. Horse drawn carriages line the sidewalk around Central Park giving us a strong manure smell, every other person is a smoker, and the subways emit a smog that is impossible not to notice. Then we have the hot dog vender cloud, the "Abercrombie & Fitch" cologne cloud, the fabulous Barbeque grill cloud, each with a smoker cloud in between. It's a veritable smorgasbord of overload for the senses.

I'm REALLY excited for tomorrow. I am not being sarcastic, I do not complain about how things are. I'm just attempting to notice.

Kathryn Playing Punk

New York City

Derek and I have our 5th Anniversary coming up in November. We are celebrating with a trip to New York City and our plane departs next week. We have a pretty good idea of which major sites to see (Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, Broadway shows, Rockefeller Center, etc.) We also have some fabulous food recommendations from LJ. I'm looking for any bits of advice that you are aware of. For instance, there is apparently a red booth somewhere that you can bid for cheap Broadway tickets. There is also a webcam where you can show up and have your picture online - if you are there at the "right" time then it will be archived. Do you know of a great place to eat that we just CANNOT miss? Should we avoid a certain place at a certain time of day? Any good info would be appreciated. Your deadline is Thursay, September 20th. GO!

Airport Fiasco

Katie and I flew out to Jodie's house in Indiana last week for a girls weekend. The plan was for Mom, Gina, and Jana to fly into Indianapolis Saturday early morning (1:00am). I was to meet them in the airport as my flight was scheduled to come in at 12:30am. Unfortunately, there was some mechanical problems with my plane and we ended up being 9 hours delayed. Yes, I was stuck in the John Wayne Airport for 9 hours with my 18 month old. Luckily she is pretty mellow because I really didn't bring anything to entertain her. We walked a while and she enjoyed standing up on the armrests of the chairs and then jumping off (over and over again). I'm glad I brought some lunch for her because all the airline offered us were those little cracker snack packs that you can buy on the plane. Pitiful. They did offer a travel voucher and told us that we would be put up in a hotel in Chicago before catching our connecting flight the next morning.

We were scheduled to leave at 1:23pm and finally taxied away from the gate at 9:30pm. Katie managed to sleep fitfully on the plane but I didn't get a wink of sleep. We arrived at 3:15am in Chicago and were told that the O'Hare Hilton (right on the premises) was not available to us since it was a holiday weekend. United was willing to give us hotel vouchers for a hotel 30 minutes away but wouldn't pay for the shuttle to get us there. Unfortunately, our flight from Chicago to Indianapolis was leaving at 7:30am so we only had 4 hours total to find Katie's carseat, get to a hotel, check-in, sleep for an hour, try and drag myself out of bed, get to the aiport in time to check-in, go through security, and make the flight on time. Fat chance. SO... Katie and I got to kill 4 hours of time during the most exhausting part of the night. She had already had a nap so she was wide-eyed and bushy tailed. I was just bushed.

I was disappointed that we weren't even offered meal vouchers since they weren't able to accomodate us in any way with the hotel. I will definitely be writing a letter to United Airlines. I'm not excited to use their travel voucher anytime soon.

(On a positive note: Our returning flights were ahead of schedule and we landed 30 minutes earlier than expected.)