Yellow #6, 8 hours of sleep, and 9/11

Only a handful of you may know this, but Claudia and I were supposed to have our first date on September 11, 2001.  We had "met" via Match.com and a Tuesday night date seemed like a low-pressure type of affair.  I worked across the street from the WTC, but was late for work that day.  I missed the worst of it, but did watch the towers fall from the West Side Highway, where my cab had stranded me.  After a long walk home, and many phone calls trying to locate friends and co-workers, Claud and I talked and decided that maybe having a first date the night thousands of people died would be a downer.  We rescheduled for 11 days later and promised each other that if thousands of people died that day, too, we would stop dating.  Fortunately, our relationship has caused no further casualties (quite the opposite).  But it's nice to look back on that day and think that despite the terrible things that happened that day we can still remember one good thing that we shared.

Now that you're all drying your eyes and sniffling into a kleenex, it's time to catch you up on our weekend.  As expected, we took one final excursion to NoFo, where ECG was eagerly waiting with merchandise and promises of babysitting.   (Not before we pinned Chloe down for a long-needed nail-clipping...they were getting  out of control.)  Chloe got a bunch of new clothes with an apple theme (not the apple theme I would pick), although as it turned out the theme was "can you believe how little these all cost?"  Nothing wrong with that.  The best part of the trip, though, was having ECG take the night shift two nights in a row!!  That meant 10 hours of uninterrupted sleep the whole weekend!  Plus, they had just completed a guest room above the garage which was like a little private apartment, painted an interesting celery color which made us feel like we were living inside a Mountain Dew bottle. 

(Ingredients: carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup and/or sugar, orange juice from concentrate, natural and artificial flavor, citric acid, sodium benzoate (preserves freshness), caffeine, sodium citrate, yellow 6, ascorbic acid (preserves freshness), calcium disodium EDTA (to protect flavor), yellow 5, gum arabic, brominated vegetable oil, red 40)

So we slept.  A lot.  It was AWESOME.  The trip itself was great for Chloe, who was happier than usual with the extra attention, and great for us because we actually got some extended alone time for the first time in weeks.  We went out to dinner at a great restaurant in Greenport called the Frisky Oyster, and enjoyed a final glorious weekend floating in the pool. 

We just got home a couple hours ago, after a particular annoying drive and search for a parking space.   I spent a good chunk of the drive being criticized for my driving, although that guy was clearly sitting in my blind-spot just to piss me off, and that jack-ass just cut in front of me and NO WAY am I going to let him get away with that!!!!  Sorry...regressed for a second.  Anyway, on a good day, our neighborhood is an intricate ballet of cars moving from Wednesday to Tuesday spaces, the ebb and flow of courthouse employees enabling residents to gently slip from space to space like the delicate dance of the sugar-plum fairies.  On Sunday night, it's like a Cabbage Patch Kid display in 1983, and  we were five minutes late for the sale.  After 712 laps around the block we ended up in a garage.  But we're home, the kid is sleeping, and now we're going to try one more time to get into "Rome."  Slow going, HBO...slow going...throw us a bone...