Post-Thanksgiving Party

The evening after Thanksgiving I had a date with an old friend from UNCG, J.Scott. He is currently living in upstate NY and was down in Manhattan for a couple of days. We arranged to meet up at Greenacre around the end of my shift. After a late start (10am) and a very dull day I locked up shop and finished my cleaning duties. J.Scott and friend Karishma (another UNCG alum) showed up and I surprised them by appearing from the hatch near the waterfall. We walked around mid-town for a while until we found a coffee place and sat there chatting until they closed at 5pm. Then we caught the subway to Karishma's temporary home on 14th Street. It was a huge novelty for me as the building she's staying in has an elevator! No trudging up 5 flights of stairs after a long, hard day. We sat around on a giant comfy couch drinking white wine and catching up on the news of 4 years. I've spoken regularly with J.Scott since I left North Carolina in late 2007, and we met up early this year when my sisters were around, but I've not had much contact with Karishma. We watched a bit of Men In Black while I was getting excited over the 900+ channels on the TV and waited on the arrival of a 3rd party person - Ransome.

We finished off the extra-big bottle of wine and headed deep into the West Village to a felafel/kebab restaurant called moustache. I believe there was more wine and delicious food but my memory is hazy. From there we met up with Timon and John Cho at the Brass Monkey bar around near the High-Line. I ordered warm pumpkin pie with whipped cream for dessert and watched as the boys played Connect Four. The pie was good in the beginning but as the pumpkin flavour took over it was rather sickly and sat in my stomach like a big pile of mashed potato. Or pumpkin, I guess.

From the bar we walked to Ransome's apartment which he shares with an absent Craigslist housemate. The apartment is HUGE, with a separate kitchen, loungeroom, bedroom and super-massive studio/rumpus room. Oh yeah, and there's a built-in sauna (I've since seen one of these in an eighties film so I'm thinking they're fairly dated but still crazy cool). We alternated between the sofa and the rooftop outdoor furniture, spying on a dude in a singlet who should have closed his curtains. From the roof Ransome pointed out an apartment building over the road that was supposedly inhabited by the great Jennifer Aniston at some point. We also spent a long time debating the merits of cats over dogs. It was a most excellent evening where old friends met new and we all drunk ourselves into a stupor.

Thanks for making the trip JScott. You narrowly avoided being dead to me.