Productive Weekend

My birthday cheesecake. They decorated my friend's plate and we had to move the candle to my cake.

The best part of the restaurant--the bathrooms. Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I love bathrooms and photograph them wherever I go.

1. My friends and I celebrated my birthday at Grand Luxe Cafe. I highly recommend skipping this place. The food was not that great. The service was awful and the manager was nasty. Even after complaining a number of times, they put the birthday candle on the wrong dessert and decorated the wrong plate. All in all, it was a fun night. I love my friends and it was great being with them.

2. Saw Gran Torino and enjoyed it immensely. It was wonderful to see a movie before it made it to television.

3. Got to visit my dad. I usually see him every weekend but was about to bow out this weekend due to weather when the sun came out yesterday afternoon. We played a couple of hot games of Rummy Q and had a good time together.

4. Saw 21 on DVD. Being a math teacher and a wannabe card counter, I loved the movie.

5. Saw Defiance today with some good friends. I actually saw two can't believe I saw two first run movies in one weekend and got to catchup with friends at the same time. The movie by my house was recently redone and on Mondays, ladies only pay $4.50. My husband was complaining about there being no Man's day, but that's life. Since all our money is our money, we still saved on my admission.

6. Dinner at Grimaldi's--coal oven pizza at its finest.

7. Marked the first half of my geometry classes midterm exams and put those marks into excel. The marks weren't all that bad. The class average was 28/40 (70% for you non-math people.) I'm still not expecting much on the next part, but I'll have to wait for Wednesday to find out.

And now, to figure out what to teach tomorrow.

Three Day Weekends

Weekends are good. Three day weekends are even better. Three day weekends in NYC with no major plans are fantastic.

Friday night started out with meeting friends down on Houston St. at Pier 40 to take a cruise around the Statue of Liberty. It sounded like fun until we actually got on the rickety old boat. It was over crowded, the bar was mobbed the food looked awful. We decided to ditch this free cruise (courtesy of the company that was trying to sell their ship for school parties) and have dinner in the Village. We found a parking spot off Bleeker and ate a great price-fix meal at a little Spanish restaurant Cafe Espanol). The food was good, the Sangria was great and the company was fantastic. Saturday involved a trip to the Bronx to visit my dad and then dinner in Little Italy of the Bronx, an enclave on Arthur Ave, off Fordham Rd. The food might have been the best Italian food I have ever eaten (Ann and Tony's). It was even better than the stuff I ate in Italy. Today we had tickets to see The Ritz on Broadway. It was kind of a stupid show, but very entertaining and funny, in a strange kind of way. The worst part was Rosie Perez. She garbled her words and it was really hard to understand her. Then we had dinner at our favorite Chinese Restaurant (Mee Too, on 54th and 9th.) Who would think that two people could walk away from dinner in Manhattan, stuffed, for on $13.50 (including tax and tip).

Tomorrow will be a day of relaxation, marking test papers, writing exams and just catching up. I definitely could use these kind of weekends more often.