Date with Ikea

Ah....gotta love the Zipcar. Today, the fam piled into a mini-van and headed towards Red Hook for our date with Ikea. Having driven for 17 years before my move to NYC where owning a car is pretty much pointless, I forgot how great it felt to sit behind the wheel. Even if it was only a couple mile drive down the BQE, it had the same rush as driving across the Pacific Coast Highway. One-hundred and seventy-nine dollars later, we were headed back to the 'Burg, with a van full of necessities like storage containers, recycling bins, new giant laundry bags and a brand new dish drying rack...in other words, items that I don't know how we had been living for so long without. One thing that's for sure, the new year is going to be a far better organized one than the past few.

And speaking of, we bid farewell to 2008 with a nice mellow gathering at our place. Jes suggested that we follow a Cuban tradition, all of us eating grapes at midnight, which is supposed to bring everyone good luck in the new year. We forgot to get them during our first trip to the grocery store, so with only 30-or-so minutes left to go before the countdown, my brother made a quick trip back to Sunac with instructions to return with 200 grapes.

I guess we all got distracted from this pursuit of good fortune when little Auden woke up a few minutes before the ball dropped. Since it was a special occasion, we let him hang out with us for a bit. An hour or so later, I brought him to our bedroom to get him back to sleep. The next thing you know, I opened my eyes and it was 5:30am and the apartment was empty, save for Jes and the baby (well, not really a baby now) who were fast asleep next to me -- hard to believe much of my life had been spent going to bed about the time the sun was coming up. Anyway, I walked into the kitchen and amidst the empty bottles and a sink full of dishes and glassees was a Sunac bag overflowing with grapes, untouched from earlier that evening. Needless to say, so far, 2009 feels like the year of the grape.