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I had a dream about my last house. Instead of in Granger, it’s in Bridgman. Instead of that crazy fake tanned divorced woman, my old landlord was my realtor (and she wouldn’t return my phone calls). The list price dropped to $185,000 and the house was gorgeous. The two master bedrooms are on the second floor, one of them included French doors leading to a sitting room. There are three stories and bay windows everywhere. I didn’t walk into the kitchen but I think it looked like a replica of Barefoot Contessa’s kitchen on Food Network.
When I woke up, I had to re-examine every reason I had for selling the Granger house. Thankfully, all of them still stand.

  

My craft stuff are overflowing and now the dinning room’s been taken over by sewing machine and ironing board… If only we can finish part of the basement and turn it into a sewing room… Or maybe I can just take over SO’s basement space instead.

  

My new thing (starting tonight) is going to bed early, and I’m already behind schedule. I don’t know how I’m going to survive this coming outage. The new season of Gray’s Anatomy is coming out soon and I will HAVE to watch every episode as soon as Netflix sends the DVDs to me… Plus there are the minor things to occupy my time, like eating, showering, making food, and sleeping… It won’t all fit into 24 hours when shit hits the fan (which I estimate to be… 9/20, giving them 5 days to figure out that a 40 hr/wk schedule has never worked.)
Anyway, back to the “going to bed early” thing… Apparently my morning performance, accompanied by plenty of yawning, eye scratching, twitching, and stretching, is starting to get noticed. Walt asked today if I’m holding a second job and I went on about my adventure at the restaurant couple of years ago. I really like Walt, as well as everyone else in the group, but he has this way that makes me feel a bit nervous. For example, he told me about this girl who was a Chem E and worked in the group years before I started. How she had a second job as a sales clerk at the department store and did nothing as an engineer. Finally, she quit and went on to a new job… where she promptly got fired after 6 months. The moral of the story is that other companies are a lot better at firing engineers than we are. But, I mean, wouldn’t this story make you feel a little uncomfortable, even if you’re not a sales clerk at Macy’s?

  

I’m tired and cranky, but not for the usual reasons.
I was sitting in my chair, listening to my latest addition of audiobooks and finishing up my cross stitch, when I got this funny feeling… later identified as guilt.
Deep steep guilt… for not mailing out Mom’s Romba… And, of course, for getting caught in the act of forgetting to mail it out 3 times in a row (if “not doing” can be categorized as an act.)
It’s one of those feelings that are most painful when experienced least often. So, either I mail out the vacuum tomorrow or I get used to feeling guilty more frequently. I think I’ll put the box in my car tonight…

  

I took Friday off and flew to NYC to visit Jennifer.
Friday was all traveling. I had a 3 hrs layover at Cleveland (plus another 30 minutes delay). We got a rental car and drove to Rhinebeck and spent the evening at Beekman Arms. Had dinner at the Valley Restaurant.
On Saturday, we went to the Vanderbilt Estate and then to Kykuit, which is the Rockefeller Estate. For lunch, we went to Equus.

I really liked the Garrison. It’s decorated as a hip club house and the waiting staff were really nice. I wasn’t too hungry, since Jennifer brought two boxes of sushi from Manhattan. So I got the corn soup and foie gras appetizer. I was really disappointed because the foie gras turned out to be pate… Even though I didn’t get an entre, the dinner bill still racked up to $100.
Beekman Arms is an okay, we really didn’t stay long enough to comment.

In the morning, we drove to the Vanderbilt Estate.

The tour was an hour and the group was escorted everywhere. I know it sounds strange, but the mansion is actually really small… The front entrance opens to an elliptical room which connects to the rest of the rooms. Mrs. Vanderbilt’s bedroom was modeled after Marie Antoinette’s bedroom, including the birthing rail which I’ve always thought looks weird in any bedroom.
We had lunch at Equus, which is this castle resort near Sleepy Hollow. I was really looking forward to the meal, but it turned out badly. We have to valet park the car, and stood waiting for the hostess for 10 minutes when we finally asked the concierge to call somebody. In the end the captain showed us a table outside. The food was so-so but towards the end of the meal there were bees crawling everywhere.

We then joined the queue of people who wanted to visit Kykuit.

The Grand Tour we signed up for is scheduled to last for 3 hours, and we thought we could duck out any time during that and go home… Nope. It turned out that they bus groups of tourists there, and then push them through an array of assembly line of short explanations. Even though I didn’t like the tour, the gardens were incredible. The grounds is so big that you can really get lost in it. Each garden was designed as a “room” and had its functions. There were out door pools and grotto, hallways lined with trees, and crazy statues everywhere.
It was around 7PM by the time we got out. We found the nearest SAMS and got some staples for Jennifer. Then we decided to drive to Indian Point and then back to Manhattan to time the car trip.
Now I’m completely exhausted…