Welcome back!

I know, I know, we've been gone a while. Things have been a bit crazy, and also a little uneventful, if you can believe it! We're getting more settled into our apartment, have gotten more of our stuff in the mail, and are starting to relax a bit. Since our little "mishap" with the apartment, we've fixed the windows, been fingerprinted...

and have moved on. We're safe! :) We promise! We're even getting the other gate installed on our window on Saturday.

Before the excitement of that Thursday afternoon, we headed down to the Lower East Side to visit The Doughnut Plant. Bobby Flay has a show on Food Network where he finds the best of the best and challenges them to a "Throwdown." This guy supposedly had the best doughnuts, so we had to go!


We had peach with a fresh peach glaze, tres leches (the winning doughnut from the show), peanut butter and jelly, blackout, coconut, and Valrhona chocolate. They were GOOD and we're going back soon.

What we had planned the day our apartment security was breached was a trip to Central Park. Needless to say, that got postponed, but only until the next day. We wandered around for a while, thought we had gone pretty far into the park, only to realize that we had only covered about 1/3 of it, if that. It's really an amazing place with a lot of interesting people, and all kinds of things to discover.


This is the Bethesda Fountain, and just south of it is The Mall, which you can see on the DVD cover of When Harry Met Sally.


This is the Loeb Boathouse where people with lots of money can eat and get married. It's also on The Lake where you can rent canoes and paddle around, but not on a Sunday because you will stand in line FOREVER.


Here is Kendra standing on a bridge, over The Lake, with the Upper West Side in the background. We live on the Upper East Side. We don't go west. At least not yet...that's unfamiliar territory.


Here we have Belvedere Lake as seen from Belvedere Castle. Just beyond that is the Great Lawn. That's about as far north as we've gone. For a little perspective, Central Park starts at 59th Street and ends up at 110th street. The Great Lawn is just above 80th Street, and we haven't even gone all the way to the West side yet. 843 ares is a lot of land in the middle of this huge city. It's great.

The other day, we decided to go meet some Friends. Kind of.

It's the Friends apartment building! I was very excited to find this since I'm kind of in love with that show. It's in a quiet, cute little area of the West Village. There's a cafe on the ground floor, but it's not Central Perk. We're planning on seeing other famous spots from our favorite shows (or even running into a taping of some) but are still trying to find the others.

Our most recent outing from today was a bit more intense; We went down to the World Trade Center site. There's still not much going on there but construction, you can't really see anything unless they've opened the fence to let a truck in or out, but it's still worth seeing. There is a visitor center set up, and you can take guided walking tours, but we decided we wouldn't be able to handle that. Instead we walked around the outside of the construction fence and peeked in when we had a chance.


The buildings in the background are on the opposite end of the site. They have posters on them (you can almost make them out) that show what the new WTC site is going to look like when it's finished in 2012. It will be interesting to see once it's all done.

Instead of going into the visitor center we found a memorial just around the corner. It was beautifully done and pretty big. There are a lot of pictures, so hopefully you can get the idea.










That's what we've been up to for the past few weeks! Hopefully you'll see that we're doing great, having fun, and that will now live in a stronghold; no one is getting in here again!