Eleven miles ...

• is a long way.
• will make your toes hurt for being in your running shoes for 2 hours and 10 minutes.
• will make your brain stop telling your legs what to do so that when you stop running, it will make you wonder if you're going to collapse and take a good five minutes for the walking to feel normal.
• will make your legs hurt, and your hip, and your knees, and your lower back, and your stomach, and your breasts.
• will make your calves sexy.
• will make you so grateful for the energy gels that you bought at Dick's.
• will make you wish you had bought some type of hydration pack.
• will make you hate the people in front of you at Shelley Lake who are walking six wide with no concept of the fact that people are trying to pass them.
• will make you mad at the City of Raleigh for not marking their trails clearly such that you end up on some random street inside the Beltline or don't take the trail that you wanted and end up on the steepest hill (by Root Elementary School) east of the Eastern Continental Divide.
• will make you feel like crying between miles 9.75 and 10.5.
• will make you simultaneously love and hate running.
• is completely worth it, despite everything.
• will make you so proud of what you can push your body to do.

Today's Run on the Garmin

¡La Biblia Dice Así!

So, if you were to think of adjectives to describe me, I'm pretty sure that religious probably wouldn't appear until somewhere after adjective no. 100. (BTW, hopefully, adjective no. 1 would be humble; hahaha...yeah right!).

Don't get me wrong...I'm not agnostic or athiest or anything, I'm just not the kinda girl who will be citing you Bible verses. In fact, the four years I spent in my high school Sunday school class consisted of walking to the McDonald's and Bojangles or playing Bible Baseball. And let me just tell you, no one wanted me on his or her team for Bible Baseball because everyone realized I knew jack about Bible trivia. In fact, there was only one kid that knew anything about Bible trivia, so everyone wanted to be on his team. By about the middle of my sophomore year, we all pretty much figured out we were screwed if that kid wasn't on our team, so we just said to heck with the teams and read questions out loud while this other kid answered the questions. This probably explains why I suck with religion. :-)

So anyway, I have to say that I was a little concerned when I realized that one of the books on my reading list was the Bible. I knew that there wasn't anyway that I was going to sit down and read it cover to cover, so I sought out my friend Google for help. (The last 15 times I tried to read the Bible cover-to-cover the furthest I got was God smiting Cain.) Mr. Google informed me that there were many ways to read the Bible: cover-to-cover; chronologically in the order that the books were written; or thematically (i.e., pairing an Old Testament, New Testament, and Psalm reading). The English major in me (who firmly believes in how the author's lifetime has an effect on the narrative) led me to decide to go with the chronological order and I'm using the following reading plan:

www.gribblenation.com/personal/laura/Bible_Reading_One_Year.pdf

I should be finished with the whole thing by February 14, 2011. The readings only take about 10 minutes each day, but I'm also reading all of the supplementary material in my Catholic Study Bible as I go (that is, front matter, footnotes, reading guides, and so on). These supplements are really critical to my understanding of everything. It's fascinating to see how different books became part of the canon and how nuances in the Hebrew affect the meaning of the English translation. I'm also particularly struck how each book was formed. Most of the books are pieced together from various sources (down to the verse level), which is incredibly impressive as a literary and historical piece.

One of my history electives at N.C. State was the History of the Old Testament. A lot of what I did in that class is starting to come back to me. I just wish I had kept my notes and essays.

Spiritually, I'm very much enjoying it. It's definitely healthier than Bo-berry biscuits and cajun fries.

BTW, I'm doing all this concurrently with reading Nineteen Eighty Four. And once that's done, I'll be moving on to Vanity Fair.

The Catcher in the Rye

So, the night before we left for New York, I finished reading The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.

I'm not going to do a full book report or anything, but I will say that I am so happy that I reread it. It is very, very good! Everyone should read it; it's very short.

The book follows the protagonist as he travels around New York City alone for a few days after failing out of his fourth prep school. It was published in 1951.

Holden's problem (aside from being mentally ill and possibly sexually abused) is that he can only see people as black or white. He wants to like everyone, but whenever he comes across a negative character trait, he completely writes off the person and considers him or her a phony. Unsurprisingly, he doesn't really like anyone except for his dead brother and his little sister.

I got a lot out of the book. I'm not going to lie, though, I felt incredibly lonely after finishing it. Like more lonely than I've ever felt after reading a book. Most of the book is just Holden's thoughts and although there are some human interactions, it's mostly just Holden.

As a side note, it was very cool to go to the city right after reading it!

Up next on the list is Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell, which I've also already read. I've started reading the first 5 pages and I'm already depressed again. After I finish this one, maybe I can find one that isn't so damn depressing. I also need to go to the library so that I can read some books that aren't already on my bookshelf!

The List

No place in the world that can compare | Final Thoughts

• If you're not up on the hip hop/rap scene, my blog titles are lines from Jay-Z and Alicia Keys' song "Empire State of Mind," which is all about New York City. It's a really good song, but if you're not all about rap, go download just Alicia Keys' R&B version. It's absolutely beautiful and a lot of the lyrics are the same. Her voice is incredible and the piano part is unreal.
• I love my husband. Brian has probably had NYC roads memorized since he was 3 months in utero and, with the help of his Blackberry, he knew all the pertinent subway trains that we needed. We never got lost and the dude is a freaking genius. He knows which routes in and fro the city require tolls, he knows which subway stairwell to take to come up on the right side of the street, and he knows exactly how to tell the cabbie to get to our hotel so that he doesn't drive all over the place and charge us a fortune. It was fantastic for me. I just followed along and went where Brian told me to go with no stress.
• My first actual experience with Manhattan was incredible. We came up from the subway at night right in Times Square. It was complete sensory overload: everything right and wrong with America simultaneously. My head was probably spinning 360°! I haven't been to a lot of places, but I have been to some big cities (namely, London, Paris, and Sydney) and I haven't ever seen anything like New York. The sheer number of skyscrapers is incredible. The only places I can even imagine having a similar phenomenon would be Tokyo, Hong Kong, or Shanghai. Whether they do compare, I have no idea.
• The city didn't feel nearly as dangerous as I would have thought. We never felt weird, not even on the subway at night. I would have been 100% comfortable going around the subway and the city (at least to the places we went) by myself during the day.
• I still don't want to live there. It would be a major pain to have to deal with public transportation every day. I like my car, thankyouverymuch.
• It snowed A LOT in D.C. and Baltimore.
• Smart phones can be very helpful.
• Every Top 40 station in America is playing Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" and Ke$ha's "TiK ToK" four times an hour. Fortunately, we liked both songs.
• I do regret not getting to run while I was up there, but it was absolutely freezing and we did so much walking that I was completely exhausted each morning.
• I do wish we had seen the NYC Public Library building and visited the Natural History Museum. We'll definitely be doing both on our next trip.
• We are incredibly lucky. It snowed 2 feet in Washington 2 hours after we left the area, never snowed a flake in NYC while we were there, and tomorrow they're calling for 18 inches in NYC. Go us!

Yellow cab, gypsy cab, dollar cab, holla back | Sunday & Monday

Sunday

Sunday was our appointed touristy day. We made reservations for a bus tour around Midtown and Downtown. It was very cool! You get on the tour bus at Times Square and then it goes all around the city, stopping at different places. You can hop off at any of the stops and then when you're done, you just head back to the bus stop you got off at and continue the tour with a new bus! Very smart! Our tour went to the following places:

• Times Square
• Greenwich Village
• Empire State Building
• Union Square
• SoHo
• Chinatown
• Little Italy
• East Village
• Rockefeller Center
• World Trade Center Site
• United Nations

So, we started the tour and then hopped off at Little Italy for lunch. We had the most incredible lunch ever. The only time I've ever had better Italian was in Italy. Brian had spaghetti and meatballs and I had eggplant parmesan. It was the real-deal-Italian!

When we got back on the bus, we made it around to the United Nations and then hopped off so that we could walk up to Grand Central Station. The G.C. is very cool in that old school way that just makes train stations so romanticized. A few months ago we watched a History Channel special on Grand Central, so it was very cool to see what we had watched on the show.

As we were heading back to the bus stop, we came across a cool coffee shop: Aroma Espresso Bar, where we sat and chilled for a while. One hot chocolate and one mocha later, we finished our tour and then took the subway to one of the areas around NYU to a nice little bookstore: Shakespeare & Co. We spent a lot of time there decompressing and flipping through books.

Afterward, we went back to Times Square and found an Irish Pub to eat dinner and watch the Super Bowl. Our dinner was fair and the bar scene was completely lame, so we decided to go to a free improv comedy show that I had come across in one of the books I read at the bookstore. The show was the Upright Citizens Brigade and it was supposed to start at 9:30 p.m. and we were supposed to get there at 8:15 p.m. to get free tickets. Well, for some reason, they weren't doing a 9:30 show, but we were able to go in to the 7:30 show that was already in progress and watch the rest of it. We got there around 8:05 and then saw about 2 hours of the show, so I really don't think we missed much and it was FREE! It was incredibly offensive, perverted, and over the top, so, naturally, we loved it! We laughed so hard. I highly recommend it if you're not one to get offended.

After the show, we were tired and it was cold, so we decided to splurge and take a cab back from Manhattan to our hotel. It was about $35, including the tip, so it was expensive, but completely worth it!

Monday

Monday was basically a driving day, but we weren't in too much of a hurry to get back (we picked Gatsby up Tuesday after work), so we slept late and then headed out to find a good pizza place for lunch. We ended up at Nick's Pizza in Queens. It was very, very good and the area in Queens was really cool. We were able to get half the pizza my way and half Brian's way and each ended up bringing home two slices, so it was very excellent to get two meals out of it!

After lunch, we drove through Manhattan so that we could see Central Park West and Harlem and then The Bronx (so that we could hit up all five boroughs). There were SO MANY dog walkers out in CPW. It was sooo funny. If I was rich and lived in NYC, I would definitely be a CPW kinda girl. Gatsby is absolutely a CPW kinda doggie!

After that, it was pretty much just driving until we got to Baltimore and D.C. where it was pretty much just driving with 5 feet snow walls lining the roads! :-)

We ate dinner at the Max and Erma's in Richmond (one of our favorite Ohio restaurants) and then got back to Knightdale around 11 p.m.

These streets will make you feel brand new | Saturday

OR POOR! ;-)

Saturday

Saturday was our shopping day!!! It was also supposed to snow 3-5 inches in the city. We shopped, but, thankfully, it didn't snow! In fact, we didn't see one single flake descend from the heavens the entire trip!!

We woke up Saturday morning, got ready, and headed to Fifth Avenue. We came up out of the subway right by Central Park and the Plaza. Very, very pretty and cool. We started out at the Apple Store, which is basically like every other Apple Store, except it's very I.M. Pei-like with the huge clear cube and an elevator descent into the store.

After Apple, we went to FAO Schwarz. Brian wasn't really psyched about the FAO until he realized that they have a huge, yummy candy section! ;-) I just loved walking through and looking at all the toys. It kinda made me wish that we had a kid to buy for, until I realized that we wouldn't be able to afford to go to NYC if we had a kid, so that feeling passed pretty quickly. ;-) While there, they were having a big sale on holiday-inspired Madame Alexander dolls (of which I have collected since I was a very wee tot!) so I was able to score a cute Raggedy Andy doll for $15! I would have rather had Raggedy Ann, but I guess all the other little girls in America would rather have Raggedy Ann too, so there weren't any left!

After FAO, we found the promised land: Tiffany & Co., Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci, and Saks. I found a beautiful pair of $1,200 boots in Gucci that Brian wouldn't let me get. He said something about it being comparable to a mortgage payment, but I didn't really hear him... After that, I was jaded. We walked into Nine West and those shoes looked like crap to me. Ironically, I was wearing shoes from Kohl's, so it's not like I'm really a big spender when it comes to shoes! It's amazing how when you see something that's made really, really well, the others just don't compare. It's probably a good thing that I didn't try them on because they were totally prêt-a-porter and I was prêt to porter them! :-D

We had lunch at a little grille in Trump Tower and it was INCREDIBLE. I had a smoked salmon salad and Brian had a BBQ brisket sandwich. Mad props to Mr. Trump!

After lunch, we hit up a five floor Nike store, Nintendo World, and American Girl Place. I just had to see AGP. All those little girls with their dolls were so cute! Brian's mouth actually dropped when I pointed out to him that the girls were taking their dolls to the "salon" to get the doll's hair styled. I would have been IN HEAVEN if I had been little. Callie would probably pee in her pants. (She still gets baby dolls for Christmas and has the whole American girl ensemble for Molly.) Our last purchase on Fifth Avenue was at Sephora. I got a nice, subtle lipgloss and bought Callie some BeneTint: Rose-tinted lip and cheek stain. I don't actually know what it is, but that's what she wanted. It looks like a vial of blood. Ironically, the Sephora is in the old Charles Scribner's Sons building, which was the publishing house of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wolfe, et al. Very cool!

After we were done shopping, we went to 30 Rock and took the elevator to the top. We saw some amazing views and then we eventually happened across the building of my company's NYC office, which was very exciting!

After that, we went back to the hotel and then headed out to Long Island for Brian's hockey game. During the game, I went to a mall and did some shopping (for items I could actually afford!) and I'm not going to lie: I was nervous as hell about driving to the mall by myself and not getting lost. Fortunately, driving on Long Island is nothing like driving in the city and our GPS was awesome. It pinpointed the exact gate where I dropped Brian off, so I was able to go back to the exact same place and it took me right to a parking deck in the mall.

It was success for all. I didn't get lost and the Hurricanes won! While at the mall, I was shopping for an outfit to wear out next weekend when I go visit my friends Shannon and Mandy in Charlotte. I found a very cute dress (in blue) at Express and then headed over to Victoria's Secret to get a strapless bra. While I was there, I FINALLY got around to get my bra fitting done that I'd been wanting to do for forever and I got a bra that I'd been thinking about getting: the BioFit 7-Way, which is very awesome. It's designed to be able to be worn with seven types of tops (strapless, classic, halter, one-strap, crisscross, v-front, and crossback). As you can see, very exciting! BTW, I totally look like the chick on that Web page when I put it on. It's THAT good. ;-) I also got a new body spray: Coconut Passion! Even Brian likes it!

After the game, I picked Brian up and we went to a diner on Long Island with two of Brian's roadgeek friends (Doug and Steve) who Brian ran into at the game. Our diner dinner was very good and the diner was really nice!

Afterward, we kinda wanted to drive around for a bit so we decided to drive over to New Jersey to get gas (which is a heck of a lot cheaper than gas in New York). As an added bonus, it's illegal to pump your own gas in NJ, so Brian didn't have to get out into the freezing cold! We also drove a lot around Manhattan--down to Grand Central Station and all over the place. It was like 1:30 in the morning, but you would have thought it was 9:30 at night! Fortunately, there wasn't much traffic, so it was a great time to drive around!

One hand in the air for the big city | Thursday & Friday

So we survived New York without getting lost, mugged, or pushed in front of a subway train! Haha!

Pictures from our trip are up on Facebook; they should be visible to everyone!

Thursday Night and Friday

I left work on Thursday and headed straight to Lowe's Foods to pick up some granola bars and soft drinks for our cooler (I am the granola bar queen on trips!). When Brian got home, we quickly got the car loaded and headed out. (Brian had taken Gatsby to Suite Paws Thursday morning before work.) We had decided that we would eat dinner at the IHOP in Knightdale because it's close by, good, and usually quick. Well, Thursday night it was good, but not quick. We got stuck with chick who was working her first week at the IHOP and she took for-freaking-ever. I'm not kidding. It took us an HOUR AND A HALF to eat dinner. All we could do was sit back, laugh, and enjoy the lengthy dinner. It was pretty hilarious considering we were driving to Baltimore.

As we left the restaurant, Brian realized that he had left his phone at home, so we had to swing by the house to pick it up. Helluva portent for our trip!! :-) The rest of the drive was very uneventful. We basically just blasted the iPod through most of North Carolina and Virginia until we got into the listening area for WTOP (our favorite FM newsradio station in D.C.).

Our hotel in Baltimore was really cool. It was just a Holiday Inn Express, but it was in an old bank building from the early 1920s. The building had been completely redone, but they kept a lot of the architecture from the original building. It still had the vault and the old elevator shaft visible. One of the hotel employees told me at breakfast that the bank was the only bank in Baltimore to survive the Great Depression.

Friday morning we got up around 9 a.m. to leave the area before the snowpocalypse arrived. We headed to Philly to get cheesesteaks. Well, Brian had a cheesesteak and I had a chicken philly (yes, I forsook my pescetarian diet twice on this trip!). We went to this place called Jim's Steaks and it was pretty good. It came as a recommendation from one of Brian's coworkers; we were trying to avoid the super touristy cheesesteak places because those places typically only have cheesesteaks and I really didn't want to eat beef.

After lunch, we were NYC bound! Oh yeah, and we screwed the state of Delaware by hopping off the interstate before the toll plaza and then getting back on an exit later. Power to the people! We had some traffic coming into the city, but really not too bad for a Friday afternoon. We got to our hotel (another Holiday Inn Express, in Queens) and checked in. Our room was on the first floor, which is actually like the basement. We walked in and there was an A/C unit in the window and I was bummed. Brian was also bummed. So he went back to the front desk and we were able to switch rooms to the third floor. I felt a lot safer being off the ground and our new room had so much more sunlight and a stunning view of the Long Island Expressway! ;-)

After we decompressed for a bit, we got dressed up and caught the (free!) shuttle from our hotel to the subway station, which we took directly to Times Square. We went to the TKTS booth and bought tickets for the off-Broadway show Newsical: The Musical. We only had about an hour before the show started, so we decided to hit up a deli that was down the street from our theatre. I had some huge avocado, cucumber, sprouts, carrots wrap-deal and Brian had an Italian sandwich. Both of them were HUGE; neither of us could finish our meals.

We got to the theatre and we were the first ones there! We were kind worried that maybe it was going to suck because the theatre wasn't too big and no one was there yet, but pretty quickly thereafter it started to fill up and the show was HILARIOUS. It was so funny. It spoofed current events as a musical and we were laughing so hard! (Our favorite was "Hillary Clinton" singing "Who the Hell is Barack?")

After the show, we went back to Times Square and had dessert at ESPN Zone. Really yummy and we got to catch the end of the Canes/Sabres game!

Then we took the subway back to our hotel and waited out in the freezing cold for 15 minutes for the hotel shuttle to pick us up! :-)