What weekend?

After I finished work last Thursday, I hopped a train back to NJ to visit the folks. Surprisingly, it went very well and I was back in NY on Friday afternoon before Josh got out of work. That night, we had dinner at Shore., a New England style restaurant. It was good find, especially in TriBeCa, where nothing comes cheap. I highly recommend the raw bar and their salads.

Unfortunately, Josh's grandmother passed away this weekend, so we were quite busy on Saturday in Brooklyn. We squeezed in a visit to my cousins, where Josh lightened his mood by playing with my younger cousins and their blocks. After we were stuffed full of food, we went back to Manhattan to catch a late showing of Mr. & Mrs. Smith. It was good enough to almost make me forget about the NYC movie ticket prices.

On Sunday, we went back to NJ to help out Josh's mom for the funeral. I worried about Morty and Eli quite a bit - of course. This was the first time I'd gone away without hiring a sitter. Then again, I'd only be away for a day.

The funeral was on Monday, followed by food at Josh's house. My brother was nice and gave us a ride to the train station in New Brunswick. After we got back to Manhattan, we decided to go out and enjoy the last of our so-called weekend by walking around in SoHo for a bit. We did a bit of shopping and then had dinner at Penang. I'm very fond of Penang and ate at the Edison, NJ location several times. This was a watered-down version of Penang. The menu was definitely more expensive and lacked several items (that I remember). The service was horrible and inflexible. I asked for them not to include something in a dish and the waiter said they could not separate the items, which was strange because I'd never had a problem with it before. When I got the dish, the offensive item was sprinkled on the top.

Yesterday, I was a little exhausted with the non-weekend we had, so I went out to ONY with my coworker and we had some good ramen. We followed that up with some shopping before heading back to the office. I decided to cheer up Josh by bringing him to Gray's Papaya, because strangely, he's never been there before. We had their special: 2 hot dogs and a drink for $2.75 and it was very tasty. True, it's not the best hot dog in the world, but when it's $0.75 apiece with great service, you really can't argue. Afterwards, we walked around in the Village for a while, walking past the huge line outside of Magnolia. Before we went home, we each had a slice of pizza from Famous Joe's Pizza, as seen in Spiderman 2. Apparently, Ben Affleck thinks it's pretty good too.

I have to agree with Ben - it is good.

Books acquired today: 1
Books amassed: 35