Independence Week

This was a busy week, but luckily included only 2.5 work days for me! The week started out with a fun night with Joy downtown. We met up Monday night after work to eat dinner at a restaurant called Pound & Pence in the financial district. It was like an English Pub...very upscale, though. It was fun and I had a good salad. Afterwards, we walked over to South Street Seaport to the Spiegletent that is there all summer for shows. This was a really cool place! Spiegletents are very old structures from Belgium made of wood and glass that can be taken apart and moved around. One of them is in NYC for the summer. It was very ornate and pretty. Just outside the tent, they have set-up lush couches and hammocks and such...a beer garden of sorts...on the dock overlooking the East River and Brooklyn. It's really pretty down there! We saw a show called La Vie in the Spiegletent. It was very entertaining. It's kind of like Cirque du Soleil, but I thought it was much better than the Cirque shows I've seen. Maybe just because it was a much smaller venue and you could see the acrobatics and facial expressions so well. It was a really fun experience!

On Tuesday, our office was only open 1/2 a day. After I left work, I met up with my high school friend, Ambie, who was in town from L.A. for a few days. We spent a few hours just walking around the city...sat in a cafe, popped in some stores, strolled through the park a bit. Basically, a great afternoon just enjoying the city and nice weather we had that day! It was also fun to catch-up with Ambie after almost 2 years!

Wednesday, the 4th was good. I had hoped to spend some time in the sun, but it was very overcast all day and finally rained some during the late afternoon and evening. I went to a BBQ over in Hoboken, NJ for a few hours with Kristin and some other friends. It was basically a bunch of people from The Journey. The BBQ was at this girl, Rachel's, place...basically a real house with a backyard. So strange to be in a house so close to the city! There were a lot of people there who I hadn't seen in quite some time so that was good. Our group left the party early so we could be in Manhattan to watch the fireworks. We had to watch in the rain...no fun, but it wasn't pouring so it wasn't horrible. Kristin and I actually headed out early from there and missed the big finale because we knew that the lines to get on subways would be horrible afterwards and we wanted to skip that part! It ended up being a fun day though.

I took Friday off to attend one of my NYU classes. I have 5 classes I have to take that are just 2 days over a Friday/Saturday and this was the first of those. This class was on Negotiating. I'm not sure we learned too terribly much, but it was a fun class and I met some nice, interesting people. Our final project was a role-playing situation where we had to negotiate the sale of a venue site for a meeting. That was fun.

Saturday night, I met a few girls...Kristin, Hilary and Brennan for dinner. Brennan goes to my church now...is a Dallas/Baylor girl, but is also close friends with Kristin through some other connections. Kristin and Hilary are good friends at The Journey and I've been around Hilary several times with Kristin. It was fun for the 4 of us girls to hang out. We went to a Mexican restaurant Brennan knew of on the Upper West Side that she promised was "just like Texas". It was really good and a huge restaurant...just like Texas! We had a good time chatting and catching-up.

Today I went to church twice....worked with the elementary kids this morning, then went back tonight to greet and attend the service myself. In between, I walked around a little at a flea market that had gone up on 6th Ave. and decided it was WAY too hot to be outside so I went home and took a nap! It really was ridiculously hot today and made me a little worried for the rest of July and August. I made another weird connection tonight. The girl I was greeting with, Megan, is a Dallas/Baylor girl, but her dad was one of my Accounting professors at Baylor and her brother was my age and in some of my Accounting classes. Once again...small world!