New York Retrospective and Cockroaches

Hello again! My husband and I have been nearly going nuts with stress these days. He's on the phone right now asking about assisted living for a family member, and we STILL don't know whether my mother-in-law has cancer or not - her biopsy came back inconclusive at Duke, so we're waiting a month then going back to try again. Apparently her steroids she takes for her muscular disease masked the results of the biopsy. Argh! We are getting to know the Duke area very well.

When we're not sorting through family drama, we're working overtime at our new office. My hubby is an immigration lawyer and we're doing our darndest to get a solid business in place as quickly as possible. Might I add at this point that I despise insurance companies.

In the middle of all of this, I've been thinking back on my daily grind in New York. We miss walking at night in the city because everything is all lit up and crowded, so any old time we wanted to stretch our legs we could do it. Now when we go out for a night-time stroll, it's DARK with plenty of rustling bushes. I feel like we're little kids going out on an adventure with a flashlight. Before leaving NYC, I took some pictures of my morning commute. Here is a morning-in-the-life-of-moi while living in NYC:


This was my street...(if you kept walking several blocks on that street you'd run into the Guggenheim Museum!)

Here is the bus I used to get to the subway (I was lazy, yes it's true).


I had to get on the 4/5 train then transfer to the shuttle train at Grand Central. I was scared I would be arrested as a terrorist for taking pictures on the subway. I seem to have gotten away with it though...


Then magically pop-up in Times Square! Tourists love to go there and stand and stare at the signs. It was a pain in the behonkus to get around them to get into my building, which fortunately was just around the corner from the subway.


Once at my desk, I would dig into my highly therapeutic breakfast of honey bunches of oats with my anthropologie cup and hello kitty spoon. Breakfast of champions!

I hope soon I will have a routine here at our new home. It seems everything is still either in boxes or piles on the floor, so pictures of the actual apartment will have to wait. I am extremely freaked out about giant water bugs, e.i. COCKROACHES that keep wandering into our home. My husband often marvels that I am not scared of anything, so he finds this hilarious. I just feel so guilty killing them, like I'm some big powerful freak who demands that no other living thing can share space with me. Then reality sets in and I see that I'm sharing space with a cockroach. I tried bashing one to death with a small trashcan, and boy do those things have armor! They are like little marching tanks coming in to look for provisions. The aforementioned unfortunate cockroach that met with the business end of my trashcan managed to stay alive and crawl pitifully to the wall. It was like watching a wounded soldier in battle. Do they make have-a-heart traps for roaches? I don't think my neighbors would take kindly to me establishing a catch-and-release policy for roaches though.

As my husband said last night, we're in the jungle now! Then he questioned my sanity when I started quoting Axel Rose. I shall keep you updated on the roach battlefront. Mind you, I didn't even mention the spiders and smaller bugs. HELP!