Square dancing is seriously bigtime Saturday night fun, ’round these parts.

And it was seriously fun, even though our square was a hot mess. Now that we know our ‘allemande’ from our ‘do sa do‘ we’ll be ready to move on to more advanced moves.

I’ve been sitting on this footage long enough.

When we were on vacation in Istanbul last Winter the majority of our evenings were spent in our cute little hotel room shooting the breeze and enjoying a light (second) dinner of cheese, wine and halvah. Me, my Mom and her BFF Sally together on a grand international adventure (a good deal of which was spent in our cute hotel room enjoying wine, cheese etc).

I’ve shot and posted family fun before, but sometime between then and now my Mom decided she didn’t want to be featured on the blog any more. She never really explained why no matter how many times I asked. I guess it’s just too strange to her– too personal.

For me, it’s different. The more personal the better. We didn’t take family movies when I was young, so to me capturing these moments is like a special gift. I get to keep them forever, living them again and again as I choose. Granted, I don’t re-watch 85% of the videos that I post.

But this one? This one falls into that remaining 15%. I’ve watched it ten times in the last hour already. It’s special to me, and it’s mine.

Sorry, Mom. I had to do it. I couldn’t help it. I think it’s just too dear to keep to myself.

The only thing less interesting than watching grass grow is watching it get cut, unless you grew up in the city and never mowed a lawn in your life. THEN it’s pretty damn exciting!

Brian is in charge of lawncare (and by “lawncare” I mean just mowing because it’s not like we’re fertilizing or watering or anything), but I’m home more often so I needed to learn how to use the mower. The front gets really scraggly after a couple of days, and luckily it’s flat and I can manage it. This is the side yard, there’s a little more to mow in front of the house, too. I’m thinking of planting a bunch or stuff there so there’s less to mow. The back yard is simply too hilly for me to even think about mowing. Brian can do it, but I’m too scared that the mower will slip back and slice off all my toes.

I have no grace with the lawnmower, no rhythm and basically no skills.

I can barely start the damn thing.

The day started off great! Birthday party, face-painting, pizza and good friends. Then it took an ugly turn.

The party was on Long Island and we were driving home upstate from there. We knew we had the Belmont Stakes, a Yankees game and just plain ‘Saturday’ to contend with traffic-wise, and because of that and the fact that we had my entire record collection and a whole mess of baby tomato plants in the bed of the truck on a 90F day, we knew we had to hit the road early.

But something went wrong. We zigged when we should have zagged and after a spell I looked out the window and saw water. We were deep South instead of Way North. We got off the highway but couldn’t get back on and ended up driving through the whole of Brooklyn– all of it, no really ALL OF IT from Canarsie through Kings Plaza, Midwood, Prospect Park, Park slope, Fort Green and Williamsburg– via Flatbush Ave. On a Saturday afternoon.

You may have to be a New Yorker to appreciate how awful that really is. If you’re not, here’s a visual:

The drivers were complete maniacs, we got cut off from the right at literally every block. The traffic getting past the GWB and Yankee Stadium was insane. We left the party at 2:30 and didn’t get out of the damn city ’till about 5:30.

We didn’t get home ’till 8:30.

We were broken.

So we broke out the champagne we’d been saving for a rainy day.

(it was also raining)

The Pizza of Your (wildly hung over) Dreams, originally uploaded by missbhavens.

Behold the wonderous Philly Cheesesteak Pizza from Hogan’s Almost Famous Pizza! Layer for layer: crust, mozz, that delightful paper-thin Steak-Umm stuff that Brian calls “scrambled meat”, golden sauteed onions, yello cheez. Insane. The thing weighs like ten pounds.

Polished this puppy off this morning. A slice for lunch yesterday, two for dinner. Breakfast.

Not sure when I can allow such delicious nonsense to happen again. I just bought two new pairs of jeans and I don’t plan on buying any more this year!

Back in the day, they used to show shorts before Rocky Horror down on 8th Street to get the crowd warmed up. Paradise Garage and Thank You Mask Man were two of my favorites, but there was a third sick & twisted little movie that always made me giggle.

I though of it when I shot this.

Winding down The Plaid Years, thank goodness. Unlike the last journal entries, these are a lot less eventful (that’s probably for the best) and span a large stretch of time. The Plaid Years should really should be called “College: The Early Years”. I took another couple of stabs at it ’till I got it right. Then grad school took a few more stabs, topped off by a second bachelors’ stab. For someone who clearly did not like school, I sure went to school a looooong time.

The most annoying thing about this diary (aside from the fact that by age 19 I’m a mess-and-a-half) is that not only are the pages not pre-printed with dates but I didn’t date them, either! I guess I though that being deliberately vague was really, really cool. I also didn’t name anyone, I just used their initials. Not helpful. When I’m 80 I’ll have no idea who these people are.

I left out the superpathetic sex bits. Plenty of that in my last post. That’s all you get.

Now we are treading in dangerous waters. No life jackets. Pirhanas everywhere. Nibbling. We’re moving on to a new journal. The plaid one. The Plaid Years were…well…plaid. All jumbly and going in several directions at once. Why? Because that’s what being a college freshman is all about. Everyone around you is saying you’re grown up, that you’re an adult, but you’re not by a long shot. What you really are is a 13th grader masquerading as an adult. I’m sure I thought I was a sophisticated Woman of The World, what with my being away at college and all**, but in reality I was just as much of a kid as most of my friends. I slept with a teddy bear and was still having nightmares about The Day After.

I shot video of several journal entries from The Plaid Years, but realized that this one– the first one– should just be out on the loose on its own.

A side note to the Fathers: Yes. It’s true. Your daughters will get older, they will have sex –likely too soon– and it will be a nightmare for you. They might make some questionable choices in spite of the fact that you’ve raised them to be strong, smart young women. You can’t lock them in the basement. Actually, I guess you could lock them in the basement…

Go. Go do it now. Yes. Lock your daughters in the basement. Hurry!

**I was 37 minutes away by commuter rail. Real worldly.

The Unicorn Years: Part Two.**

After a couple of years of writing in dated diaries I became embarrassed by the volume of empty pages when I didn’t write so I took to writing entries in blank books instead. The gaps are still there, just less obvious. That’s why the unicorn book lasted as long as it did. It stretches all the way into March of 1986 - the Spring semester of 11th grade - and it’s still more than half empty. I never could resist starting a new blank book.

There is a huge gap between September of ‘84 through September ‘85. The pages for the entire school year are actually ripped out. I have no idea when I did that, but I do remember why: junior year was excruciating. Academically disastrous, friendships obliterated, loyalties tested, epic scale teen-girl drama. I’m pretty sure my best high school girl friend wrote a play about that year when she was old enough to parse it all. You couldn’t pay me to relive high school, particularly that year.

Now we’re getting into the yucky part of being a teenager. Pain, rejection and parental disapproval.

I really should have stopped listening to The Smiths so much. But how could I? They were speaking directly to me.

**Today there may be a ‘Dear Diary’ two-fer. I’m hoping to cram in VBWeek #3 before I go to work. If not, the whole week will be off by a day.  As you can plainly see from my diary entries regarding school, organization and prioritizing were never my strong suits.

I’ve been away for far too long. Busybusy, not much to report, just busybusy. What better time to get back into the swing than Videoblogging Week? One video a day for seven days. After NaVloPoMo, a week should be easy as pie.

Last year for VBWeek I reviewed some of my favorite good, cheap foods of NYC. This time, it’s personal.

Pretty much every year for as far back as I can remember someone gave me a daily diary as a Christmas gift. Being the pack rat that I am, I still have most of them. I’m not sure what made me think that reading them in public was a good idea but I was inspired by a recent episode of my favorite radio show in which a man read entries from his childhood journals expressing his deep desire to become the prime minister of Israel. It’s what you’d expect from a teenager’s journal: intense, outrageous and touching. It’s also seriously cringeworthy.

I’m expecting a whole lot of cringing going on here, for certain.

I haven’t read all the way through the diaries and don’t know what embarrassment is in store; it could be really bad so this little project may end abruptly. I can always go back to good, cheap eats, right?

Let’s start with 1983-1984, the years documented in the journal with a unicorn on the cover. From what I can recall, those were very good years. The unicorn years.