Boo!!

Okay, I’ll admit the title of this post is sooooooo lame, unfortunately I can’t do any better I’m overworked and lacking inspiration. Nine days to my hols and counting!! Whoo hoo!!!

So, a happy Halloween to you, I hope, unlike me, you’re going to do something fun tonight. I've been debating the merits of stopping by the Halloween parade in the village this evening, but quite frankly I don’t think I can be arsed. I’ve not been sleeping well this week so I’m in too crabby a mood to deal with the crowds, however if you are ever in New York on Halloween and of a sunnier disposition than I am at this moment then I definitely recommend stopping by to see it, it's a great parade. In fact, even better, you could join in, since this particular parade, unlike most of the others in the city, is a free for all. Absolutely ANYONE can join in as long as they’re in costume; you just have to turn up at the staging area at 6th Ave. and Spring St between 6.30pm and 8pm and as long as you’re all gussied up you’re in.

I did it myself a few years back; I joined a friend and a gaggle of her friends as a 1960s Tom Jones groupie – a very easy costume, mini dress, boots, big hair and Dusty Springfield style make up. We screamed and danced along in the parade behind ‘Tom’ – the husband of one of the women who was the spit of the Welsh singing sensation – throwing our knickers at him – we each had multiple pairs of lacy ones attached by elastic to our wrists - as he lip synched to Tom’s hits in his best Tom Jones costume - tight black trousers, shirt open to his navel and a glistening gold medallion resplendent on a rug of fake chest hair. He had the groin thrusting down pat. It was a very fun night and I’d say that if you can actually get your act together to be in the parade, it’s a much better way to enjoy the festivities since you don’t have to deal with the jostling crowds of spectators.

Of course festivities aren’t just restricted to the parade; there’ll be people in fancy dress all over town this evening and there were a lot interestingly dressed people on the subway this morning, many looking like they were half in costume already. I was trying to work out whether the woman next to me – in vivid orange skirt and matching tights – was making a fashion statement, or whether her outfit formed the basis of some pumpkin themed costume she’d be wearing later on. Whatever the reason it was an outfit that was a tad too bright for my bleary sleep deprived eyes at 7.30am in the morning. I also heard on the radio that dressing as Amy Winehouse is expected to be a popular choice this year - it was all about pirates last year - so I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for beehives on the way home. In the meantime i've nabbed some pics of Halloween 2006 from NewYorkDailyPhoto - a blog I love to bits - for your viewing pleasure. If you are interested in seeing more photos I highly recommend checking out NYDP's Flickr site here. It's fab!! Have a good one!!

The Mating Game

This post probably isn't what you thought it might be about given its title - although I am still playing the mating game with ol' teetotal, chick flick loving Tel Aviv - TCFLTA for short - I just haven't gotten around to writing about it yet, despite his many 'when are you going to blog about ME?' requests. Soon Tel Aviv, soon :-)

Instead this post is a bit of a plug for the band Bitter:Sweet. Not that they need it I'm sure, their music has been everywhere this past year. If you live in America and watch even the smallest amount of TV I don't see how you could have missed them, especially if you watch Grey's Anatomy.

Right now their song, Dirty Laundry, is being used - yet again - to promote 'Samantha Who', a cute wee TV show I'm trying on for size at the moment. I'm quite liking it.

Bitter: Sweet are a fabulous band, I love the whole slinky sound they have going on. For a while they were my band of choice for music to dance around my bedroom. They don't perform in NY very often, they're LA based, although I saw them at Joe's Pub back in February when my gorgeous gay hub - and Andersen Cooper looky likey - Miles was over for a Valentines visit. The lead singer has that whole sexy chanteuse thing going on. Miles and I had quite the girl crush on her. If you've never heard of them I hope you enjoy 'the mating game'.

Longing for a Pisco Sour

Phew, it’s been a tough week. There just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day to get everything done at the moment. I’m working furiously to get through everything before I go off on my hols to Chile in a couple of weeks, but my ‘to do’ list keeps getting longer.

It’s my own fault. I made the mistake of warning people that I’ll be out on holiday in a little over 2weeks so now people are stopping by my desk, smiling sweetly at me and asking, ‘oh but could you just do this project before you go?’

I need to learn how to keep my big mouth shut!!

Unfortunately the whole department is swamped with work at the moment, since, on the plus side, we’ve been fortunate enough to have already met our financial targets for the year. Unfortunately the picture is not so rosy company wide, so there’s a hiring freeze, a company wide hiring freeze, which means our department’s had to absorb a lot of the additional work and hold off on recruiting new staff. It’s not been the most popular decision I can tell you. The team has been slaving away morning noon and night and morale is at an all time low. There’s only so long people will put up with working until 10pm everyday.

I raised the morale issue to my manager at our status this week, and he in turn raised it to our head of department at the directors meeting later the same day. My manager suggested arranging team drinks as a thank you for everyone’s hard work. Unfortunately our head of department was extremely reluctant, saying he felt it was inappropriate when the rest of the company is not doing well. He then went on to brush off the heavy workload as temporary, saying, “I’m sure it will only be for a few more months.”

A FEW MORE MONTHS!!!

Ha! Take us for granted much!!

So, let me get this straight, we’ve beaten our revenue target for 2007 by 20%, got the extra work done, despite being 6 people down, and he won’t even take the team out for a beer? Meanwhile, across the hall, his co-head of department seemingly finds the money to whisk his group – albeit a smaller team - out for dinner and karaoke shindigs!! Hmph!!

I was ready to jump across the table and give him a slap in the director’s meeting, but reminded myself I have a vacation to pay for and Christmas presents to buy, so I restrained myself, but I was fuming at his attitude. The man is an idiot!!!

Why is it that senior managers in marketing agencies never think to apply their marketing expertise to the experiences of their staff? They’re always pontificating to clients about how it costs 5times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one, but do they apply that to their own staff? No, of course they bloody don’t. It would certainly cost his nibs a lot more in recruitment fees to replace even one of the most junior staff members, than it would to buy an appreciatory round of drinks for the whole department, a small, relatively inexpensive gesture which would go a long way in boosting the morale of the team.

Whatever! It would serve him right if everyone quit.

On top of work stress I'm also starting to get a little freaked out this week about the fact that done precisely bugger all to prepare for my upcoming trip to Chile in exactly 2weeks, something that I'd pushed to the back of my mind until an email from Melissa – my travel buddy – landed in my inbox this week.

We booked our flight to Chile about 3months ago and it's a trip I've been interested in ever since I was bitten by the South America bug following a trip to Buenos Aires in 2004. By the way if you’ve never been to Buenos Aires I can’t recommend it enough. It’s a gorgeous city, it’s inexpensive and the people are lovely, although of course they had their fun with me ribbing me about Las Malvinas and Diego Maradona and the hand of God from England vs. Argentina game of the 1986 world cup.

Unfortunately flights to Chile weren't quite as cheap as they were to Argentina, in the vicinity of $1200 over the last few years, and I’d sort of given up on going any time soon, but then something made me look again this year and would you believe it, we got a flight for $680. It was so cheap by comparison to previous years that it made me a bit suspicious, but all seems above board, so I guess we just got lucky.

As part of the trip we’ve been investigating popping down to Patagonia to see the Magellanic penguins and what not, but when we looked into booking the 3hour flight from Santiago to Punta Arenas – apparently the world’s southern most city – it was close to $700. Yes, more expensive than the flight from New York!!! It turns out that you can get cheaper flights, but you tend to have to be in Chile to do it, so we’d resigned ourselves to sorting it out when we arrived in Santiago. That is until Melissa sent me an email on Tuesday saying she thought she’d found a travel agent in Chile that would allow us to book online in the US and the flight would be $300!! Happily we booked it yesterday, which kick started my excitement for the trip. I’ve started trying to refresh my memory of the 2years of Spanish I took in high school, oh a mere 18years ago. Re-learn Spanish in two weeks, that's feasible right?

Last night I set about looking for a hotel room in Punta Arenas…and um….oopsie….no rooms available!! It’s high season and Patagonia is BOOKED!!!

Bollocks!!

It looks like we may well have to resort to camping out with the penguins. Hmmm these chicks look nice and fluffy, do you think they'd make a nice pillow? :-)

Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade

I've been a little bogged down with work this week and haven't had much time to blog, but ,like many places, New York is in full on Halloween mode at the moment and this Saturday sees the 16th Annual Halloween Dog Parade held in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village.

I've never been before, but it looks like a fun event, so I'm going to try and stop by and check out the dogs in their costumed glory. The short video above is of last year's event. Enjoy!!

The joys of travel

So, no need to pop down and give the bull a tickle for Kim after all. She gave birth to a 7lb 10oz - as yet unnamed - baby boy yesterday. I got the news via text last night when I landed back in NY after my 3day business trip to Florida. I'm looking forward to meeting the little fella when I'm back in England for Christmas in a couple of months time. Speaking of which, can you believe my sister emailed me this week to ask if there's anything in particular I'd like for Christmas? Um....hello, it's still OCTOBER!!!! Honestly!

The business trip went well, although I am happy to be back in New York. We were all a bit worried that we might get stuck down there an extra day, due to the heavy storms that had been forecast for the north east. The weather types seemed very concerned that the storm which caused a freak tornado in Pensacola would travel up to the New York area and cause problems for our flight, but thankfully we dodged that particular bullet and only had a couple of hours delay.

It's hard to believe these days that air travel was ever considered glamorous!! The flight home wasn't too bad, but the flight *to* Florida was not the most fun I've ever had. There were some...um...interesting characters, including the actor Joe Pantoliano - Sopranos, Memento - who I noticed making himself very much at home in the front seat of business class while making my way through to economy. You couldn't miss him in baggage claim at Fort Lauderdale; he was wearing a HUGE stetson. Clearly trying to travel incognito, so that no-one would recognise him ;-)

We also had the full complement of screaming babies - 4 of them, all sat very close to me. I sympathise with the poor little mites I really do, but my God it was quite a cacophony. I almost lost the will to live when they didn't calm down for even a second during the flight. The older guy across the aisle from me dulled the pain by drinking heavily and cranking up the volume on his iPod, occasionally singing along at full volume - Petula Clark's 'downtown' seemed to be a favourite - clearly oblivious to the fact that he was shouting over his headphones. I think even Joey Pants all the way upfront must have heard him roar his drink orders to the flight attendants. And then there was the woman behind me who thought it perfectly acceptable to put her feet up on my armrest so that her toes - not the prettiest - were inches from my face. Um...hello! Manners!! She then huffed and puffed her annoyance when I asked her to move them.

Unbelieveable!!

After that experience on just a 3hour flight I am seriously considering prescription drugs for my 16hour flight down to Chile in a few weeks.

Hoping for a stroke of luck

I’m flying down to Florida with a team of colleagues today to pay another visit to one of my clients. We’re supposed to be participating in all day brainstorming sessions over the next few days to discuss overhauling some of their existing programs, but we’ve just learned that the primary client, the one who we need to approve any changes, can no longer make it, so we're still going, but the value of the trip is a little up in the air right now.

The situation reminds me of the time a team of us flew out to visit a client in Silicon Valley a few years ago. We were presenting the findings of an analysis we’d spent 6months working on with our client and this was our once in a lifetime opportunity to present to her board of directors. We spent weeks preparing only for an emergency board meeting to be scheduled at the eleventh hour. There we were, all ready to go, with our all singing and dancing presentation and instead of presenting to the powers that be, the holders of the purse strings, we flew all the way out to California only to end up presenting to a team of interns.

Some you win… :-)

Preparing for the brainstorming sessions has been intense, but happily I had a lovely and relaxing weekend to soothe my jangled nerves. I stayed at Tel Aviv’s place for much of it, which was very nice. He has a fabulous, airy apartment in the Financial District, right off Wall St. It’s a neighbourhood I never spent much time in until recently, so I'm enjoying the change of scenery. It’s been touted as an up and coming residential area for the past few years now, although I think they may have even been saying that when I first moved to New York in the summer of 2000. That year, on the hunt for a place to live, I saw a gorgeous 2bedroom apartment in that area on John St, for $3,000 a month, which I considered sharing with 2 other potential housemates I’d met online. We were planning to put up a dividing wall to split the large living room and create a 3rd bedroom, a fairly common practise in New York, but we missed out on the apartment and I ended up taking a share in a large place on the Upper East Side instead. The UES apartment was nice, but nowhere near as beautiful as the downtown place which was in a building newly converted from office space to apartments, something that’s happening a lot down there. Tel Aviv’s apartment building used to be a bank and when they did the conversion they retained the black marble lobby. It’s funny when you first walk in as it still has like a bank like feel even though it’s very plush and on my first visit I remember wondering if I’d entered one of the nearby office buildings by mistake.

One of the reasons we missed out on the beautiful apartment in the Financial District back in 2000 was our hesitation about living in that neighbourhood so another apartment hunter with no such qualms beat us to it. My biggest concern was how lonely the area might feel at night, since, like the city of London, it can feel pretty deserted after office hours, bars and restaurants are few and far between, and as for a place to buy groceries? Forget it. There’s nothing down there, so when I pictured myself living down there I saw myself jittery and jumping at my own shadow on the way home from the pub of a weekend evening.

Seven years later I’ve learned that it’s actually pretty hopping down there, well, comparatively hopping to the tumbleweeds I expected. There still isn't much in the way of bars or restaurants, but at least Fresh Direct - the local online grocery store - delivers to the area and there are tons of people walking around, workers, residents and tourists, my God the area is teeming with tourists. They're everywhere, snapping photos outside the Stock Exchange, draping themselves over the statue of Washington or lining up to rub the bronze bollocks of the Wall St bullock in Bowling Green Park. Apparently bullock bollock stroking is purported to bring good luck. Who knew?

There’s no bear on Wall St, only the bull, and I’d previously assumed this had something to do with the bull being the more optimistic of the two symbols of the financial markets, and that traders were likely a sufficiently superstitious bunch to not be too keen to risk a run of financial hardship by the presence of such an ominous symbol, however a quick peek on Wikipedia reveals a more interesting back story…

“The sculpture, however, was not commissioned by the city as a work of public art. Rather, Di Modica created it on his own (at a personal cost of some $360,000) and installed it in December 15, 1989 as "guerrilla art", trucking it to Lower Manhattan and placing it in front of the New York Stock Exchange as a Christmas gift to the people of New York.”

I’m just trying to picture the scene with the artist – in my mind wearing a beret, smock and clutching a paint palette and bearing more than a passing resemblance to Peter Sellers playing Inspector Clouseau – trundling along in a big lorry in the middle of the night on a stealth mission to drop off a 7000lb bronze bull on Broadway :-)

Wikipedia goes on to say…

“The police seized the illegal sculpture and placed it into an impound lot. In response to the public outcry favo(u)ring the sculpture, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation re-installed it several blocks away to its current location in the plaza at Bowling Green where it faces up Broadway”

And they’ve been fondling his testicles ever since

Speaking of luck, my friend Kimberley in London could do with a bit of that at the moment. The baby she’s expecting is more than a week overdue and the delay is driving her crazy. She’s trying every 'old wives cure in the book to try and bring on labour as the alternative is that she'll be induced, something that is apparently more than a little bit painful. Yes…worse than childbirth!!! She’s been eating fresh pineapple, taking hot baths, going for long walks, and engaging in vigorous sex – something she claims is not so easy for a woman of her current dimensions. She’s saving her final weapon - the fiery hot curry - until Wednesday night, so fingers crossed it does the trick. However if the curry doesn’t work and the baby is still a no show by the time I’m back from Florida, I think I’ll pop down to Wall St and give the bull a tickle on Kim’s behalf. You never know ;-)

Top Photo Credit: Rithviks @ Flickr

Above Photo Credit: "Tourists & The Bull" Dahliapics @ Flickr

There’s a spy in our midst

Tel Aviv cottoned on to the fact that I have a blog some time ago. We were having a conversation about whether our jobs were fulfilling – Tel Aviv LOVES his job – and I admitted that my job doesn’t really do it for me. However instead of thinking about retraining to do something else, I focus on using my spare time, limited though that is at the moment, to focus on more fulfilling pursuits.

“Like what,” he asked.
“Well I like to write and I salsa dance.”
“You write? Do you have a blog?”
“Um…yes I do”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s all about me” I responded with a laugh.
“Can I read it?”
“Not just yet. I’ll let you read it when I know you better.”
“Am I in it?”
“Well…sort of. I reference you, but not really. I don’t tend to talk about who I am dating, so at best you’re a peripheral character”
“Peripheral? But I WANT you to write about ME”
“Oh!”

Not the reaction I was expecting. In fact I’ve generally been led to believe by various bits of dating advice that letting the cat out of the bag about your blog is the kiss of death to most relationships, clearly not in Tel Aviv’s case.

That conversation occurred about a month ago and since then there’s been an occasional request from Tel Aviv to see my blog, but I’ve always batted his requests away and told him I’d share the link with him when I was good and ready. He changed tack recently and asked if I would at least share something I’d written with him. I kind of suspected where this was heading, but this week I pasted a copy of a post into an email and sent it to him.

Today I was looking at the Google Analytics tracking of my blog and noticed a visitor who searched on the term:

"I've been biting my tongue and trying to be patient, but i was definitely getting bored of"

A line from my very first post, the very same post I emailed to a certain someone earlier this week. This same visitor spent a whopping 37minutes reading my blog.

Hmmmm. How very curious. Who on earth could it be?

Tel Aviv you are SOOOOOO BUSTED!!!

Although I can’t say I didn’t totally expect he’d resort to these sneaky tactics. I would have done the same. Good thing I’ve switched on the comments moderation ;-)