2007 December 31 | Suzanne Earley

Most of the time I like living in a small town. Really, I do.

Today is not one of those times.

Our post office was apparently only open from 8:30 to 10:30 this morning. Not only did I have book orders to mail, but they’ve been holding our mail for the past week, and I’d dearly love to know what is sitting there waiting for me.

I was so annoyed that it was closed that I drove all the way home and was inside the house before I remembered that I wanted to go to the Pharmacy to get some Sudafed.

I hauled my cookies back out to the car and back downtown only to discover that the pharmacy was closed, too.

Moving on:

I can’t decide which of these two pictures I like better:

This is my adorable nephew Colin. We were watching Mark, Will, and Joe skate in Central Park.

Colin is such a sweetheart. He’s sporting a hat that his Gramma Reed (my mom) knit for him. He calls me Aunt Suzy and says “Suzy” in a way that I wish I could reproduce so you could understand just how cute it is coming out of his mouth. He mimics everything. If you ask him to say something, he’ll try. It’s pretty funny to listen to him. My boys didn’t talk as much (or as early). He shares a nanny with a little girl that is 6 months older than he is, which I suspect has had an impact on his early language skills. I wish he lived closer so I could spoil him more. I will get to see him (and spoil him) again in another 6 or 8 weeks — after his little sister arrives!

TTFN-

Our flight out of Newark was fine. Our flight out of Minneapolis was 2 hours late, so we ended up with a 6 hour layover. We could have rented a car and been home before our plane even left. Oh well. We made it. The luggage made it. The dog was happy to see us. And it was nice to sleep in our own beds.

Unfortunately, I wound up with another cold, and my head feels like it is going to explode again. Flying with congestion is not recommended.

I’m not sure how many vacation pictures I’ll share, but I’ve started going through what we took and thought I’d share a few. These will probably end up being completely out of order

Our list of Things We Really Wanted To Do in New York City included a trip to the Statue of Liberty. We ended up doing that on Wednesday, which, ironically, was the day that had the worst weather. We could barely see Manhattan from the Statue. And it drizzled on us most of the day.

Couple of things I wasn’t expecting: first off, technically Liberty Island is “in” New Jersey. Second, she wasn’t nearly as big as I was expecting. Don’t get me wrong: she’s big, and she’s pretty amazing, but…not as big as I thought she was from seeing her in movies and in pictures.

We did get to go up into the pedestal (visitors are no longer allowed to go up into the Statue itself: after 9/11 they started enforcing fire code, which would have made it nearly impossible for anyone to go up, so they just stopped letting people up at all. Prior to 9/11, they would let something like 300 people up at a time, fire code would have limited it to 5 people an hour.)

It was still a pretty impressive view (even with the mist and fog) and they have a nice museum inside the pedestal.

One of the things you see is this replica of her face:

This is probably sacrilegious, but you do know what the next picture is, right?

I mean honestly, how can you expect two 8 year old boys NOT to put their heads up her nose?

I can’t remember how long we had to wait to actually get into the pedestal/museum. It wasn’t so much the quantity of people as it was the security check. We had had to go through security in order to get on the ferry, but this was an additional security check which included a machine that checked for explosives.

We did go to Ellis Island, but didn’t spend much time there. The boys were completely uninterested, and we didn’t want to miss our assigned time for the trip to the Statue.

And even though the weather was a little bit yuck, we were glad we took the time to go see Lady Liberty.