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...or so I thought. I must apologize to my friends and family. For a long time now, I genuinely thought people had stopped reading my blog because I stopped receiving comments. As it turns out — in the continuing saga of comments related issues — at some point my Entourage decided to start classifying your responses as junk mail. From now on, I'm going to monitor comments manually.
Thanks for the responses and keep them coming. I'll be posting them from now on.
After what seems like an eternity, Beth took a giant leap toward completing her doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology. With her last year of class work about to wrap up, the only things that stands between her and whatever Dr. Manning jokes I can think of are completing her doctoral thesis and her internship (the equivalent of a residency in medicine). Today, she found out that she will be interning at the Manhattan VA Medical Center, working her way through three rotations in outpatient/ inpatient, health and neuro-psychologies.
She began the process of applying to internships over a year ago and despite all of her hard work, she was never guaranteed a spot. In the final process, both Beth and the institutions she applied to provide a list of their top picks to APPIC and if there's a match, she gets her internship. The whole experience falls somewhere between buying a lottery ticket and rushing a sorority. It's a scarey process but in any case, she's in. Congratulations, Beth!
After moseying around December and January, look who finally decided to show up for the month February. Come on in Winter, sit down, freeze my ass off. Most of February was too cold for it to even snow. So, when things finally warmed up enough last week to dump a few flakey inches, I decided it was time to take Beth out for her first winter hike.
Now I myself am not a particularly avid cold-weather sportsman. I haven’t strapped on a ski in fifteen years and I have only seen snowboards in catalogs. The only time I have ever done any winter camping, it was on the south rim of the Grand Canyon in March. I was so woefully under-equipped for trip, I never did it again. Sometime in the last couple of years, however, I have come to enjoy the peaceful solitude of a winter day hike where, if the weather threatened I could quickly retreat to the cozy comforts of my waiting car.
After a brief re-direction from a Harriman Park Ranger, we finally found a legal parking spot and headed out into the trees. The snow pack was perfect for hiking — deep enough to level the terrain and solid enough to support our weight without skis or snowshoes. We made our way up and over two ridges before finding our way to the frozen edge of Lake Wanoksink (which I promise, is more romantic than the name sounds). Unfortunately and despite sufficient layering, the sun and the wind weren’t on our side. After a couple of hours with dropping temperatures, we headed back under threatening skies. Thank God for car heaters.
Before I let too much time slip away (and it may be debatable that I already have), I wanted to mention our little visitor from last week. Beth's mother, Betty, flew in from California to enjoy our couch and a whirlwind of Broadway shows. My own personal tastes and religious practices demand I abstain from musicals so I missed out on all of the festivities, but from what I gather Beth and her mother had fun. Unfortunately we couldn’t always be there to show Betty around but, considering that this was hardly her first visit to New York, I think she fared allright. Good shows, good food, good company — a good time was had by all. Thanks for the visit, Betty.
For those of you who are in the know, I don't need to tell you that I have become a bit of cheese freak in the last couple of years — and I'm not talking about crap like Velveeta or American Cheese. I'm talking about the real smelly, moldy, snooty stuff from Europe where they are unencumbered by thoughts of pasteurization and olfactory offenses. From a fresh Chévre to a fine cave aged Gruyére, I can't get enough of the stuff. But, that's only half of the story for, you see, I am also an unabashed beer snob. I wouldn't touch Bud or Miller unless I had a gun to my tongue. A name brand for me is Ommegang or Hacker Pschorr.
Well, imagine my ecstasy when I discovered that I could bring these two gastronomical wonders together. This past Christmas, Beth gave me certificate good for one free course at Murray's Cheese — a famous cheese shop here in New York. And what class did I sign up for? Why everyone's favorite, High Altitude Pairings: Cheese and Beers from the Alps of course. Hosted in conjunction with B. United International, a local beer and wine distributor, the class was a blast. The cheese was excellent (Hoch Ybrig is my new favorite cheese) and the beer was unlike anything that I have ever tasted. Everything was exotic, rich and flavorful and, while I may not have agreed with all of the pairings, it was exciting to be exposed to such new and different tastes. I practically popped a taste bud.
Better late than never — or so the saying goes. On Tuesday, my Studio finally got around to having it's annual holiday party. Having worked through the official Ogilvy holiday party toiling away on what would turn out to be a failed business pitch, this was really the only party that most of us got. We gathered at Jadis — our favorite pinkies-out watering hole — for Champaign, wine and foie gras. Hey, if you're going to wait a month for your holiday party, you might as well live it up.
While it's always a pleasure to be in the company of such good friends, this year's gathering had its bittersweet overtones. With a string of bad luck that's plagued Ogilvy over the last couple of years, we've lost a lot of good people in Studio — the most recent being Mike and Lena. For a lot of complex reasons the Studio has been hit pretty hard by agency layoffs, and with dwindling numbers in a group that's so tight it's almost family, that means a lot. Hopefully in time, Ogilvy will get back on its feet and the Studio will follow suit.
