Personal Post: Our trip to Europe, Days 1 & 2 - Drugs Are Not Always My Friend

So! On October 25, we traveled to Europe to be in London for our wedding anniversary, and then Paris for my birthday.  We have never been to Europe together.  Jeff's family traveled extensively, and I lived in London during my late teens/early twenties before I was deported.  Long story.  We were total tourists; had sent me two Rick Steves guides for my birthday. Jeff had one or the other with him at all times, and we weren't afraid to stand on the street going "buh?" as we found our way around.

We flew on Virgin Atlantic.  Since I despise flying, I insisted we book Premium Economy, which is worth EVERY PENNY.  Large leather seats, more legroom, everything free.  If we were drinkers we would have made out like bandits.  It's probably their equivalent to Business Class, which we've never flown.  Also individual tvs and great meals on plates with real utensils. When we boarded, we were offered free champagne, but we chose orange juice instead.  Rather than the red eye, we decided to spend Saturday traveling, leaving around 7 AM and getting in somewhere around 8. Don't ask me--I was so bombed on drugs I could have been in New Jersey.  We checked in at the Windermere Hotel on Warwick Way, south-west London near Victoria Station. The underground looked EXACTLY the way I remembered it.  The entire street was hotels!  This photograph is not mine; it shows the front of the hotel.



Our room was at the very top.  I knew European hotel rooms are tiny, so I reserved a "superior double."  Look at all of that space to luxuriate in!


The door is about a foot away, and there is a teeny shelf called a "desk".

The bathroom had a skylight!!  It felt like the height of luxury.  The one problem was that there were no bars in the shower, so Jeff had to help me in and out.  Our view was of the council housing (in New York, housing projects for the poor) outside.  I smashed into the bed while Jeff went for a walk around the hotel.


Sorry for the blurriness.  You can see the council housing behind the hotel

Jeff's pictures are much sharper; I might have to snag them off Facebook.  Anyway, you can see the council housing behind us.  We're in the tiny rooms on the top.

There was a little restaurant below ground.  Every morning they offered a "full English breakfast": eggs, ham, bacon, sausage, grilled tomato, mushrooms and baked beans.  There was also a little buffet of cereal and fruit salad.  We did mixes of the English breakfast every morning.  Except you couldn't pay me to eat the baked beans.  I ate beans on toast and spaghetti on toast constantly when I lived there.

Our first day, we arranged to meet a friend of Jeff's at a traditional restaurant called Brown's, which has locations all over the place.  We wanted the roast and Yorkshire pudding.  I should warn you now, there are no pictures of food.  We got hopelessly lost, and were extremely late. Andrew, Jeff's friend, was too damned gracious!  I kept insisting they sit next to each other, because it was so loud.  Andrew was so polite, "oh, no, no, you stay right there."

What Andrew didn't know was that I was still drunk from the drugs.  Shortly after this picture was taken, I fell asleep at the table!  Even THEN Andrew insisted I sit between them!  The food wasn't very good.  I wanted the pork roast, which they were out of, so I had chicken. Jeff said his mother made much better Yorkshire pudding. After that we ate at ethnic restaurants or suggestions from the guidebook.


Yours truly, about to faceplant into the Yorkshire pudding

I had to ask Jeff what we did for the rest of the day. He says we went to Covent Garden, which I have no memory of. We walked all day, so I was happy to smash into the bed again. As an American, I'm slightly grossed out by there being a white bottom sheet and a large white duvet with no top sheet. It was the same in both hotels. Why? Especially with the high stain risk?

Glad to finally get this posted!!!!

"Hoarders" - The Play At Home Game

When I was running my vintage clothing business, particularly between 2008-2010, I turned most of our apartment into a storage facility.  I stopped taking pics of the place until a year or two ago.  I had never been a hoarder, but the thrill of the hunt left me with tons of clothing and accessories.  I had too much to photograph and sell.  Every Christmas I hired an assistant.  The right hand living room window was completely blocked off by massive storage bins.  I had three racks of clothing in the gallery, every surface had stuff on it.  I had put together an expensive shelving system, planning to use it as an all-in-one.  But it got covered in more stuff.  All of our closets--except Jeff's--had my clothing in them.

Those of you who've seen my apartment know that by NYC standards, it's huge.  We had a cleaning lady come in every two weeks, so it was somewhat under control.  Mostly she helped me organize the clothing etc. and then cleaned the rest of the place.  We worked with an organizer, but everything kept going back to crap.  Here's some pictures from 2006.



My custom-built shelves.  I used the ironing board to de-lint and pack clothing.  The area on the far right later had bins stacked to the ceiling.



Our living room.  By 2008 huge storage tubs went all the way to Jeff's desk on the left by the window, and the right-hand window was almost completely blocked off.



Our gallery.   It also got way worse. In the back you can see my beloved plus-size mannequin, Bodicea. She was donated last year to the Shirley Chisholm Foundation to be used at a home for at-risk teens.

I sold on Ebay for nearly ten years.  After the economy bottomed out, I was selling at a loss. I closed my store, sold off all of my vintage and donated much of the contemporary stuff, or gave it to plus-sized friends.  I sold up to size 10X in contemporary, as large as I could find in vintage.  I put ads in Craig'sList for free hangers and packing material.  Every piece of bubble wrap that came out of my supply closet HURT.  I've been cleaning and purging off and on since then.

Recently I discovered I'm a paper hoarder.  A month or so ago I had a shredding company take out an industrial size container of paper, and there is still tons more. (Gaahhh...)  BUT!  Our apartment is cleaner than it has been in years.  In fact, it's so clean it makes me a little anxious.


Living room

We had the built-in metal bookshelves moved into the living room, and donated the Ebay shelves to Materials for the Arts. And 85% of the bins, particularly the huge storage tubs with wheels. The Victorian fainting couch belonged to Jeff's mother.  We got it when she moved from Nyack to North Carolina in the 1990s. The armchair and ottoman are also from my mother in law, when she moved from North Carolina to the Ass-End of Nowhere.



Living room facing the gallery.  Above the couch hangs a painting of Pittsburgh by my mom.



The gallery.

My mother painted the ocean scene, which is what you could see from our late lamented beach house.  The gallery is 20 feet long, so you can't get a feel for how large it is. On top of the bookcase is a sculpture that my mother did in the 1940s. The red bag contains my dad's ashes, and the top hat I brought back from London for him.  It's so big that when I put it on, it drops to my nose.


Other side of gallery.

Note marble "cane stand" on the right.  My sister did the painting of our first cats c. 1975.  The antique chest is from my mother.  You can't see it, but on the left is an antique German table that my other sister gave me, and an antique monastery chair (or a good copy) that I got from Sarah Lawrence college while my dad was president.

The rest of the boxes are in a corner of the dining room.  I moved them there before a dinner party for my sister Tessa.  Eleven people, including my mom and the rest of the family.  It was a whopping success. 

Yes, it is an episode of "Hoarders."  We've been in our apartment for many years. But it wasn't until I started the business that things got so out of hand. 

When my brother posts his pictures of the dinner party, I'll put some up so it REALLY is an episode of "Hoarders." 

It's Freezing and My Dog Has Cabin Fever

It is in the single digits here.  I'm thankful that the heat has been fixed! ("Thankfully" is a descriptive term, as in "He received the presents thankfully".)  The apartment is still somewhat cold, but we're not running around screaming as we pull our clothes on! The vet has told me not to take Fletcher out in this weather. 

Which means he's using the wee-wee pads in the bathroom (ugh) and going crazy from lack of exercise.  I play with him for a few minutes, but then he loses interest.  But once I start something, he bats me with his paddle-sized paws.  Right now he's stretched out in the sun.



Oops...as soon as I wrote that, Rupert the cat drove him off the sunlit couch and took it over.  Fletcher is now looking at me pathetically from the other side of the room.

I'm having some trouble concentrating because I haven't taken my meds yet.  Crap on a cracker. Remember, kids, take your medicine or you'll end up sitting slackjawed in front of a computer like me!

What We Did On Our Winter Vacation: Treasure Island, Florida

Sorry, gang, I kept attempting to write this, but I had so many other things to avoid work on I got sidetracked.  Then yesterday I edited pics for my FB album.  I'd made a rough list before we left of what we had done, otherwise it was going to be all a sort of blur with palm trees.  Like a Jimmy Buffett concert.  And don't think we didn't have to listen to a lot of poor bastards singing "Margaritaville" in the ensuing days.

We flew out of Newark, NJ to Tampa airport on Thursday night, December 13th.  As always with planes, I was drugged out of my mind on xanax and some kind of anti-psychotic.  I react very badly to anti-psychotics.  This one caused "heavy sedation". BINGO!  I don't remember a damn thing, although I'm told that while waiting for the plane we ate pizza and cheesecake.  I actually bought a coat specifically to go to and from the airport! It was 50% off, dammit.  Long, cobalt blue, with a fake fur collar and cuffs.  I felt like Ginger Rogers until I took the pills.

We picked the Bilmor Resort and Hotel, specifically because of its cheesy 50s vibe.


(I didn't take this picture, as you can probably tell)

It's on Treasure Island, an island part of the city of St. Petersburg.  The area is mostly a long strip of hotels and bars.  We didn't care, because our main goal was to do lots of lovely nothing.  We achieved our goal. The hotel faced the Gulf of Mexico, and there was the biggest public beach I have seen in years.  It was about half a mile to the water!


(I didn't take this picture, either)

We got another handicapped room, which had a peephole at crotch height, presumably for folks in wheelchairs.  Remember, my crotch is higher than most peoples'.  It was on the first floor at the quiet end of the hotel, and had a back glass sliding door onto a little "porch."  Also a screen door, so we could open the door in the morning and let the breeze in.


Me, the morning after we arrived.  At least I'm not drooling.





Jeff on our "porch"

Every morning this guy had to rake the sand between our hotel walk and the slight rise to the palm trees.  Every single morning, he came out with a rake, raked the sand sideways, and then in perfect lines perpendicular to the walkway.  After five minutes people would come out of their rooms and wreck it.  One morning Jeff gave the raker $10.  The man was flabbergasted.

Honestly, we were both exhausted and emotionally spent.  The temperature was in the 70s, not as hot as Jeff wanted.  But back home it was 21 degrees and stormy, which made him feel better.  It was so wonderfully luxurious to lounge in those white sheets, no deadlines, no animals, no anything.  We'd agreed not to talk about anything.  And I do mean anything.  Just be in the moment and enjoy ourselves.  This worked beautifully.  The trip was more romantic than I could have dreamt, but if you think you're getting any details, don't worry. 

Jeff spent hours on the "porch", reading.  We didn't have a computer and our cellphones were packed away.  Bliss.

We had bought breakfast food to eat in the room, but Jeff had a craving for Waffle House.  It always hits him when we go anywhere near down South.  We walked through an uber-touristy area called Johns Pass.  Every other store had a name like Tiki Surf Shop, Seashell Jewels by Nyota, or Shore Clothtique (I kid you not).  The bars were often either tiki or mariner themed.  One nearby was named It's Five O' Clock Somewhere!. 

Most nights we ate at the hotel restaurant, Sloppy Joes, where we watched the other patrons get sloppy drunk.  The food was excellent.  Almost all of the fish was fresh.  I will never like fish tacos--they are a food abomination--but Jeff loved them and ordered them at almost every meal.  Sloppy Joe was represented by a picture of Ernest Hemingway, which I never understood.  The patrons were probably all too illiterate to know who Hemingway is. ("Is that the guy with a million cats around his house or something?")


"Wasting away, today, in Margaritaville...thanks, remember to tip your servers"

We spent all of Saturday around the hotel.  This time there were two poor bastards singing Jimmy Buffett, one at Bazzie's, the breakfast restaurant at the other end of the hotel (and later in the evening, a sad deserted bar), and another guy at the next hotel
 down, the Thunderbird.



The only thing we had scheduled in advance was dinner at Berns, a storied steakhouse in Tampa. About which more later.


The Gulf side of the Bilmor. 

There had been a sand sculpture contest two weeks before.  Also about which more later.

Jeez, I can't believe I wrote something personal on this thing again!

If You Can Read This, You're Standing Too Close

I blundered over this blog while sorting through my staggering amount of email addresses, most of which I don't have the passwords to. My primary address is on AOL.com, an ongoing source of shame. It screams "I DON'T LIKE CHANGE, GODDAMNIT!"

My AOL address is so old it is my NAME.

Think about it.

Be careful, this blog can be very, very stupid. And rude. But lotsa big words and fun.