I Can't Believe We Made It!

A somewhat belated post-New Year's "Happy New Year!" post to my fellow blogospherians. Some highlights from spending the final night of '08 and early days of '09 in the Empire and Garden states:

• Driving down during the Great Blizzard of '08 in Dunndee's Trans Am, AKA the Car with No Traction, Wiper Fluid, Functioning Wiper Blades, Rear Windshield Heating Element, or Headlights. At one point I thought we were going to be stuck in a rest area parking lot on 84 until 2009.
  
• Great New Year's Eve party "in the village," as they say, replete with bottomless Strong Islands, lots of A-side peeps, and vaulting bartenders
• 24 hours on Dunndee's couch on Jan 1st. Quite literally.
• Seeing the outside of an old law school building at Rutgers Law, Newark, AKA "City Law University," the law school Mike McD attends in Rounders, a film I watched approximately 146 times in college. Damon, Norton, Malkovich, and Turturro at their absolute peaks.
  
• Getting serenaded a cappella by five cheerful gentlemen in the wee hours of 2009 on the PATH train from World Trade Center back to Penn Station, Newark, NJ. A brief but comical Hall & Oates stint - "Hey, what you wanna listen to? White people music? What do white people listen to? Hall and Oates!" - was followed up by a little Sam Cooke at my request. A few bars of "A Change Is Gonna Come" were all too appropriate at that point.
• Calamari pizza. Don't knock it 'til you try it.
• Sauerbraten, AKA the "best thing on the menu" over at Cafe Steinhof in Crooklyn, NY. Nothing but steins, schnitzels, and spaetzle over there.