Our Apartment

So we wanted to give you a virtual tour of our apartment - hopefully to entice you to come visit. As you will see the space is a little small, but our arms are wide open for visitors!

Greenwich Village

In a recent conversation, Jamie and I decided that if we were going to continue to invite our friends and family to New York, and if they were to continue to accept our invitations, we had better become more familiar with what the city has to offer. So we determined that we would try to explore a different neighborhood each weekend, or as often as we can given our loaded schedules. Last week I was taking classes at New York University in Greenwich Village (often shortened to "the Village") and was taken by the spattering of boutiques and eclectic restaurants pigeonholed in old row-houses on tree-lined streets. Wandering through these alleys, I knew Jamie would take a liking to the place and so we decided to make this our first neighborhood tour. Greenwich puts the hip in hip-hop, it may not contain the the Prime Meridian, but sure is prime. The Village....well you get the point: Greenwich is uber-trendy among those who are concerned with what is uber-trendy.

Greenwich Village has a rich history situated in the South West side of Manhattan. It is called the village because it was away from the city...now the two places run together, connected by rich, young professionals and liberal students. I won't dwell on the history, but suffice it to say that George Washington, Edgar Allen Poe, and Woody Allen all helped make the Village what it is today: an amoral, avant-garde patchwork stitched by threads of daring drama and lifestyles, all on a Revolutionary background of Georgian, red-brock houses and lush, green parks.






Here are some things of interst we discovered in Greenwich Village:

The Village is a very happy place. There are many happy people in the Village. Happy people like rainbows.


Falafel is very good and very cheap

Did I mention that falafel is cheap?


I have potential as a street-baller.



It looks like Jamie's "leaning".

A Little Change...

Stanton and Rubi Jones finally moved to New York (yay), and with that came a fabulous hairstylist who charges reasonable prices. At first we were just planning on Jon getting his hair cut from Rubi, but I got a bright idea and decided that I wanted to change things up too. Looking back on pictures from the past it looks like I've had the same hair style since high school...long and layered. This weekend I decided to make a change, and I left it up to Rubi as to what to do with the only parameters being "no shorter than my chin." Now it's to my chin and kind of stacked in the back (a modified a-line if you will). It's a fun change for now! The first time washing my hair was kind of a scare, but I'm adjusting to the new do. Jon is so cute and supportive by constantly reminding me that I'm beautiful, cute, gorgeous, etc. His comments are much appreciated at a time of drastic change. As for his hair - it always looks good. I just have a handsome husband!! How can you not love his dark brown, curly locks?

Update...

We started out with the very best of intentions. One month ago we had a bit more freedom and flexibility with our time. Now we are wrapped up in the whirlwind pace of the city, running from place to place, spending hours working full-time jobs, and setting up our permanent apartment in Manhattan. After transporting several loads via the subway from St. John's and our place in Manhattan, we were wondering whether having a car would be all that bad (we miss our SUV's). Our lives flow throughout the city, and the subway is our lifeblood. Yesterday, in fact, we took the subway down to Costco in Brooklyn where we stuffed a large rolling duffel bag full of reasonably priced food (at the markets around our apartment a half gallon of milk costs as much as you pay for a full gallon, and cereal is a precious commodity at $6 for a baby box). Our jam packed duffel looked suspiciously like a body bag, and it didn’t help that we were dragging it from near the Hudson River docks. We have both become very used to the strange stares we get when transporting ironing boards, IKEA boxes, TVs, or large bags of bulk items across the city. Even a homeless man commented to me the other day, "How are you carrying all of that?"

But for now, most of the large transporting is over—we have our pod unpacked and the items in their proper places (thanks to our parents for their HUGE help on the Utah end…”Big Al” and his greedy thugs helped unload it here in the city). We have purchased a few things to make our one-bedroom pad seem more palatial and more like home. Thanks to the generosity of so many people, we have been able to start our little home and make it the sweetest spot on the island. (Now we are ready for visitors...hint, hint)!

Last week Jonathan finished up teaching high school US Government as part of his Teach For America training; now he tutors biology at the school where I will be teaching starting in the Fall. I have been doing a variety of things for work: taking hair coloring/cutting clinics at the Redken Exchange, touring numerous Redken salons in the Northeast, attending glitzy Vogue parties, and going to lots of meetings. I am working in the field for the next month, following salon developers around and attending more sales meetings. I am enjoying my job but am looking forward to having a permanent desk on 5th Avenue (right now I am based from home and anywhere I can take Amtrak).

We love our little place, and hope that many of you will take the opportunity to come out and see the city (oh, and see us too). If you come, don’t look at us strange if we are carrying an ironing board on the subway.

Hot, hot, heat

Creativity is more often a product of necessity. In the picture below, Jamie is trying to keep cool in our baking apartment. It has been ridiculously hot and humid the last two weeks. Coincidentally, our air conditioning stops working once the thermostat rises above 85 degrees.

Philharmonic in Central Park

Last night we went to the closing performance of the New York Philharmonic Concerts in the Parks series along with 63,000 others. As you can see we were quite scrunched by many, many, many neighbors. The evening was very enjoyable complete with picnic (strawberries, blueberries, pretzels, and, my favorite, sour patch watermelons), wonderful weather, beautiful music (works from Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and Sibelius), and an incredible fireworks show that definitely made up for our lack of fireworks on the 4th. Look - we're even wearing patriotic colors!

They could put anything in there.

Coming from good law stock, naturally I thought I had a strong stomach for contracts. Up until this past week, I thought I did, until I was asked to swallow a 30-page, sign-your life away lease for our quaint (defined as "cute, but pricey") apartment. It was a nail-biter to the end to see what would run out first: my detailed concentration or the pen's ink from signing so many times. The pen won.

My experience with contracts is rather extensive: as an eight year old I tried to trick my parents into getting me dog by writing out an agreement with the words "I will get my son, Jonathan, food" stapled over a sheet with the word "dog" placed under a key part of the other document. After one of my parents had signed it, I would carefully tear out a hole, removing the word "food" so that the contract now read, "I will get my son, Jonathan, a dog." This eventually worked, but the dog didn't. Bark in Peace, Trouble.

At BYU, my leasing contracts generally consisted of very creative clauses. Obviously some students had tried some unusual activities simply because they were not expressly forbidden in their renting contract. Some of the prohibited activities were: "No trampolines on, or near roofs", "Barbecuing indoors is prohibited", and my personal favorite, "No domesticated farm animals may occupy the grounds or apartment; this includes, but is not limited to sheep, horses, cattle, and llamas."

So, we signed our lives away. Despite the writing callouses, we are ecstatic about securing our little home. We are so blessed to have had everything work so well, so far. And after all the paperwork, the rules are kind of a blur. I'm not sure, but I don't think that they said anything about llamas not being welcome, so feel free to pack them along with the trampoline.