New Yoak City

Nate's never experienced The Concrete Jungle. We decided to take advantage of the $99 JetBlue tickets and get away from this little town for a weekend. 

I guess we brought some Texas weather with us, too, cause it never got below freezing while we were there :) 40s and 50s all weekend. It was great.

Nate's friend Chad was kind enough to let us stay at his place all weekend. I thought I left prepared with exactly how we needed to get there from the JFK airport, but my directions were very off and it took us twice as long to get to Chad's apt than it should have. (AKA 3 hrs on multiple subway lines...) Alas, we made it and dropped our bags off and went out to explore the town before it got too late.

First stop was Rockefeller Plaza. Yes, touristy, but we have to do touristy things this weekend, cause Nate's never been...so cut me some slack.

The MoMA has free Fridays, so obviously we took advantage of that our first evening in the city. Nate loved reliving his humanities classes all over again...but really, he got a big kick out of it.

Somehow the subway smelled much worse this time around than I ever remember it smelling before. Maybe it was just the time of year, but my goooooodness it was horrific. The rats down there are gigantic.

Although, the people watching on the subways never lets me down. We witnessed a number of different activities that I'm sure we will remember for the rest of forever. I think my favorites were the times when angry black parents were yelling and then laughing at their 2 yr old daughter. Yeah. Real life. Real crazy.

Of course, we had to step into Time Square for a few minutes. We ate Shake Shack right before and our bellies were very happy with us, so it gave us a little extra adrenaline to handle the madness and the bright lights. Chad was hiding the entire time because apparently people who actually live in the city wouldn't be caught dead in Time Square. Sorry Chad ;) Way to take one for the team.

Right after, we skipped over to the Roosevelt Island Air Tram so we could witness the real majesty of the twinkling lights of Manhattan. If you've never taken this air tram back and forth to Manhattan, please do it next time you're in NYC. It's glorious at night.

btw. that's totes a carmel apple cider...in case you were judging.

9/11 memorial was our first stop Saturday morning. I didn't realize what a hassle it was going to be to get inside, but it was totally worth it. 

After the memorial, we went a little more south and into Brooklyn so we could walk across the Promenade. It's this walkway right on the edge of the New York harbor. The Manhattan skyline was amazing with such great weather that morning.

Also, very windy, but I can't complain cause at least it wasn't snowing.

The neighborhoods all along this area of Brooklyn are so cool. Most of the fancy walkups have been remodeled in the last ten years or so and I fell in love with all of them.

I convinced Nate that once he starts making 2mill a year then we can move into this one :)

Nate loved these little garage doors over near Chelsea :)

Chelsea also happens to be home to the famous High Line. One of my favorite places in all of New York, duh. We took our time meandering through Chelsea and then up to the High Line. There are tons of amazing art galleries tucked away into the alleys below. I was getting kind of late, so most were closing...but we made sure we got into the Klein Sun Gallery to see this one:

I mostly just loved all the food we ate. Sorry for the crappy picture, but this is the only photo we have with any food we indulged. We ate pizza for lunch AND dinner on Saturday, and I'm definitely not mad about it. Grimaldi's was our first meal and then this picture was taken at Luzzo's for dinner. Both were TO DIE FOR. I recommend NOT going to the Grimaldi's in Brooklyn because it's infested with tourists. The wait was long, but the pizza was soooo goooooood so I didn't care. But if you want to save time, just go to one in Manhattan. Nate and his friend Chad voted that Luzzo's was slightly better, but they're were both so divine and I couldn't choose which one I liked best. Also, I had to stop at Eataly for some gelato before dinner. Had to. Couldn't miss it.

We didn't go to church on Sunday, cause it's vaca and like, you're only in New York for like two days...soo yeah. But we made a pit stop in and out of the Temple/church so that counts, right?

We also walked basically the entirety of Central Park on Sunday, so that's like, super great Sabbath day behavior. Totally. Observing nature and all that.

We had a blast, but New York is definitely a different place in the winter. I love it so much more when there aren't huge piles of black snow piled up on the sidewalks and dirty snow water leaking and running all through the streets and subways. Love ya, but no thanks. I'll keep NYC as a place to visit rather than a place I'd want to live year-round.

Remember how I promised I'd take more pictures? Well I'm attempting, but upon first try, I get the above outcome. Let's just say I had to get very serious with little Nathan and explain to him that he tries harder to stop the picture taking than he would have to if he just let me take it.

Since this is my first year as a married woman, I kind of forgot that I had another set of parents that I had to find a Christmas gift for. I'm not very good at gifting in the first place...but especially not when I'm trying to like, impress the in-laws, ya know? Fortunately I was craving my paints (I go through phases...) and decided to make a calendar for both my moms. I wanted to paint fruits that would be in season during their assigned months, and then I created the calendar layout in photoshop (harder than I thought it was going to be) and viola! Now on sale in my Etsy shop!

https://www.etsy.com/shop/SoBleak

Since we spent Thanksgiving break here in Texas, we decided to travel up to Nevada for Christmastime. It was definitely much colder than I may have liked, but it was good to spend time with Nate's family for a little while. 

I won with the guns. That's what I get from being from Texas, I guess. All his older brothers earned some mad respect for me that day.

I wanted to shoot these dang turkeys so bad! They were the most vicious creatures I've ever seen. We were just minding our own business, driving into town...when all of sudden a flock of wild turkeys came stampeding towards the car and gobbling up a storm and pecking the heck out of our tires! Dad says that the people that go walking in the mornings have to take big sticks with them to fight off the turkeys when they run into them. It's serious.

Standard home decor in Panaca.

Seasons greetings from the Bleaaaaaks :) tah dah! (this was taken after a heated discussion about how Nate doesn't ever take pictures with me anymore)

Perks of going to the in-laws for the holidays: getting to look through aaaaaaaall of Nathan's pictures from him growing up. I loved it. Enough to create this mash up and try and imagine what our babies will look like. I think we'll be ok...

Sometimes don't you worry that your offspring will inherit all of your worst features from the two of you combined? Maybe that's just me...but it's a real fear and I try not to think about it because I think if I think about something too often it's really going to happen because that's just how life works because life it hard.

Also- hooray for airports that charge you $4+ dollars for one soda! Happy New Years SUCKERS!

The Wild

hi. it's me. long lost zoe. lots has happened in the last month and i think i've been trying too hard to avoid updating this thing.

so i got married. now i'm very bleak.
ok just kidding- that's just my new last name and it's actually pronounced like "blake". now you know.
with that change comes a new shadow. but really that shadow is a human being and his name is nathan. and he's really cool and smells really nice and has great hair. he also likes to wake up really early and so i'm very sleep deprived most of the time.

we spent our honeymoon skipping around vegas and california for a few days. i ate too much food and spent way too much time in the car for our own good. (we made the mistake of leaving vegas on a sunday and it took us 2 hours to drive the 30 miles out of the city. yikes.) but obviously it was awesome finally having time to ourselves after such a crazy summer away from each other. i missed him a lot.

after our not-long-enough honeymoon we had to hurry back to panaca to pack up the uhaul with all of nate's belongings and move down to college station. 1423 miles. 22 very long hours. i was just glad nathan was excited to drive the truck because that meant i didn't have to. the guy told us that it isn't allowed to go over 55 mph. we broke that rule far too many times and i think hit a maximum speed of 85 mph at one point on the trip. oops.

i've spread really nice rumors about the house we're renting down here in college station. i talked of it like one of those picturesque nicholas sparks-type cottages on a quiet lake in the country. well that's exactly what it is, but once you have a realistic man in the picture with you, it all becomes much more real and you start seeing all that is wrong with the place and everything that is missing and needs to be fixed and cleaned and repaired and installed and bought and set-up and on and on and on. my dream, for a while, turned into an awful nightmare, and we spent too much of our time complaining. i've done everything i can (so far) to make our little house into a home and i think i'm well on my way to success. there's still plenty to be done- suddenlink is about to give us a brain aneurysm. we've been waiting for over 2 weeks for internet to come and get installed. oh and we don't have any real furniture. nate eats dinner in his office chair while i continue to cave in the lid to our igloo. desperate times call for desperate measures.

these live next door to us. they're awesome.

more to come on our fun adventure- but for now, i have to go. only because we're in a campus computer lab using the internet and nate is done checking his school email. ha.