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The weather in August: Usually this time of year in Texas, you are melting into the ground at temperatures right around the 100-degree mark. Today, the weather is a beautiful 74 degrees in NY.
Iced Coffee: Yeah, I know they have this in Texas, but I never really got into it there. Here, iced coffee is served pretty much everywhere. I had a large french vanilla flavored iced coffee this morning while I was enjoying the beautiful weather and waiting for my laundry to dry. I have a feeling that iced coffee will always bring back memories of my first summer in the city.
People’s attitudes toward pets: Pets are everywhere and welcomed everywhere. You can bring your basset to a bar, your dachshund to the drugstore, or your weiner dog to the wash-n-fold. 
People in general: We’ve come across some pretty nice people here. Just the other day Joey was riding his bike to work and his wallet fell out of his back pocket. Someone found it and turned it in to the police. Absolutely nothing was missing. How wonderful is that?!

Last night we went to the Bryant Park Summer Film Festival and sat out on the lawn surrounded by skyscrapers and a thousand other people and watched The Bride of Frankenstein. The film festival is sponsored by HBO, lasts all summer long and touts a different classic movie every Monday night. When the HBO intro, one I haven’t seen since I was much younger, started up half the crowd stood up and danced and clapped along with the theme music. It was awesome to see so many people spending a nice night outside enjoying themselves peacefully together.
After the film, we took the F train to the Delancey stop and waited for the J train back home. An announcement came over the intercom that there was a problem on the tracks over the Williamsburg bridge and no trains were currently running over the bridge. We left the train station and turned the corner to see tons of people waiting on buses and cabs, so we decided to trek it across the bridge. The roughly 1 1/2 mile walk was a nice one as Joey and I enjoyed the cool summer evening and the amazing views all around us. It was the best Monday night I’ve had here yet.

Last week a new IKEA opened up in Brooklyn and of course we had to go.  We have been in desperate need of storage space because we just have too much crap, so we decided a wardrobe cabinet was the best way to go. We picked one out and then realized that you have to order the frame, doors, door hinges, racks and shelves all separately.  So I headed to a lady for some help.   I decided we’d get four wire drawers for the bottom part of the wardrobe, then do shelves for the top part. I could tell my helper lady was pretty new to the IKEA system cause she had to keep asking for help finding the right item numbers. After it was all picked out, we headed down to the pick-up area and started loading up. Wardrobe frame? Check. Two mirrored doors? Check. Door hinges? Check. Shelves? Check. Wire drawers? Check. The boxes seemed really long, but we checked and double-checked the item numbers and headed to the checkout, where we waited for about 45 minutes.
On the way home, Joey made a left turn in an area marked “Left turns buses only,” and we promptly got pulled over. Fortunately, the officer went easy on us and wrote Joey up for a less-expensive $90 ticket.
Then we started putting the wardrobe together. I was given instruction-deciphering duty and started pointing out where Joey was supposed to put the screws and which way the pieces lined up. All was going smoothly until we tried to hang the first door the next morning. It went on without a hitch, but it was really heavy to try to hold up while screwing into the frame. Then we realized that the four-pack of door hinges we were told to purchase was only enough to hang one door. (This is when I started ranting about how I knew that girl didn’t have any idea what she was doing.) So we had to make a second trip to IKEA for another set of door hinges. This time, we went right into the pick-up area, got the hinges and waited in a considerably shorter line. And we didn’t make any illegal left turns, either.
After struggling for about two hours adjusting hinge tension on the second door, we couldn’t figure out why it was slightly bowed in the middle and wouldn’t stay closed like the first door. There were some tense moments where lots of cursing ensued, but we finally had to give up and take down the second door. We laid it out on our ottoman and just sat there, silently cursing IKEA. Then Aaron noticed that one of our hinges wasn’t lined up the same as the other three. It looks like we have a defective hinge, so another trip to IKEA is in our near future. Damn! And I used to like IKEA…