Summer is back in New York City with this wacky 85 degree weather.  The great part is that we can carry on our fall festivals in shorts and tank tops…the bad part is my allergies are back.  I am apparently very allergic to the small amount of nature in the city.

Despite what my allergy medicine promised, I felt like this lady…

Not this lady……

So yesterday I took a trip downtown with the lovely Christina to a tea shop in Greenwich Village.  The Sullivan Street Tea & Spice Company is my favorite place of the day!!  Hooray!

We were chatting to the man who worked there and I told him I was being attacked by pollen.  He gave me the most incredible peppermint tea and I instantly felt better.  I bought some and it is delightful.  Win all around!

The best part about this place is it was only recently bought and restored to the beautiful store it is now.  Before this, it was…a famous New York City mob hangout.  But of course!  Originally the Triangle Social Club, the space was the meeting place for the infamous Genovese family and Vincent “Chin” Gigante.  Gigante apparently spent years roaming the streets of New York in a bathrobe pretending to be was insane so he wouldn’t be arrested.  After the club was closed and boarded up for years, the now owner bought the place, preserved the majority of the interior, and filled it with delicious herbs and spices.  Take that mobsters.

In other news,  my most recent “lesson about New York” is that humor goes a long way.  Ben and I moved to a new apartment last month, and though very beautiful inside, it tends to sound like we are living in midtown…maybe this is because we live one block from the Tri-Borough bridge.  Even better, we live next to the intersection that feeds all the large trucks off the highway into Astoria.  They can’t quite make the turn so tend to clog up the road, causing a chorus of delightful honking.  And here’s where the humor comes in:

A.  If you imagine the honking cars are actually honking in celebration, it makes the noise much more bearable!  We like to pretend there is a circus going on outside and instead of disgruntled New York drivers, there are colorful cars packed with a comical amount of clowns.  The honking is just to say “Hellooo!  The circus is here!!”

Or option B: Especially in the mornings when I can sense the honking is waking up Ben, I tell I him have posted a sign on the traffic light that reads “Honk if you think Ben is hot” or “Honk if you like puppies.”  And other things of the sort.

…we’re open to any other suggestions…

Creepy Casting Post of the day…this was on Actors Access for a student film.  The descriptions tend to be pretty bizarre.  But this one takes the cake… (yes, you are reading this post right…stoner elephants)

(Erin)

(21) A paler, shyer girl from Los Angeles, her hair is dark. She wears heavier eye shadow and is terrified by the situation. She’s sick and hungry from three days of malnutrition at the hands of inconsiderate stoner elephants and their abusive boss, and showing it bad. Maybe she would have ended up going to a good college. Too late now, I guess.

And last but not least…my favorite kid moment of the day!  I don’t have a story since I haven’t been teaching during the long weekend but this is just as fantastic…