Thursday: Dreary, then Aunt & Uncle

I spent a large chunk of the morning worrying what place I should choose for dinner. See, an aunt and uncle I haven't seen in some years that live in New York was driving into Manhattan to see me and asked me to choose. The morning was spent reading reviews, thinking about where I'd be able to find parking in the vicinity, pondering places with nice atmosphere, reasonable prices, a wide selection of dishes, some of which should be without lactose. In the end I ended making a decision through indecision and choose the decent though not exceptional Trattoria Trecolori which I'd been to before and knew it met these characteristics.

After grabbing a quick lunch of bagel with fish (belly lox in this case: quite salty but still good) (and cream cheese, tomato, and onion) I decided I might as well simply continue working from home rather than go to work and have to return in a few hours since my relatives were picking me up from my apartment. So that was a dreary afternoon -- basically I didn't move much until 7pm.

Seeing my aunt and uncle was nice. We discussed my somewhat crazy though mostly indecisive parents, caught up on other relatives, and traded stories about my (now deceased) grandpa and grandma. Dinner generally was what I expected. The menu is good; the food is decent but not great; everything else fit my criteria. Except for a fairly large table of somewhat drunk people that were being annoying loud. After dinner we strolled around times square (staying on side streets -- otherwise we wouldn't have been able to move) and chatted, mostly about the changes the city has undergone since they'd been younger and the sorts of things they do in the city nowadays (opera and photography).

It's nice to catch up. I've been feeling guilty the last few years about not paying enough attention to my non-immediate relatives. This makes me feel a bit better.