Good day / Bad day

Last night the kids and I celebrated my birthday by going Christmas shopping at the mall. We had a lot of fun and Steffi even baked me a cake from scratch! and they sang to me. After we got home I finished putting ornaments on my tree - a full tour will be in a future blog.

Earlier this week I had been in New Jersey and New York visiting our regional office there and several of our city and suburban stores. I tell you the hot bars and prepared food venues in those stores are far superior than what we have in our "flagship" store in Austin. The store in Tribeca has shish kebab crepe venues that are out of this world yummy. We sure eat well working at Whole Foods!

On Monday it was actually HOT in New York. We took the ferry over from Edgewater and here is what it looked like from the upper deck. A gorgeous day!I was way overdressed in my cashmere turtleneck and winter jacket. I think it got up to almost 70. After visiting the stores and finishing up our bizness, we had a drink at a place in Union Square called the Coffee Shop. Then we walked to dinner at The Redhead. Both of these are really cool places and I would highly recommend them. The Redhead offered an appetizer with sausuage imported from Kreuz's market in Lockhart Texas (best bbq in Texas!) and a homemade peanut brittle with bacon (which I bought a jar of to bring home to share). Check out the menu on the Redhead link above.

After dinner my colleague suggested walking 5th Avenue to look in the windows. Remember Mike and I had been in that area on Saturday night but the crowds were too thick to see everything. It was still about 70 degrees and quite a nice evening to stroll along and look at the sights. Here are a few for you. I think this is the building with Tiffany on the 1st floor:

Here is one of Trump's towers

Just a small wreath above the Donald's main entranceAnd his modest tree in front of a multi-story fountain


We walked past and into The Plaza. Those are real flowers, of course and Baccarat crystal above.

And the ceiling above the Palm Court dining room there

Back outside, there's this great big 3 dimensional snowflake hanging above the intersection at 5th Ave and another street (that I forgot to make a note of.)

Now that I am going through my photos I wish I had taken more from the department stores. Bergdorf Goodman was just fabuous. There was a separate window for each month of the year with decorations that you just wouldn't believe. I have never seen these windows before, but this year's had an animal wildlife theme with foxes, wolves and other furry critters dressed up in BG clothing in elaborately decorated scenes. I think I was intimidated by the professional photographers taking pictures. I think these next two are from the Saks building and I took these for guess who?

Can you imagine wearing this dress?!

So that was Monday. Tuesday was a completely different story. It was about 30 degrees when I woke up and snowing! Good thing we did our touresty stuff Monday night. Anyway, I checked my direct flight home and it was cancelled due to weather. Whether it was weather in Newark or weather in Austin (which was also bad) wasn't specified. They had conveniently rebooked me on a 5:30 through Houston arriving just after 10 in Austin. Not so bad and it gave me more time for my business visit. It allowed me to have a delicious pasta lunch at Osteria in our recently relocated Milburn store. While we were there it started snowing again!


The weather didn't look like it was improving so my colleague dropped me at the airport around 2 so I had plenty of time to make my flight. When I checked my bag, the flight was already showing a 15 minute delay, so I attempted to get on 2 earlier flights through Houston but they were oversold. I only had a 40 minute layover in Houston so when the flight was delayed even further and I would certainly miss the connection there, I rebooked onto the last direct flight to Austin at 7:30 that would get me to Austin just after 11 p.m. That would have been fine, but the story is not over....

We did board on time, but by 7, the snow and ice was coming down significantly harder and as we sat there I watched it build up on the wings and eventually coat my window. We taxied somewhere. The captain finally came on and said that we were in line to be de-iced and anti-iced and that we were behind several international flights with large aircraft that took a little longer. Not to worry - the deicing area could process 5 airplanes at a time! Then he came on and said we could move about the cabin and use our electronic devices until further notice... one of the runways had been closed and the deicing line wasn't moving. After about 2 1/2 hours we finally got out turn to be deiced. After my window was clear I watched the whole process. The guy was very thorough maybe because I was giving him the eyeball from my window! We inched toward the runway and the captain announced that it was a normal process to turn on the AC to clear any excess deicing fluid from the vents before take off and that we should not be concerned if we see some vapor from the AC. OMG - he turned on the system and the whole cabin filled with thick smoke (vapor) so much that the captain came on and said that his cockpit had also filled with smoke and he could not see to fly. Uh oh. When he tried again, if the same thing happened we would have to return to the gate! By now it is 10:00 local time and we had a 4 hour flight ahead of us. This news was greeted by moans from everyone on board. The good news is that when the AC came on again it was fine, so we took off around 10:30. We landed in Austin at 1:47 a.m. (2:47 Eastern time). I still had to drive home, let the dogs out, etc so bedtime for me was around 3 a.m. Let's just say I didn't set my alarm for 6:30...went into work for a short day and came home to "rejunenate my creativity and problem solving skills" (ie., take a nap) before going out with the kids. I can't complain - it had been a good trip overall and I got home safely.