Cupcake Returns to New York, Tornando Hits Brooklyn

Coincidence? Probably not. See here.

What the hell happened? I was sound asleep when a very loud, very close thunderstorm passed over my building, violent enough to set off every car alarm on the block. By the time I got out of bed about an hour and a half later the rain had stopped, but the city had fallen to shit. There were essentially no subways running into Manhattan from my area of Brooklyn. It took me three hours plus to get to work - longer than it took during the transit strike of December '05. I kept in constant contact with my bosses giving them plenty of opportunity to say, "You know what, Nancy, you tried your best, why don't you turn around and go home?" Ha. No such luck in the land of Oz.

I don't want to get into the details of how I got to work, but it involved me hopping into a gypsy cab with three other women going as far as Wall Street, trying to bribe the driver with all the cash in my wallet to take me to Midtown, having the driver assent only to freak out because the traffic was so bad, being dropped at a gas station on the West Side Highway, standing outside the gas station bathroom waiting for yellow cab drivers to finish their business to ask if anyone would take me to Midtown. Deee-lightful.

Also, I just called Keyspan, our local energy company to report a gas leak in my apartment. This is not something that happened while I was gone, rather something that happened a couple of days before I left and something that I was hoping would naturally resolve itself while I was away. I'm sure it will turn out to be nothing. I was cooking and not paying attention to a pot of water - it boiled over and spilled a lot of water down into the burner. Now that burner doesn't work and whenever I enter my apartment I smell gas. Boy, though, Keyspan sure does hop to when you say "gas emergency". They told me to open all the windows, not to strike any matches and a technician will be here within the hour. So now I'm sitting here with my windows open, the A/C turned off, debating if I need to straighten up my bedroom for the gas man cometh.

Why did I ever leave California? Real life has more varieties of headaches than I remembered, but vacations sometimes grow lonely when there's no daily routine to distract you from the fact that you're sleeping alone in a King size hotel bed. That's just the gas poisoning speaking.