October Overview

Here's some nice miscellaneous items from October that weren't Owen visiting (that was a few posts ago) or me testing cameras (that's my next post)

There was this one night where I met up with Broek for Tacos No 1 and Los Mariscos at Chelsea Market because I've happened to go there nearly every week since Los Mariscos opened and on the way home we got donuts at the Donut Pub. Guess what? This S'mores fake Cronut wasn't great. Should just stick with the normal classic Donut Pub donuts, they're great.

Second weekend of the month Jesse was in town and I was so lucky to get to get dinner with her at the Noodle Bar.

Some of the classics we ate that night: spicy cucumbers, scallops with corn and chicken skin and the brisket buns

Wrapped it up with dessert at Superiority Burger

Then there was this Friday where I went to Tacos No 1 and Los Mariscos with Kim and discovered that the ceviche tostadas at Los Mariscos are GREAT and so much better than the just fine fish and shrimp tacos.

Then we dipped into the Whitney for a bit to check out their portraits exhibit for a minute before the museum closed for the night. Was a pretty good show, I ought to give it another look.

For dessert that night I tried Ample Hills' orange and brownies Donald Trump ice cream

That Sunday, a magnificent occurrence, Keri happened to be in town and I found out by running into her in the hall at church

The next Friday Ned had a number of us over for some very fine Korean food that James cooked up

Accidentally got off my train home a stop early but I made up for it by snapping pictures with my sporadically-used f/1.1 lens all the way home

The next day I went over to the far west side to check out a camera show (all about that in my next post) and walked the final phase of the Highline (plus the rest of it) for the first time. When the "new" MoMA opened in 2005 they had this exhibit about the plans for the Highline and I remember looking at it and being all "Yeah, like that will ever happen" and now here we are and the whole thing's built and beautiful. 

Look! A Quince!

That night, what a night, first I caught La Sera with Victoria at the Mercury Lounge and then we went and watched the Cubs win the NLDS (that's a baseball thing, not a church thing) at the bar where I had watched them lose it in 2003.

The next night, man, what a month for visitors, Rebecca and Derek were in town and we enjoyed a fantastic dinner at the far too undervisited Ma Peche.

Imagine there being a group photo before these food photos, because I really should've taken one of those.

That week I found myself with an unexpected Wednesday off so I took my camera out to try zone focusing—that's a type of manual focusing where you don't focus? You just set a wide angle lens (in my case a 28mm) to a high aperture (in the case of these photos, f/11) and then your depth of field is so great everything is in focus for a certain range (in this case, everything from approximately 4 feet to infinity). It was fun and neat to commit a whole day's walking around to learning to use a new technique. Also, I grabbed lunch at Mission Cantina with Brook where they had a great new burger and found the mole chicken wings to be served with an amazing dill yogurt sauce that had me not letting the servers remove the plate once the wings were gone.

Morgenstern's had a very scary Halloween costume, I could not bring myself to go inside. It was all orange and things were hanging from the ceiling.

Nailed it!

Sheesh, you know what, this post is getting long? I'm changing my mind about things now: there will be an additional post about the rest of my October food. For now, let's just wrap up with a little Halloweening.

Saturday night I hit up some Halloween parties with Victoria the Bat and unleashed Count Tacula, the Taco Vampire, upon the world. I had never seen people run away in terror before, it was exhilarating. 

Only click on this video if you are very brave (and yeah right like you haven't seen this before it was one of the most popular videos on the internet this year) 

On the actual Halloween I went to see Conan O'Brien tape his show at the Apollo. And I'm a rule follower, so when the tickets said "No Cameras", I didn't bring a camera. So just trust me, Count Tacula was in the audience and everyone was like "We would feel much less horrified right now if it was just the Phantom of the Opera here."