Holly Northrop Blog

Jasmine and her friend Weber came home for three nights and two days and my god I am exhausted. As is always the case with Jasmine I did more in two days then I do in a week. Sometimes I do think that she is trying to kill me although not intentionally more like on a subconscious level. Weber had the sweet set up. She got the upstairs, the queen size air mattress and the studio to hang out in. Jasmine got the red couch in the living room with two cranky women in the next room.

The first day they were here, we toured the spooky Hudson Library, went to the mall, Home Depot, walked around Olana and ended the day with a sushi dinner and a trip to Happy Clown for some soft serve.

Day two Weber drove into Jersey City, (two blocks from where we used to live) so I could pick up my 15 x 40 print. About every hour or so on the way down the Thruway, I would coat up with Tiger Balm in Weber's car. I am so good at applying Tiger Balm that I can even do it while crossing a street, never missing a step. So the all day glazing went on without a hitch. My back only started to really give me trouble about the last two hours of the ride home. Considering how things used to be, I'll take two hours of a little back stiffness any day.

After picking up the print, we drove on over to Newport Mall and witnessed all the horror that is Newport Mall and parked the car. We jumped on The Path to the World Trade Center where there we 'ran into' Weber's sister. New York is like that, you just run into people all the time. It's super weird.

Anyway, after that we went to lunch and dug around in the dirty vinyl bins of record stores; where I would like to point out here that I was in three record stores and did not buy a single thing, even though I have been wanting to buy more vinyl. But the prices on new vinyl is through the roof. $30.00 for Nick Cave, $20.00 for The Black Keys and on and on.

After the record thing, we walked down to the Asian Mart on Broadway and Canal; pushed our way around the store and then out Canal street to the subway. We then reversed the order of the whole day by jumping back on The Path. It was at that moment that I realized that my deodorant had given up and I stunk. Actually all three of us were kind of ripe but I was by far the worst.

We rode The Path back to the mall where we hurried back to the car before 6:15 because the price of parking went from $10.00 to $22.00 if we didn't clock out after six hours. After some ridiculously tense moments at the parking machine, we made it with roughly fifteen minutes to spare.

Once in the car we crawled our way through Jersey City to Hoboken to Edgewater, (stopping at Whole Foods naturally) and then on to Fort Lee, under the GW Bridge and onto the Palisades Interstate Parkway. I was eating sushi in the backseat when we merged on the I-287 which fed us onto the New York Thruway were three hours after leaving the mall, we finally pulled into our driveway.

Jasmine brought with her from school an enormous painting (4ft x 3ft) of two cherries on a black background. There is really only one place it can go and that is over my photo table. No place in the house can you get far enough away to appreciate it. She did it in squares, not as crazy as Seurat but more of a cubist grid thing. It's all pretty cool and I love to see her painting, plus she has one of the best signatures I've seen in a long time.

Zoe was a complete and total bitch cat the entire time Jasmine and Weber were here. Not only did she attack Jasmine on the stairs with some kind of midway standoff; she attacked Weber when she bent over to pet her. That monster cat smacked me with multiple jabs and then bit me when I was petting her in the window. Jesus Christ she's a drag and I will NEVER have another calico no matter what. All that red hair just makes them crazy.