Year 2, Day 336: Fridays at 669 Washington Street

I was just remembering that Fridays used to be a time when Emily and I would have a routine 'indoor picnic' in our inherited-from-her-sister-rent-controlled apartment in Washington Square, Brookline. It was a great apartment when we were young, carefree twentysomethings, but by the time we neared our mid-30s it was not very cool. At the end, there were rats (brought on my our neighbors, who were Russian, and had a habit of improperly storing their trash; celebrating their life every night by drinking vodka and tossing chicken bones into the impossibly crowded parking lot) and water bugs the size of a small reference volume that were black as coal and slow as molasses. They were hard to kill on soft carpet. You would have to do a Mark Morris like dance on whatever you were smooshing them with to kill them. It would be awful for killer and bug.
We had two cats and they never seemed very interested in fending off bugs. They were spoiled and just wanted food in their dish. But I digress. Because my job at a big-city newspaper weekly had a 40-hour a week MAXIMUM and I worked late on Wednesdays in production of the paper, I got to leave early on Fridays. Emily was a teacher, so we were both always home by about 2pm. I would have a big breakfast (usually something awful) and I would bring lunch home. It was almost always the same thing: A chicken breast sub from Il Gardino (The Garden, on Brookline Street in Fenway); a bag of Krunchers! (The best potato chip ever); snapple and diet coke; A copy of all of the day's papers (Times, Voice, Phoenix, Globe). We would meet, park it on the floor, the couch, a chair, and just kick back with our sub and start the weekend. I have lovely memories of it always being sunny and just putting on a CD and having those long moments of happiness where you're in the same room with someone but you don't have to say anything. You're just being together. Plus a bag of barbecue potato chips.

Breakfast
2 Eggs
2 Slices of Balthazar Bread
Coffee
A few slices of clementine, a few slices of apple

Snack
2 oz 50% Jalapeno Cheddar
3 Beef Jerky Sticks
1 Fuji Apple
1 oz. Boston Lite Popcorn

Lunch: Russo's: ($6.57)
Romaine, red pepper, red onion, feta
chicken, broccoli, mushrooms, broccoli slaw
balsamic vinegar, pepperocini

Dinner
Emily's Shrimp Gulag
(Shrimp, Leeks, Scallions)
1 Cheese Quesadilla

It's very hard to shop for salad when you're hungry, and when the chicken pieces are big, it can throw you off. Emily always used to discuss the 'vertical dimensions' of the plates I would create from a buffet line, especially a Chinese food buffet line. It's true that I was a plate-stacker from way back. At Russo's, I can tell I'm in trouble when I exceed the height limit of the aluminum container. You know you're in for a seven dollar salad then.