Early release today! Woo-hoo! It's like a throw-back to elementary school when you used to get "half-days." Man those were fun! Instead of getting picked up by my mom and doing errands or going home to watch TV, I met a friend in Union Square and we drank in the holiday weekend at Heartland Brewery. But first we strolled through the world-famous Union Square Farmer's Market and took in all the sites and smells, and there are plenty! It's so beautiful, the piles of fresh vegetables and juicy fruits, the flowers, the bread, the baked goods. And it was abuzz today with people buying their Thanksgiving fixins, almost busier than a Saturday afternoon in the summer.

After our beers we strolled into ABC Carpet and Home to admire overpriced gew-gaws, and found ourselves in Chocolat Michel Cluizel, a chocolate shop/cafe on the lower-level, with all kinds of cool chocolate cocktails and coffees and bonbons. And the coolest thing of all were these things called "chocolate pops" (I think that was the name), which were tiny chocolate thimbles full of liquer which you popped into your mouth in one bite. As we recovered from the liquer explosions in our mouths, the bartender announces it was training time: she was going to train a couple of employees to make the cocktails and did we want to sample their efforts? Hell Yeah!! So we got to sample all five of the $10 fancy chocolate cocktails! My favorite was a rum and chocolate concoction with a cinnamon stick. Another awesome, random NYC moment, the kind that make me love this city so much!

I've started reading this really neat comic series called "LOCAL." According to the description in the first issue, "LOCAL, simply put, is a series of short stories about people and the places they live in." It also has a companion blog where people can submit little vignettes about the places they live, so I submitted one about Manchester, NH, which you can read here. The writer, Brian Wood, also has a t-shirt biz called Northern Boy. I really want to pick me up one of these - they are so cool!

Anyway...of course I have picked the one snowy, rainy, windy day of the week to fly home: Thanksgiving Day. I thought I would bypass the holiday travel hell rush, which I probably am, but now I'm flying home in a storm. Dammit. Oh well. Happy Thanksgiving!