Kelly was visiting and she took it upon herself to cut the onions, , fortunately for her, we had a dust mask handy to filter out all the fumes. No tears guaranteed! My nifty bicycle stand is in the background.

Here's the real deal. The good ol' fashioned artificially plumped Butterball turkey. It's still hanging out in our fridge, though it's been nicely sliced and partitioned by my super-sharp Japanese sushi knife. 

This is what a Tofurkey looks like. THey don't taste too bad either. Granted, it's no substitute for the real thing but, hey, it's made of grains and stuff. We cooked ourselves a feast last week. Delightful and slightly ridiculous in its scope. 

Sunday Ian and I "did" New York, at least we trekked all around the lovely island of Manhattan. The Chinatown Bus is amazingly cheap, $20 gets you from Philadelphia to NY and back. We saw a sword swallower, ate some less-than-stellar pizza, rode the subway, gawked and in general, touristed it up. Though I can't honestly imagine myself living in New York, I really liked the city. There is some of everything there. Ian kept a language count, and the informal numbers were 2 English speakers for every 1 Non-english speaker. Quite the world city.

Ian and I had a superb weekend of touristing. He arrived in Philly late Thursday night, and we hit it hard Friday through Saturday. We did some of the Philly sights on Friday: Rocky Steps, Italian Market, Liberty Bell, Philly Steaks, Canoli, then we hit up Happy Hour at UPenn before we went to see Borat. Saturday involved some climbing on rocks, a beer tour of the Yards Brewery and some bitchin chili and some friends coming over. Jennifer stayed home the whole time and worked on the house, the fruits of which you can see here as she and Ian take it easy after the party.

One of the interesting things about living in our neighborhood is the fabulous array of smells. Walk into our back yard and there's the smell of cat pee. Wake up in the morning and you can get a whiff of frying breakfast at the local seafood joint. As I head to school, I usually get a pungent whiff from the de-facto latrine next to our house where the drunk guys pee. And then there are days like today when Old Guy and his wife Sourpuss decide to cook up a SE Asian specialty such as, and I'm only guessing based on the smell here, Fried durian stuffed with cat bowels, aged fish and onions. Thank god that this seems to be just a sometimes food because somehow the aroma has the ability to penetrate brick walls.