Not many things make it into the blog, but these past 48 hours take the fucking biscuit - so here’s my story.

Wednesday, I’m on my way home in a cab from Manhattan, get dropped off at the corner of Washington and Fulton, grab some fried chicken from Crown Chicken and head home. I hit the sack and wake the next morning, excited that I can add yet another converted movie to my new iPod video - which I acquired 2 weeks prior. I couldn’t find it. Not in my bag. Not under my bed, where perhaps a book has slipped out of my hands before as I pay a visit to the land of nod. Nowhere. I turn my room upside down, hunting through the entire flat in search of my 2-week old iPod. Nothing. Pissed off would be like saying the Great Wall of China’s quite old. I go to work fuming, not knowing what the fuck happened to my new toy. Through the morning I try and think what I did the night before. Did I leave it in the cab? No, I didn’t remove it from my bag. Was I pickpocketed? Possibly. I remember someone brushing behind me while I was paying for my chicken. Mother fucker.

So, yesterday lunchtime I’m coming to terms with the fact that I’ve been robbed, and my $249 piece of heaven is in some skeevy fucker’s mitts, and in walks a coworker with a blood soaked compress on her head. As it transpired, she’d fallen in the bathroom at home, cracked her noggin on the bath tub, waited til the bleeding had stopped, then traipsed all the way into the office. And here she was, in need of obvious medical attention, due to the grand canyon sized gash in her turnip. I insisted we call for an ambulance, and they promptly responded within 10 minutes. So I’m sat in the back of a Lennox Hill ambulance at around 1pm, on my way to Cornell Medical Center on 68th and York, iPod-less and babysitting my blood encrusted office mate. You couldn’t make this shit up.

Five hours later, and 4 episodes of some forensic/cop show, we leave - she with 3 stitches in the back of her mellon, and a sore arse cheek from the mandatory tetanus shot. I see her to the nearest bus stop, and make my way to the Apple Store to buy another iPod. All’s well - I pick it up, take the N to the Q, get out at 7th Avenue in Prospect Heights, and take Vanderbilt to Fort Green - stopping at the Golden Arches for a Big Mac and Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese. Excited to transfer all my songs and movies to my new ‘Pod, I connect the little bugger, and start dragging and dropping. About half way through, iTunes decides to throw a spaz and tell me that it doesn’t recognize my iPod. For fuck’s sake, FUCK ME! I try restoring (which of course means I lose all the songs I just uploaded, but what the hell) and again, it freezes. My little black shit shuts down, and tries to reboot… and tries to reboot… and tries to reboot… you get the idea. My 2nd iPod was now about as useful to me as Christmas is to a Jew. At this point I’m all angered out, so I put everything back in the original packaging, planning on returning it to the Apple Store this morning…

…which is exactly what I did. Today seems to be dealing me a better hand, as I didn’t even have to ask for a replacement - they just took one look at the frozen iPod screen and gave me a spanking new 30GB video.

Anyway, happy Friday. May the next 48 hours have my blood pressure somewhere below 180.

I’ve just had the best chocolate croissant I have ever tasted. Accompanied by a sweet cup of hazelnut coffee, it was just what the doctor orderd on this shit covered clouded sky of a morning.

If you’re a fan of the chocolate, and of the croissant, head over to Little Miss Muffin on Park Place and Carlton, Prospect Heights.

They bake their goods fresh on the premises in an oven so small it belongs in a child’s play house. Their Jamaican patties are kick ass too.

It’s been quite the eventful 2006, considering. A true “single life” looming like 5:59am in the morning waiting for the 6:00am alarm; finding oneself finally embracing a city that was once loathed with such distain and a want for forgiving acceptance; a ghostly apporition of a memory of surviving in an alien existence in this new place called home; a death so close to my heart that has pulled my family together with a force of gravity that’s rivaled only by that of the sun and its third planet’s celestial sister; crossing paths with someone so profoundly life changing that it rewrites the entire book on relationships; the birth of such a gift to humanity that it brings forth such pride through his tiny smile… my nephew, Alex.

[sigh]

This year we were given, shall we say, a reprive. A reprive that has has affected me on a level I never thought I’d be afforded. Beautiful Alex, my nephew. I remember when he was born - the call from my mother, crying, in a voicemail - so happy, I could feel her smile through the airwaves coming to me courtesy of Verizon’s central wireless servers. After holding him in my arms in May this year everything changed. I changed. My mindset changed. Priorities took on new order. A new life bringing with it a level of profound meaning, a clarity that I have seldom experienced first hand.

I am proud to be an uncle, proud to be my brother’s brother. Proud beyond words to be my sister-in-law’s brother-in-law. So proud to be the son of my mother, a new grandmother. Proud to have been brought closer to a stepfather that I have grown to love, to respect, to call Dad. Proud to know that my rock of a grandmother had the chance to see him, to hold his hand, before she left this place.

Alex, I can’t wait to see you grow - I may be a few thousand miles away but you’re never far from my heart.

Thank you for coming into our lives. I hope that some day I can teach you that the world is an amazing place full of wonder - opportunity - of love - and to some day shake your hand as a man and tell you I love you.

My nephew, you have changed me.

Without conscious motivation, you make me strive to be a better man.

Thank you.