I know I am in the right restaurant when their blog is called “The Slice”. Automatically my mouth is watering for a big bite of their food. This love affair all started with an invite to celebrate my cousin’s fortieth birthday. What you have to understand about this cousin is that she is the complete opposite of what we use to think forty was like. Growing up, I am about to turn thirty-five, forty sounded like the end of a dirty road. I know many women freak out about turning thirty but I wasn’t one of them. Neither was this cousin. However now that I am half way through my thirties I am beginning to feel like forty is an age that I could never possibly be. I will officially be a grownup despite having acted as one since I was six. But it occurred to me that forty isn’t what it used to be. This cousin of mine is exceptionally amazing. She has a career she loves, spends her life with friends and family who are of the utmost important to her, travels the globe

The library is one of the greatest cultural and educational institutions that exist. When I was in elementary school I remember the excitement I felt whenever we went to the library. All of the books were surrounded by the little tables and chairs making it seem like an enchanted realm. Trying to decide which books to take home was almost as magical as when the Scholastic packages ( http://bit.ly/2g7dUhY ) arrived in school. My beloved high school teacher ( http://bit.ly/2gpaXM5 ) was the one that taught me to judge any university I visited by their library. It would be the foundation of my education. When I saw the library at Fordham University I was bowed over. It was how I knew that was where I would attend graduate school. The library system in New York City is more complicated than I knew. There is a total of ninety-two libraries in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island. But that leaves Queens and Brooklyn out of this borough configuration. I had to find out why. So

After the election this year ( http://bit.ly/2fwNhAQ ) I was good for nothing. My love of government, politics, and the presidency seemed lost forever. I needed to do something to remember a more positive time, a time when good men worked hard to accomplish what seemed impossible. That’s when I knew I would be spending Veterans Day at Theodore Roosevelt’s Birthplace. The National Park Service spent over a year restoring this enormous brownstone and it reopened to the public on October 29. I had been counting down to this event ever since I went to see his summer home, Sagamore Hill, in Oyster Bay, Long Island ( http://bit.ly/2aO4LZM ) last fall. It was a gorgeous day to drive into Manhattan and I was spending it with two of my favorite people, my niece and nephew. When I told them the plan for the day they were so excited. I had no idea what they would think but they were excited to do something different. They were absorbing facts as fast as I could s

I feel like crap. I have for days. I have a minor migraine but more so I feel like passing out. I have no appetite, which is partially contributing to that passing out feeling. I don’t feel like I am in my body or more poignantly in my head. That is an extra crappy feeling while I try to function in the real world all day. To boot I am also suffering from a little known migraine system- congested sinuses. As the pain in my head starts to ease my noise begins pouring out for hours on end. Until it clears I feel like I have a terrible cold and additional cloudiness in my already troubled head. I have accepted I will feel like this as I drag myself around all day long until I can finally collapse in my bed tonight. I would like to assure you I will feel different in the morning but there are no promises in the world of chronic migraine disease. Don’t worry I won’t. I know from experience that it will eventually go away it is just all this dang time in the meantime that I’m wallowi