Oh Happy Day(s)!

I rarely, if ever, have a day when I wake up and can do anything I want.  Reasonably, it would be on your birthday, or if you're a mother, Mother's Day (because everyone knows luxury days do not coincide with holidays!).  Well, I had just that type of thing happen for me.  Yay!  Let me thank my friend Mary in advance for all the joy she brought to my day yesterday and today, because this was her idea. Lucky me!

On Friday, we went to the 9/11 Memorial - not a typical thing to do especially considering how tragic that entire event was for everyone, particularly the people who were directly involved and are still suffering the ill effects of that devastation.  There was a visit to the actual location where the towers stood:

There were two of these pools, representing the north and south towers.  It was a rainy day, but the site was no less awesome in its hugeness.  As we went around the pool, we saw all the names of the fallen and someone left a rose in the etching of one of them:

It was then that I realized that the people who are still suffering have this site as the only resting place for their loved ones and I immediately stopped trying to take pictures - not only out of respect, but also out of a sense of how private and personal their grief is.

The new towers are huge and very New York City.  Tall, reflective and totally out of sync with the surrounding neighborhood, but beautiful for what it represents: restoration and renewal.

We did the outside tour, then the inside tour which made me cry.  You would think, after all this time that I would have been able to hold it together, but I fell apart.  The reality of it hits you all at once when you see the destroyed fireman's jacket or some unknown victim's shoes.

Enough about that because it's all still pretty close to the surface and not a necessarily happy event, but it was part of my experience.

Then we had a dim sum lunch at a local restaurant.  It was delicious.

After a nap and getting ourselves presentable, we went to see Motown at the Lunt Fontaine Theater:

It was excellent!  I was singing as quietly as I could, but the show had audience participation and everyone in the theater was singing!  When the character who plays Diana Ross sang Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand), she had members of the audience come up on stage!!  No doubt, those folks had VIP tickets and they couldn't sing worth 5 cents, but it was such a nice (and funny) part of the show.

After the show, we had a light dinner (it was late by then) and went to the hotel.  Now, I was there without my knitting but it didn't matter because we had a full day.

This morning we went to the Frick Museum to see the limited showing of Girl With a Pearl Earring.  It is a beautiful painting and I fell so in love with it that I bought the mug and a postcard:

The museum is the former residence of Henry and Adelaide Frick and when Henry passed away he willed his paintings and the contents of his house to the public.  However, his wife Adelaide continued to live in the house with her daughter after his death and the conversion from residence to museum didn't fully take effect until after her passing.

The paintings are awesome, and the house is huge!  I could fit my whole house in one room.  It's hard to believe that people used to live like that, and some people still do.  Oh man!  You need a riding vacuum cleaner to do the carpets, never mind the dust that could settle on all those paintings.  Yikes!

And now, because this is a knitting blog after all, I do have one finished object:

Yes, it's crochet, and they're only potholders, but it is finished and isn't that the point?

I'm also almost finished with the body of my sweater:

So, that's the round up so far.