CityWife Victorious at DMV.

Well, it’s done. My name has officially been changed to reflect my marital surname, and I shall soon be receiving my new and improved drivers license in the mail. For now I have only a flimsy, bar-coded, pictureless ‘interim’ license to show for my efforts – and this hardly seems like an adequate prize, considering what one has to go through to get it. I tell you true – the DMV………..could use some help from an efficiency expert. And a nanny.

First Attempt: CityWife Goes to the DMV.

Went to the DMV yesterday to change my name on my drivers license. After waiting on line for half an hour just to get a number (?!), I was told by the defeated employee behind the information desk that I would need to wait an additional 3-hours on a different line in order to complete my name change. I asked if I could go to “License Express” – right up the street – to perform my name change task in a more ‘express’ fashion, and he said, “No. You have to do it here”.

Ah.

I decided to love myself enough to walk out of the DMV with my old name and go back on another day – when I could get there the nano-second that it opens.

With all the technological advances that have been developed in the past few decades………apparently, there’s still no way around a 3-hr wait at the DMV. Whoever runs that place need to get in touch with the folks at Trader Joe’s. The gang at Trader Joe’s knows how to keep a line moving…..

CityWife Goes to the Marriage Bureau.

This afternoon I went down to the office of the City Clerk – the Marriage Bureau, to be specific – to procure some extra official copies of our marriage certificate so that I can set about changing my name. Yes – I decided to go all-in and change my last name to that of my husband – no hyphen, no nothing. I still plan to use my maiden name professionally, so it won’t be gone forever, but I’ve been looking forward to having a new name and sharing a name with CitySpouse.

CityWife Distracted by Cupcake Truck.

So, I’m walking down 5th Avenue around 22nd street and there, parked right at the sidewalk, is a big white truck billing itself as “New York’s Only Mobile Cupcake Shop”. It’s a truck……that drives around…..selling freshly baked cupcakes. As if it isn’t hard enough to avoid eating cupcakes in the middle of the day when there are so many tasty cupcake shops everywhere in Manhattan – now there is a truck that drives around the city, practically stalking you to eat a cupcake.

CityWife Defeated by Zucchini Fritters.

A very sweet friend of mine noticed that I have become maniacal about cooking and being all housewifey since the wedding. As a gift, she gave me a beautiful cookbook – ‘Vegetarian Suppers – from Deborah Madison’s Kitchen’. Doesn’t that sound all homey and delicious??  It’s a beautiful book with some really great tips about local food and cooking in general. I could barely contain myself, ripping through all the pages looking for the most tasty recipes I could try over the weekend. I settled on ‘Zucchini Fritters’ – which satisfied the following criteria:

….and then it rained again.

I mean……..come ON!!! Tomorrow it’s going to be AUGUST already and we’ve barely had a summer. June was a bust and we probably only had about 10 good days in July – a 31- day month. What…..is UP…….with the rain???

In the words of Nell Carter: Gimme a break.

Stay-at-Home CityWife

One of the more fun and girly things about being a newlywed is the part where you get to ‘nest’ and create your Marital Home. CitySpouse and I had already been living together for over a year when we got married – but after the wedding, we took the opportunity to do a few spruce-ups around the apartment. This really helped make it feel like we were starting fresh and re-moving in together, even though…..we were both already there. 

CityWife Goes to the Market.

Today I am going to the green market to do my ‘marketing’, as my CityGay friend and I like to say. He and I fancy ourselves from another era sometimes, so words and phrases such as ‘marketing’, ‘char-woman’, and “I think I may have contracted Consumption,” often come tripping off our tongues. In any event, going marketing at the green market has become one of my new greatest pleasures – this from a gal who used to be perfectly happy to let Fresh Direct pick out my produce.

It Has to Stop Raining.

Okay, seriously? If I had wanted to live in London or Seattle……I would be living in London or Seattle. What….is UP……with this weather?? I cannot taaaaake it anymore!! It’s just been raining ALL the time. And if it’s not raining, it’s about to rain, or has just rained. It’s almost AUGUST, man – and we have had waaay more rainy days than sunny days this summer. This is like another March – where you’re so ready for the weather to get nice, but it just doesn’t. And there’s no one you can complain to about the weather. There is no government agency who is making it rain (again) today, no social group you could join to make it get sunny any sooner. It’s just the weather. And so I blog…….

An American CityWife in Paris – or – What’s Wrong With Enjoying Yourself?

CitySpouse and I were fortunate enough to spend 6 nights in Paris for our honeymoon. Neither of us had ever been to Paris before and, though I could go on for pages and pages describing all its wonders and glories, I will briefly sum up our trip by saying: It. Was. Perfect. A truly transformative experience. If you’ve never been there, I wish you the chance to go. If you’ve already been, then you probably know what I mean. It’s just…..different…..over there.