I can't believe how quickly this month has flown by. We've almost been in NYC four months now. Wild.

In some ways, we're mostly settled. Oh sure, we're still dealing with the bureaucracies that make things like getting car insurance and getting the car licensed an absolute pain-in-the-ass. (We did manage to get the RV trailer licensed and took a quick trip to NJ on Saturday to screw the plate on and cover the trailer for the winter.) But I still have quite a long task list of move-related items: get a dentist, find a therapist, buy some sort of bed for the office (Kaia will be here for Xmas), frame artwork, buy a bike.

The latter is becoming necessary as I've reached the breaking point with Citibike. Although Wednesday's rides were both flawless — the first bike I chose worked, the docking stations worked — on Friday, nothing worked: it took multiple tries to find a bike that'd work and when I went to return it, I couldn't get it to registered that it had docked and locked. I had to get ahold of Citibike customer service to stop the app from telling me I'd owe them $1200 if I didn't return the bike.

It was truly "one of those weeks" when it came to customer service. I have had to battle Geico, Allstate, Adidas, Ruffwear, and Nike. (The latter was actually a great experience. The rest pretty much sucked.) Like I always say: it's not that AI is getting better; we're just asking people to become more robotic. Nothing shows that better than customer service.

I received an IndieGoGo product from a campaign I supported last year — an ice cream maker. It doesn't work either. Now I have to deal with getting a refund on that too. Ugh.

I also bought a Roomba. In this case, we are cheering for the robots. Please help me handle all the dog hair.

Our friends Jen and Jeff were in town on Monday; we met them for drinks at Dear Irving on the Hudson before they went to an event with Jose Andrés and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Nice rooftop bar with a view. I think we need to just get some liquor in our apartment as the view is comparable.

We stopped at Pizza Shack on the way home. It was disappointing. Some folks say that the best slice/BEC is the one from the bodega/pizza shop nearest your apartment. Perhaps the most convenient.

In other food news: I made peanut butter sweet potato brownies, "superhero muffins," and black-bottom maple pecan bars (although I didn't have pecans so made it with almonds. And I bought half-and-half instead of cream — I guess it's good the ice cream maker didn't work — so the bars didn't turn out nearly as good as normal). I made baked rice with beans and leeks and lemon — a solid recipe from The NYT Cooking. I made ham and scalloped potatoes that lasted days and days, the former finally becoming a quiche. We ate out at Cafe Sabarsky yesterday. It was very good — Kin had bratwurst, and I had smoked trout crepes. We ordered two desserts, and we regretted not getting the chocolate cake (and the weinerschnitzel) that the table next to us had.

Yesterday's outing was to the Upper East Side — to the Guggenheim with a stop into a B&N where Kin bought more records.

In reading news: we finished Blood in the Machine and started No Meat Required. I'm also reading Vagina Obscura. On my runs I listened to the Barbell Medicine podcast, Coach Bennett's podcast (on how to set up a training week), and the Ali on the Run podcast about the NYC Marathon.

Speaking of running, my friend Paul was in town from Oakland, visiting his son who's a freshman at NYU. He's in the middle of marathon training, but I ran 5 miles of his (18!) mile long run with him on Sunday. I have a race on Saturday — my first 5K of the year — and then I'm volunteering at the NYC Marathon on Sunday.

I'm trying to do more yoga, as I feel like I need more mobility work. I did 10 minutes after my runs this week. I also lifted, which went well on Wednesday but really sucked on Friday. Swimming wasn't that great on Friday either. I'm not sure why I'm so slow.

I started taking more continuing education courses — this time, it's Stacy Sims' course on menopausal athletes.

And I am absolutely broken-hearted about Matthew Perry, which actually means I'm absolutely broken-hearted about Isaiah, truth be told. I've never watched Friends. (Funnily, it was something that Isaiah would watch.) But addiction — god, what a beast. I've had Perry's memoir on my To Read list for a while, and I'll probably pick it up. I was going to do the audiobook, but now I don't know if I can listen to a ghost narrate it. Things seem very hard all around right now. Check in with the ones you know tend to struggle. No one is doing okay.