I feel so bad for not updating this as often as I should. But I'm busy, people! Busy!

I left at 3:30 on Friday morning for Union Station to take the train with my roommate to Utica, New York. We had a layover for about an hour in NYC, so we popped our heads out to say we were there. We were at 8th and 31st street. Remember that for later. So we took the train up to Utica, and got there around 3pm. After that we went and said hi to a bunch of family members and all. Then I went and hung out with Al's twin and her cousin while Al did some stuff with a couple of friends. We had lot of fun shopping and all. By the way, TJMaxx has a great selection of sunglasses right now. I shoulda got some. We finally got to bed around midnight. So we had been up for 40 hours by then. We got up the next morning at 6:30 to go to her mom's house to go have breakfast and pick her up to go to her salon. She gave us both highlights and they turned out soo good! Her mom is the best hairdresser I've seen. After that, we went home to get ready to have lunch with Al's friends at a place called Cavallo's. It's really good. I had a covered meatball sandwich. I thought by "covered" it meant "with a top" as opposed to "open-faced." Makes sense in my mind. Noooo to Italians it means, "with lots of marinara on top." So that was a new experience. It was good though. Everything is SO Italian up there. People, food, everything. And they all have heavy accents. I even picked it up. Sheesh. After that, we went and hung out with her family some more, then went over to her mom's house for dinner. It was super super good. More Italian food, of course. Then we went to another friend's house to hang out for a little while. When we got home, it was about 11 o'clock or so... by the time we got to bed we had been up about 20 hours. On Sunday, we got up around 6 to get ready for church, which was an hour away in Syracuse. After church, we went back over to her Nonnie's house for Easter dinner. We had cuppalettes (spelling?), which is a soup with handmade dumplings made from handmade pasta... it's a family recipe from 5 generations back in Italy. Along with that we had antipasta, fillet mignon, asparagus, scalloped potatos, pusties and canollis, and three layered cheesecake. SO good. I asked them to find me an Italian husband or adopt me. They could pick.

We left around 6 or so for our train, which was supposed to be at 7. The train didn't come till 7:45. By the time we got to NYC, it was after midnight. It was supposed to be 11 when we got there and we had had plans to go to Times Square and check it out since we had such a long layover. We didn't though because it was so late. Turns out, it was a good thing too because that night annually is notorious to being the Blood's initiation night in Midtown. There was someone shot right at 8th and 31st street, where I had been 2 days before. Something like 55 people were arrested between Penn Station and Times Square. So it was DEFINITELY good that we didn't go!

Our train out of NYC didn't get to the station till 4, so that pushed getting back to DC till 8. We went to bed as soon as we got home around then, and I slept straight till 4 o'clock this afternoon. I was SO exhausted. All in all, since Thursday morning at 8am, I only slept 12 hours till I got home. Talk about being wiped out.

I'm about to go back to bed...