Five Foto Friday (June 13, 2014)

Happy Friday!

A short post for you all this Friday: 

I took this picture a few weeks ago at a luncheon from the ballroom of the Mandarin Oriental at Columbus Circle.  I posted it on instagram and Facebook and it got tons of likes so I figured I'd share.  Since One57 (the building shown in the picture), is one of my company's projects, my marketing team liked the picture so much, they might even feature it in some marketing materials.

The week days have been dismal, but the weekends have been great!  Here is a picture of downtown and midtown on beautiful spring days.

Last weekend we watched a friend's dog for a few hours.  He's an adorable 6 month old goldendoodle.  Note the cord next to him, which he subsequently chewed through when he mixed it up with his chew toy.  The cord is the power cord for my surface.  Luckily, Microsoft has some great customer service, replaced the cord in 3 days and here I am typing to you from a fully powered Surface.  

Lastly, here is a view of a rainy Manhattan from at 19th floor in sunny Downtown Brooklyn.  That's a summer's evening for you.

Have a Shariously wonderful weekend!

Graze

Somewhere on the internet I stumbled upon another one of the subscription service fads.  This one was called Graze.  Their slogan "Delicious, healthy snacks by mail."  For $6 per box (including shipping), Graze sends you 4 different snacks There are two kinds of boxes, a NibbleBox, and a CalorieCounter (all snacks are less than 150 calories) and you can set up to receive the box every week, every other week or every month. My first box was free - and your 1st and 5th box can be free too if you use this link: www.graze.com/us/p/SHARIL9XU 

There are all sorts of categories of food and an example of what you might get:

• Pop corn (lightly salted)
• Dips & dippers (shortbread dippers with berry compote)
• Flapjacks (apple cinnamon flapjack - basically like a granola bar)
• Savory (mini tomato breadstick, basil crunchini and cheese cashews)
• Natural Treats (lime infused raisins, sponge pieces, mini meringues and green raisins)
• Pure Fruit (cherries, lingonberries, cranberries and jumbo raisins)
• Whole Nuts (roasted pistachios with a touch of salt)
• Pure Fruit, Nuts and Seeds (redskin peanuts, roasted hazels, jumbo raisins and cranberries)
• Super Seeds (vanilla sunflower seeds and vanilla pumpkin seeds)
• A touch of Chocolate (fudge pieces, blanched almonds, milk chocolate drops and cranberries)

After you get and try the snacks you can rate them on the website as "Trash", "Try", "Like" or "Love" to determine if you want those snacks again in the future and how often they send them to you.  So far I've had 4 boxes and have not repeated a snack since I like trying new things.

Here are the latest snack's I've gotten.

Cherry, Pear & Walnut Morning Engergizer

Cinnamon Pretzel

Lightly Salted Popping corn

Smoky Gazpacho Dip

A Shariously great way to add some variety to your daily snacking! 

Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day to the best Mom!

For all her love and support and being my blog proof reader.  Looking forward to spending a beautiful day with her. 

A Shariously Happy Mother's Day to all my Friends, Family and readers. 

May 9, 2014 (Five Foto Friday)

Here are some spring-time pictures on this rainy Friday:

We had our first BBQ a few weeks ago - burgers for the eyes, veggie burger for the nose and tomatoes for the mouth!

A double rainbow leading right to Laguardia Airport - spotted on a drive from Queens.

Ominous clouds over the Freedom Tower.  It was a very cool sight in person. 

Beautiful spring time Japanese Maple and Tulips on one of my project sites.

So many Tulips!

Rain rain go away, Shariously wants to play - still waiting for a spring week of 68 degree clear weather and hoping it doesn't jump right into the 80s so that we miss spring again.

At the Car Wash

We recently went to a car wash after hours, which means for $6 you get an exterior wash where you can stay in the car.    So I recorded it for one minute for your enjoyment:

A Shariously fun way to get your car washed!

Second Blogaversary!

Hello Readers!  Happy Friday, Happy Pi Day (this blog was posted on 3.14159, eastern daylight time),  Happy Blogaversary! AND this is my 101st post!  (I didn't realize that my last one was my 100th, so we'll pretend that 101 is special).

It has been a great two years of blogging, there have been some periods with tons of posts and some periods of nothingness, but I still enjoy blogging and hope you enjoy the content I provide.  In keeping with tradition (2 years in a row makes a tradition right?) here is some info about my blog in the past year:

Most commonly searched keyword that brings people to my site: "low-cal peach bellini"

1  My analytics was not working properly for practically the entire month of December, so the numbers are definitely off.
2  Blogger shows a different total number of page views from google analytics, so I'm not really sure why the difference, but this number looks great!

Last year I set a few goals for myself, here's what they were and how I did with them:

• Gain more regular readership - I think I accomplished this one a little, I do have more email subscribers and a more widespread audience, but I'd still love more readers.  I had a few posts that I tweeted about and were subsequently re-tweeted which drove a lot of visitors to the site.
• Average 2 posts per week - This did not happen. But if I discount my summer hiatus I think I almost hit this goal.
• Have more reader comments and interaction - Huge thanks to all you who comment!  I love to read comments and respond to them, keep it up.

Blog Goals for the next year:

• Build more great content. Please let me know what you want to read about! 
• Try again for 2 posts a week average
• More readers
• More comments
• More promotion on my part to get readers and comments by tweeting and posting on facebook
• Switch over to a different blogging platform since Bloggers text editor and photo options are limited and a struggle (ie. not being able to make a table).

And Shariously big thanks to all my readers (and editors), keep spreading the word. And thanks for allowing to use so many exclamation marks in this post.

Five Foto New York Friday

So this post is both a Five Foto Friday and a New York Friday!  It's like a double feature.

On Wednesday, a coworker and I had an 11:00 meeting at the Olmsted Center (NYC Parks Dept headquarters) in Flushing, Queens in Flushing Meadow Park.  Flushing Meadows Corona Park was also the the location of New York's 1964-65 World's Fair, National Tennis Center (home of the US Open), CitiField (where the Mets play) and a bunch of museums and tons of recreation spots.

As we were walking over from the subway to the meeting I asked my coworker if he had been to the Panorama of the City of New York at Queens Museum where they have a giant 1"=100' model of the entirety of New York City.  He hadn't been, neither had I, but heard from many people that it was a great sight.  After a very short meeting, the architect we were with mentioned the same exhibit I had mentioned earlier as well. And, said that the model gets updated from time to time with models that Architects from around the city donate.  Well, my coworker was sold, we were going to check out the exhibit, it didn't hurt that we had both budgeted 1.5 hours of our day for the meeting which ended up barely 40 minutes.  And, I had a meeting later in the day in Long Island City, Queens so it didn't make any sense to go all the way back into Manhattan then back out.

The Unisphere up-close

As we walked over to the museum we passed the Unisphere from the World's fair.  Although I had seen it hundreds of times from far away, I never had been this close.  It is quite impressive.

Midtown Manhattan

Next up, is a view of Midtown Manhattan.  The model was created in 1964 and mostly looks like the city did 50 years ago, although there have been some updates through the years.  You can kind of see Laguardia Airport near the top of the picture, and one really cool aspect of this model is that they had planes taking off and landing at the airport!

This expansive view is from the south of Brooklyn.  Just off the bottom of the screen would be Coney Island and to the bottom left is the on ramp for the Verrazano Bridge. The Bronx is at the top left and Queens the top right. Sorry Staten Island, I left you out.  I took this picture for my dad, you can spot the building he grew up in near the bottom of the picture.

Last but not least, the martian spaceships. I don't know what these structures were actually for in the World's Fair, probably some exhibits and rides, but everyone knows them as the spaceships from Men In Black so I took a picture to share.

If you have an opportunity to check out this exhibit I Shariously recommend it.  Even though it seems all the way out in Queens, it's actually a pretty quick trip from Manhattan.