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Thursday around 8:30 p.m., I had my typical nightly dilemma. It was time to order dinner from Seamless Web so that I could sit at my desk and eat out of takeout containers while working. Always a good time. If you want to to be romantic, you can turn off the light and pretend that the glowing computer screen is candlelight. After six months of work, I’m getting somewhat tired of the available options, despite the 180 or so restaurants on the list.

Then, I noticed a new option: Barbarini Alimentari, an Italian restaurant on Front Street in the South Street Seaport area. The menu descriptions sounded interesting, so I decided to try it.

I ordered a red beet and dried ricotta salad and spinach fettuccine with roasted tomato puree. The beets were fresh and juicy, and the ricotta had a nice, tangy taste. The fresh-made fettuccine was perfect, and the tomato puree was one of the more interesting tomato sauces I have had. It has a cream base, but the tomato puree gave it a great texture and taste.

As I researched the restaurant today, I discovered that one of the owners is a former chef from Paprika, an excellent restaurant in the East Village.

Anyway, I’d highly recommend stopping by there if you’re down in the seaport. It’s a nice switch from the mediocre tourist-friendly places around there.

Just now, I was responding to an eVite invitation. You know how when you are responding to eVites, they always take you to a red envelope ad. I presume the advertising logic goes something like this:
1.) You’re responding to an eVite, therefore you have friends.
2.) If you have friends, then you need to buy gifts for them.
3.) Your friends must want useless gifts that don’t really match their tastes, because nothing says “You’re a great friend” better than a random novelty gift ordered off the internet.

Anyway, today’s ad was for a “circle of friends votive holder.” I don’t know who designed this thing, and I don’t know who buys them, but all I can think of is some kind of cheesy cartoon with stick people of many colors holding hands, dancing across the screen while singing “We are the World,” with maybe a nice encore of “Kum by Ya.”

Of course, I’m sure some of my diabolical readers have already picked out my birthday gift.

I realize that this blog is basically becoming “Nathan’s Pic of the Day” (if day = week, that is). That’s mostly because if I wrote about my day-to-day life, no one would want to read this blog, and I’d come across as a whining baby, desperate for sympathy. So instead I give you my photos.

Oh well. At least I post more frequently than than my brother posts on his supposed photo blog, Jason’s Photo Blog. That comment probably wasn’t necessary. But somehow I’m still not hitting the backspace key.

Here’s a photo I took while we were out in LA over Christmas. While waiting to meet a photographer, I saw this cool view out the window of the Hollywood Hills and the buildings around us.

(Note: this picture is supposed to prove that I can be “cool” and “arty” with my photos. Notice the security sticker and window frame, making it obvious that this was shot through glass. More importantly, the roof of the building in the middle distance is key. How artistic must one be to sense the deep meaning of a desolate rooftop adorned with stark HVAC pipes? Pretty freaking artistic, it says here.)

As mentioned earlier, I spent most of last week at the printers. Literally. Anyway, every day I would walk from 53rd and Lex to 53rd and Madison, which takes you through a great collection of modernist skyscrapers (the Seagram Building, the Citigroup Center, the Lipstick Building, the Chippendale Building, and so many others). On the corner of 53rd and Park is the Lever House, which is notable particularly because it was one of the first buildings to use a large plaza to avoid set-backs imposed by zoning requirements (in the case of the Lever House, it is an elevated plaza).

So as I was walking by, I liked the view, especially with the reflections from the surrounding buildings.

I tried to get to work early this morning (meaning prior to my typical 10:15 arrival time) but I just couldn’t drag myself out of the house. My motivation level seems to be at an all-time low, which is really saying something. So now it’s 11:00 am and I have two key achievements for this morning:

1.) I went to the cafeteria and got two slices of seven-grain toast (plain) and an apple. Both were delicious, although I bit into the apple and it sprayed all over my desk and my sweater.

2.) I figured out how to change the desktop image on my BlackBerry (yes, I realize that after having it for six months, I am a little slow). But I finally got sick of the clouds floating behind my icons and uploaded one of my Disney Hall pictures and set it as the background. This makes me happy and satisified.

Now, however, I have an indenture to draft. Suffice to say that this makes me neither happy nor satisified.