Same city, different day

How do I love thee, Manhattan? Well, to be frank I love thee a little less when it's warm and humid, because your perfume, she is not so fabulous. The fougere of hot dog water with a base of fermenting trash and exhaust, touched with pungent notes of exotic dried seafood...it's bold, don't get me wrong, but it's maybe a bit much, yes?

But olfactory issues aside, NYC remains my favorite place to meander around, finding things strange and wonderful (Munchies Paradise, Edge*nyNOHO), strange and disturbing (9/11 commemorative socks? bu yao), familiar and caloric (hail, Via Brasil, to your inky black beans and their symbiotic partner, a vicious caipirinha), and, of course, expensive and alluring. Oh, Tom SoHung's full-skirted black cashmere coat with the wicked vampy collar and zebra-print lining, ours is a forbidden love. We musn't, darling, it would be so wrong.

Perhaps the oddest thing we saw was a tour group being led into (and just as quickly out of) Rocco's Pastry. The place has been there since 1974, which you wouldn't think qualified it as a historical landmark, but it's evidently enough of a neighborhood institution to have made the bus lists. As La Mère, Seesterperson, and I were resting our tired feets and recharging with some of Rocco's finest on Sunday, we spotted a guide hectoring his ducklings just outside the door. He then brought them in, led them up and down the pastry counter, herded them away from the tables, handed each a miniature cannoli, and briskly fussed them out again. What the hell? What kind of fun is that? You take me into a famous bakery, just you git out the way and let me ogle the options before I pick summat my own self. Obviously not all of us can hack the tour.

Now that the temperature is dropping in DC, we're all breathing a sigh of relief. The speed with which it's falling makes me a little nervous, on account of Doc acts like a Sugar Smacked toddler when it gets cool, and while frisking around all colt-like is very fine in its place, he's a 1200-pound beast and his gambols carry some weight. We will have to talk about restraint, and, probably, will do some extra running around to let him feel his oats. It's nice to know what to expect, at least. Last night when I went in for dressage, he was being tacked up for a different lesson; his manners are too good for him to walk off while he's being groomed, but his head came up and his nostrils widened, so I patted him and promised him an apple after he got done. His affections can't necessarily be bought, but they can certainly be swayed.

Crank the panic

April in DC is usually one of the months that makes me glad I live in this area: Although there are hordes of tourists, they tend to stick to the Tidal Basin area, a section of the city cleverly designed to keep people searching desperately for parking and never wandering beyond the confines of the Mall. Occasionally they get as far north as Metro Center, but the rest of us are left largely in peace. Allergies notwithstanding, seeing everything burst into bloom is fantastic: All the trees are hazed with green, the redbud starts to open up, forsythia become conspicuous, and the dogwood and azaleas start to warm up for a long drawn-out flurry of colors that would be spectacularly tacky if they weren't actual flowers. The air is warm, everyone gets all romantical, and generally you feel that the Magnetic Fields' "Washington, DC" gets it right about the spring.

All of which is to say, I hate this weather. The weatherdroids are working themselves into the usual state about our current storm fostering a classic nor'easter for our neighbors up the coast (sorry, Seesterperson! wasn't my idea!), it's pouring and dreary here, and I can't help wondering why the Wilson bridge is suffering from standing water. Maybe they were hoping for a dual water-traffic aqueduct and didn't quite get the balance right.

What with the cold, the rain, and the general misery of this weather, the horses have been all over the map. My gentlemanly gelding partner was so full of chilly weather beans on Monday that I gave up on riding and just chased him around the ring ("whooshing," the barn term for making sure a horse stretches out a bit); on Thursday, he was calmer, but the sucking mud of the ring was so bad that we kept it to nothing faster than a jog. I did get to try out another student's QH/Arab cross, a zippy young gelding, and after I got used to the OMG MOVING! speed of his walk, I had a terrific time. I rode him when he first came to the barn, when his settings consisted of slow and aieee, so the work his owner has put into him was beautifully evident. He's still boss hoss--first through the gate, first in the line, don't grab his mouth--but he bends and adjusts his speed and backs a treat. Mental note: win lottery. Buy pony.