long weekend fun!

We we're thrilled to pass this Gap, whose window carried our summer mantra "The city clears and its all yours."

This weekend was super fun and busy. We always say that we get more done in a morning than most people get done all day!

Our long weekend started on Thursday, when we took 2 subways and a bus over to Ikea to start up our routine of fixing up the apartment this weekend. Havi wasn't thrilled that she couldn't come or even help put the coffee table together! We then headed out to Long Island for Law Student' littlest brother's Awards Ceremony where he won the PRIDE Award, for embodying the values of the school. At Penn Station they have a new restaurant, Chickpea, which is all over the city and serves baked falafel!

Friday morning we woke up to the handymen knocking on the door to replace our floor that mysteriously buckled. Apparently the parquet floor was laid down in 1985 when the building was built and the humidity this week has really affected it. When Dental Student came back from a few classes and errands, the fun began! The threepeasinapod packed up our bags and headed into Midtown. We cut through the ever-camera-ready Grand Central Station.

Havi was thrilled to lay on the cold marble floor.

For each other's birthdays we always like to do something experiential. So last year, for Dental Student's birthday we took an Urban Oyster Food Cart Tour. New York City has food carts everywhere, some sell pretzels and hot dogs. But others sell cuisine by pretty famous chefs. Food carts and permits are not cheap to come by, but the food they sell is. Food Trucks are becoming increasingly famous around here as well. Midtown, which is where the large majority of the city works, has the highest concentration of food carts.

We attended my favorite, the Biryani Cart (who won the 2008 and 2009 People's Choice Award at the Vendy Awards) for Buradi and King Koti Kati Rolls. The kati rolls are spicy!!

Then we headed over to El Rey del Sabor, for a delicious quesadilla.

While looking for somewhere to sit, we found this outdoor eating area, which worked out pretty well!

Besides the fact that these fun food carts have superb food, its cheap too! For our Kati Rolls, quesadilla, and 3 waters it was only $16.

We passed Gramercy Park, a beautiful private park where Havi needed to take a break. She insists on wearing black, what can I say?

Next, we headed uptown to Home Depot. We bought all the supplies to paint the apartment, and Havi rode her first escalator which everyone seemed to love!

We passed some pretty "only in New York City" things, like this giant yellow bear on Park Avenue, even Havi laughed!

Saturday we spent the day fixing up the house, putting the coffee table together, fixing the lights, painting and planting.

We took a break during painting to head over to the Union Square Greenmarket. It was really hot out at this point of the day and Havi's paws hurt on the concrete, so she took every opportunity to plop and pant. Last week, we asked for suggestions of what to do this weekend and Reilly/Bree over at CowSpotDog recommended a farmer's market. This worked out well, because we needed some fun stuff. We bought compost soil, petunias, lillies, and a fresh baguette for our MDW BBQ.

We saw this man playing an interesting instrument,

Havi stopped frequently for a water break on the hot concrete,

then modeled the bread and jam stands.

Sunday we woke up early to receive our Fresh Direct BBQ order, then headed over to Hummus Kitchen a fun, outdoor, pup-friendly mediterranean restaurant. There, a woman told Havi she could sit near her and gave her water then started debating about the dangers of owning a pit bull, despite Havi sitting quietly tucked under our table! Her concluding line was "if you stick a pencil in Havi's ear, she'll bite you." Sometimes, it's not worth arguing...

After cleaning up the apartment, we said goodbye to Havi and went to Hoboken for a BBQ and met Baxter, an American Bull Dog (or so they say).

Monday we woke up and were VERY excited for our first party in our apartment - a BBQ with our parents.

Lastly, we saw a late night showing on Friday of Hangover 2 with our tickets from a Fandago.com LivingSocial deal. It was VERY funny, and not overdone. Although, a little graphic so leave the pups and kiddies at home. I also finished up Running With Scissors by Augusten Burrows. It was very well-written and I am glad I read it, but it was a little "too much" crazy for me, and therfore only gave it a 2 out of 5 on GoodReads. You guys gave me some great reading suggestions, so I have tons of fun stuff to read this summer!

After movies, books, painting and fixing, errands, food carts, Chickpea, outdoor brunch, farmer's markets, bbqs, and parades we remembered why we love living in NYC, just two grad students and a pittie in the city that never sleeps!

What new thing did you do this weekend? What should we do next weekend?!

spring cleaning to the extreme

On Friday we mentioned we were anxiously awaiting MDW in order to get a lot done around the apartment. Our apartment "ghosts" promptly responded by allowing the apartment to fall apart, and our list get longer. In case you missed it, we moved into this unit in our building 2 months ago, and waited until finals time to get done all the super fun stuff to make it more like home. If you want to see some of our apartment look at this post from our Favorite Things week.

Today we'll chat about what we got done around the house, and tomorrow we'll let you know how we took advantage of our first long NYC weekend!

On Thursday we went to Ikea. We'll admit this is one of the not-so-fun things about NYC. There are no big box stores close by. So we walked 10 minutes to the subway, took two subways for 20 minutes, then a 20 minute bus to Ikea of Brooklyn.

These are the strong feet of a man who carried a coffee table from Brooklyn

Once there, we purchased this awesome Hemnes coffee table. It really brought the room together. Because our apartment is black, white, grey and beige tones and very modern, Ikea was our best bet for an affordable coffee table. Who knew how necessary a coffee table was?!

The perfect size rug is tricky. We had a 6X9 area to fill, which is pretty large. We were expecting to have to spend a lot. But Law Student's mom recommended an outdoor rug. They are much cheaper and easier to clean (for example, when Havi threw up on the rug 5 hours after we laid it down). We also found this awesome Web site, Home Decorator's which had 20% off outdoor rugs and free shipping.

While at Ikea I could not resist, and picked up this corkboard for the kitchen. I recognize we have a magnetic fridge, but it holds our collection of magnets (we collect a magnet from every place we go together). So this corkboard is perfect for invitations and bills.

I also insisted on 2 flower pots and a watering can. Ill actually blame this on Two Pitties in the City and Love and a Six-Foot Leash, because they gave us ideas we couldn't resist to spruce up our balcony. We visited the Union Square Farmer's Greenmarket (more about that tomorrow) and purchased bright orange lillies and hot pink pentunias as well as compost soil for this awesome look.

This table and chair set were inherited from our last apartment via Target.

While we're on the balcony...Dental Student purchased a George Foreman grill on Amazon. Our old roomie had this in our old unit and we LOVED using it every night of summer. We're even hosting our first BBQ today! The only difference is this time we purchased a cover. We're really close to a major NYC highway and we don't want the grill getting yucky. We tend to eat in 6 meals a week, so this will be abused!

We bought these great Ikea lights that we mentioned during our Favorite Things Week. Unfortunately, because we hung them vertical, the lights burnt out super fast. While we were at Ikea we bought the halogen replacements and see a major difference!

On Saturday we painted the apartment. Havi insisted on holding the drop cloth...

We painted the wall behind our couch a deep grey and a smaller, adjacent wall with chalkboard paint. We headed with the pup over to Home Depot and bought Behr's Deep Granite in flat finish and Rust-Oleum chalkboard paint. Although paint chips are helpful, nothing beats seeing the actual color. We recommend spending the most time on the taping - its really the hardest part! Make sure to buy tarp. The chalkboard paint splatters easily and is very hard to get off all surfaces.

Havi wanted to model the before picture:

We kept Havi lounging on the balcony most of the day, because we were scared she'd get sick from the paint. We thought she had pretty sweet digs...

But she seemed to want to come in and help paint!

We still need to buy a few items around the house, but our next big project is hanging up our picture collage above the couch and our blinds - but that's for next week!

What's you spring cleaning routine?

peeps on parade!

We decided on a special Saturday post, to celebrate Peeps on Parade with Sarge over at Sarge Speaks Out, one of our favorite readers! We had to answer specific question to participate:

So here we go...

- Havi lives with the Dental and Law Student, just Two Grad Students and a Pittie living in NYC.

- Dental Student's special talent is playing the guitar, he even wrote a song for Law Student.

- Law Student makes scrapbooks of their fun adventures, and gave Dental Student his first one all about their fun times two years ago.

- Havi's favorite thing to do is lay on the bed and cuddle. She is a remarkably happier dog when all three of us are together.

- Something serious about the Dental and Law Student is they hope to be debt free one day! We both worked before this; Law Student for Publicis, a communications firm, and Dental Student for a UConn research lab. So this whole debt thing is new and scary!

- Something funny about the Dental and Law Student is that they met on Valentine's Day. They were at a mutual friend's birthday that they had both known for 5 years! When they met in a bar they were both applying to graduate schools outside of NYC and were both living in the suburbs. As fate would have it, 6 months later they both attended NYC schools and moved into apartments 2 Avenues apart. We like to say our relationship is "beshert" - the Hebrew word for fate.

And here's our very first threepeasinapod pic, the day we adtopted Havi! Thanks for the fun, Sarge!

MDW kickoff

Well Memorial Day Weekend is here! We were always pretty psyched for this weekend to finish up the little things around the apartment we never got to when we moved in. We planned to paint, hang up some more pictures, and switch around some furniture.

Well, apparently our apartment knew of our plans because over the past week...

Our floor buckled:

Our bedroom picture fell off the wall:

Our blinds broke:

So we get to add these items to the list!

We plan to do a lot of fun stuff with the apartment and a lot of fun NYC stuff with Havi and cannot wait to update you on Monday! As excited as we get about NYC weekends in the summer, we forgot to mention one small thing. We love NYC weekends because were the only New Yorkers who actually stay in the city. "True" New Yorkers head to Fire Island, the Shore, and the Hamptons and escape the concrete jungle. This is actually our favorite part of a NYC summer! As "true" New Yorkers, we get the city all to ourselves...just threepeasinapod and cant wait to share our adventures!

all leashed up

Oops! Forgot to publish this yesterday!

A few weeks ago Dental Student relayed this story to me:

He was walking Havi by the park attached to our building when he ran into a dog walker with two little pups. Havi played briefly with the pups and then Dental Student walked away. Then Havi heard the dog walker yell "please, stop." Dental Student turned around to see a man trying to take the small pups from the dogwalker! He went over and asked what was going on. The man starting exclaiming that these were his wife's pups. The dogwalker shook her head wide-eyed. Dental Student and the dogwalker stood inside the park and called the dog owner and the police. The police took the man and Dental Students statement and walked away. This week, the District Attorney's office called Dental Student to state they were most likely pressing charged for attempted grand larceny! At first we thought this was silly, but then we realized how upsetting this must have been for the woman - we were certainly disturbed by it!

Dental Student and I started talking about all the pups around the city who are tied up outside restaurants and stores and how easy it is to steal them. As dog friendly as most of NYC is, sometimes they do prohibit dogs. Recently, our laundry room and local CVS placed "no pets allowed" signs outside their doors. While we certainly understand that not all people are pup lovers, we would much rather just not take Havi on these errands than leave her outside. In the course of a mere 2 minute errand, your pup could be taken, a lose dog could attack your leashed up pup, or a little kid may taunt her.

Additional pit bull food for thought: this event made us realize Havi would make the WORST guard dog, as she happily licked the man trying to steal the little pups. Yes, pit bulls are oh so scary!

walking gear

Continuing on our theme of how great it is to live with a big dog in a small apartment on a budget...

We love reading other blogs and getting great ideas about pup products. We got to use some of our favorite ones on our walk this weekend!

When we first rescued Havi she was well-trained in some areas and not so much in others. After a full month of my arm almost falling off, and Havi's unaffected nature regarding the choke collars, we tried the Gentle Leader. Havi was immediately a better walker, but there was a negative result. Havi was in extreme pain from the leash around her nose, her fur started rubbing away, she would plop down pawing at her nose, and run when we took her leash out. Some friends in the building with another awesome pit recommended the Easy Walk Pet Harness. Havi loves it! She walks like a perfect angel, and is no longer in pain. The major difference is the Easy Walk Pet Harness is that it pulls more from the chest, as opposed to the nose/snout area. Our persistence with making Havi walk on our left side and sit at corners/when she meets new friends in addition to the Harness has made her the ultimate walking companion!

We bought this water bottle on a recommendation from SIL, and love it! The Pet Crew Handi Drink is a water bottle we clip onto our belt and fill with water at any restaurant. The blue part acts as a bowl to capture the water.

We originally wanted the Ruff Wear Palisades Backpack after two different bloggers chatted about it. But we settled for the cheaper Stansport Saddlebag for Dogs. It makes Havi more approachable, gives her a job, tires her out, and she carries her OWN food and ball!

What fun walking gear do you have?!