I'll drink to that

It's been a good week for socializing. On Wednesday, despite having to come to work in the rain -- standing at the bus stop was not a particularly dry experience -- and having the Mets game postponed until tonight, I still got home around the same time I would have otherwise. Sure, I left work earlier, just after midnight, but instead of heading straight home, I took two co-workers up on an offer to join them for a few drinks.

It wasn't just the pints of Yuengling or the talk of music, baseball and Cory Lidle that made it worthwhile, but it was the whole experience. I turned to one of the guys sometime after 3 a.m. and said, "This is the first time I've been out with coworkers to shoot the shit since I worked at the newspaper four years ago." Unbelievable, but true. The few times I'd gone out for a drink when I worked at the magazine it was for someone's send-off drinks -- and in one instance, my own. With the offices in New Jersey -- as well as my home -- and most of the other employees living in Manhattan, I didn't often partake in those after-work invitations to meet up at a pub.

So finding open bars between midnight and 4 a.m. in midtown New York on the East Side -- 30 blocks below where Lidle's plane crashed -- was at times a difficult process, but we found two and knocked a few back until the wee hours, then went our separate ways to sleep away the morning.

As for today, I caught up with a college friend who e-mailed last night only hours before she and her fiance got on a plane for New York. Met them at Rockefeller Center, then we walked down to the library to gawk at the design of the building and escape the biting wind whipping through the New York canyons. A drink before work and talk of what they should do while here took us up to my departure time, but we'll probably catch up again before they head north on Wednesday.

Boy, not nearly as involved and interesting as I'd planned to make such otherwise mundane events sound, but I'm still a little weary from the extremely late nights and an afternoon strolling around Manhattan. I'll be OK; I have a couple days off in a week.