Erik turns to me with that way he has, to indicate that I have somehow switched from speaking in English to speaking in Crazy, and says something like, “It’s been a while since you’ve seen that movie, right?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess. Why, that’s not what happens?”

“Yeah. He goes to reach for her hand and dies. She then picks his hand up and throws it off of hers.”

“Oh.”

While I love the smell of baking bread, and I love knowing that I can whip up fresh bread from the contents of my (theoretical) pantry, I don’t really subscribe to the homemade bread snobbery that sometimes afflicts the culinarily inclined. Bread from the bakery and from farmer’s markets are often ridiculously cheap! While certainly, flour and eggs and salt, etc. add up to mere pennies, the addition of other ingredients and flavors (especially if you are trying to go the all fresh route) can be not only expensive, but time consuming, in preparation and in shopping. Since I don’t have really great, well-stocked supermarkets near me, that requires a lengthy subway trip to get certain ingredients. It is at that point that I say, it is completely well worth it to just buy bread.

There is a bakery a couple of blocks from me that often has really great bread. You have to get there while it is still morning, or there will be very little left, and it will be stale. But they also have a chocolate cake that is fabulous, and the cookies are also excellent – and relatively cheap. I am all for making things at home, but I hate being made to feel guilty for buying things that I could very well make myself. Most of the time, when I eat out at restaurants, I will feel really guilty about ordering something that I could definitely prepare for myself at home for at least half the cost. But then, I have to remember that food should be fun and nourishing. Screw the guilt. At the end of the day, who cares?

Except, these days, everyone is parroting phrases like, “sustainability” and “locavores” and carbon footprints. And I just read The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals recently, which, while being a good read, also scared me. Because, corn! It’s way evil.

The winner gets to go to the National City Chase championship in New Orleans, and the winner of that goes to the International one in Morocco. So really, most people (Erik and I included) were playing for the fun of it. There were over 20 different challenges you could choose to complete, and the object was to complete 10 of those challenges as quickly as you could. Erik and I ended up completing 9. We came just shy of 10, because we were getting close to the finish time.

The challenges were kind of in riddle form, obliquely referring to locations and/or the possible tasks. When I find the clue sheet again, I’ll transcribe some of them.

These are the challenges we completed:

At Christopher St. Pier, we had to come up with an original cheer and perform it, including some specific terms, and a kick, jump, cheer, and something unique with a pom pom.

At Pier 40, there were two different challenges – one was kayaking around in a large circle. Erik did most of the rowing, as my lack of coordination and lack of strength didn’t do very much. That was a lot of fun, and something I want to do again. At the other end of the pier, was to roll a die, and you had to eat something corresponding to whatever number you rolled. Erik and I both rolled a 5, which was just some wasabi paste. The other choices we didn’t get were live crickets, anchovies, live mealworms, and two others I don’t remember.

We then went to the Fat Cat bar on Christopher St. for a ping pong challenge. Each team played another team, excpet one teammate had to hook their arms through their other teammate’s arms (that teammate had to keep their hands on their hips). Erik and I had an advantage in that he could see over my head easily, but he had to kneel a little to put his arms through mine. We lost our first round, but won the second. The first couple we played had to play 4 different teams before they finally won.

After that, we went to the magic shop on 21st St (which I remembered from the times the Bookspanners went to bars on that street). Our mission there was to learn a trick and then perform it for a bystander. The hard thing was finding people who were willing to stop and watch. I messed up my trick, but Erik did his pretty well. There was a very nice couple of men who stopped and watched us.

We then headed to 34th st for a clue that had a typo in it. It indicated a spy shop on W.34th street, but they meant E.33rd St, I think. After a futile look at the J&R annex in Macy’s, we decided to give up on it and head to the Joshua tree for our next challenge. (We were only allowed to walk and take the subway, and many places were several loong avenues away from any subway stops).

At Joshua Tree, we were given a Palm and a sheet with 6 different photo ops we needed to take. We had to get 5 of them in 30 minutes or less. They were things like, take a photo with a non-participant giving you a piggy back ride, take a photo of two non-participants giving one of us a kiss on the cheek at the same time, etc. At first it seemed hopeless, but we stuck with it, and got it in plenty of time.

We then headed to another pier, like 80-something, for what ended up being a tandem-bike riding challenge. We just had to ride the bike in about a 10-minute loop. It was quite fun, with Erik doing most of the work.

We were on our way back to the subway station from it, when we happened to pass another challenge. It was a wall-climbing thing at the Manhattan Plaza Health Club. I hated it and I wanted to come down from the wall but the very patient instructor and Erik kept urging me on. After several tries, I begged to come down, and they finally let me down. We still got the point despite the fact that I didn’t make it all the way up the wall.

At this point, we had 9 points (We got a point just for getting the clue sheet). So we headed back to the finish line (Webster Hall), and were hopeful to swing by another challenge place (Kaplan, where there was a grammar test rumored to be the challenge). But it was getting late, and my legs were threatening to give out on me.

The after party was actually quite nice. They had huge platters of actual food that they kept refilling – chicken and steak and pasta salads and veggies. It was very tasty (although I wonder if it was really that good, or if it was only that good because we were so tired and had only eaten protein bars all day). The drink tickets were only good for Amstel Light, white wine, and Drambuie. Erik and I had never had Drambuie before, so we tried it. It was terrible, horrible, disgusting stuff. It was sickeningly sweet, and tasted kind of like cough drops mixed with licorice mixed with evil. We stuck to white wine afterwards, but we headed out pretty early, since we were so exhausted. The 8th place finishers did 10 challenges in just over 3 and a half hours. Erik and I only managed 9 in just under 6 hours. Although there were ways to get two points before the race even started – collecting money for charity beforehand, or completing ten items in a small scavenger hunt that was printed in the Metro giveaway newspaper on Friday. And everyone got a point just for getting the clue sheet.

So, at the end of all that, Erik calculated that we walked (and kayaked and biked) about 9 miles. I am so sore.

But that was a pretty fun day. And all the places that lent their locations and/or services were very smart – Erik and I will totally go back to half the places we had to travel to – kayaking, Fat Cat, tandem biking, the health club (it’s beautiful). And I liked that we were forced to visit areas we normally would never have gone to – especially in one day’s time.

And how many other people can say that they went kayaking, played ping pong, went tandem-bike riding, performed magic tricks, and climbed a wall, all in the span of six hours?