On Saturday morning, Mike and Matt said they liked the idea of getting a croissant at the farmers market for breakfast, so that's where we went first. It had been rainy on Friday, and it was supposed to rain off and on until sometime in the afternoon. We had planned to go to Governors Island that day to play miniature golf and look at some art and the cool old buildings (well, I was the one who was most interested in doing the latter two things), and I hoped we'd get the break in the rain that was being called for.
At the market, we got some tomatoes called Chocolate Cherry. "These don't really taste like chocolate, do they?" I asked the farmer. No. They get to be very dark when they're really ripe. They're an heirloom variety that's a little bigger than cherry size, and they tasted very nice—even if they didn't have even a hint of cocoa flavor. :-)
I also bought two bunches of spearmint, one for each of the guys. I'm glad they're as enthusiastic about mint as their favorite uncle, even if they are weirdos for preferring spearmint to peppermint. ;-p They nibbled on the leaves while they were here; I set the bunches upright in glasses of shallow water to keep them fresh. And I figured Tracey could make some tea out of them when they got home. Mike and Matt both liked the peppermint tea I had in the fridge.
When I saw these big-ass cabbages at another farmstand,
I asked the boys to pose with them over their heads. For old times' sake. But they wouldn't do it. If they hadn't already watched the Wizards of Waverly Place movie, I could have threatened them with all of a sudden not being able to receive the Disney Channel unless some cabbages went over heads. But that spell had already been cast. Dammit! :-)
At the Wilklow Orchards stand, my usual spot for buying meat, they were giving out samples of jowl bacon they'd fried up on a hot plate. My nephews are being raised Jewish—their own bar mitzvahs will be here before we know it—but they don't keep kosher. I wasn't necessarily going to try the bacon, but the gal had three pieces on toothpicks and I didn't want to look like a wuss. It was basically hot pork fat. Mmmm. Hot pork fat. *drools like Homer Simpson*
Moments after I took that photo, rainwater that had collected on the roof of WO's tent slid off and drenched the left side of my body. At least my right side still had some dignity. *sigh* The gal and guy from the stand were very apologetic, and I knew it was just one of those things of being in the wrong place at the wrong time without my umbrella up, so I shrugged it off and bought some ground beef.
We ran into my friend Eugene, who does public relations for the Prospect Park Alliance. He was going to be working that day because of a huge birthday celebration for Michael Jackson—he would have been 51—in the park hosted by Spike Lee. The Brooklyn Vegan blog has about a bajillion photos of the party. And that's only part 1! And BV, if you happen to follow my link back to this post, sorry for all of the meat and dairy references that have gone before and sorry in advance for the ones that are bound to come after this.
After I bought some flowers, which I usually buy last because they're the most cumbersome thing to schlep, we went back home and ate our breakfasts. The boys requested butter for their croissants. I gave it to them even though I told them that, of course, croissant dough is already loaded with butter. I suspect they won't be turning into vegans anytime soon.
The guys brought some of their newly favorite Wii and DS games with them, and they played a lot throughout the weekend. And they also played LocoRoco 2 and—after Michael requested it—the original

LocoRoco on my PSP. They were disappointed that I didn't have my Wii hardwired to the Internet and hadn't figured out how to access the Web with it using my wireless router, if that's possible. So they couldn't download a bunch of new Miis for me. They ended up using my Mii and the one Bob created. Matt even said, enthusiastically, "I want to play as Bob." It was fun watching them make Bob and I beat up on each other in
Swordplay Duels in Wii Sports Resorts. Mike got to the end of the Swordplay Showdown for the first time ever using Bobby. And because performances are saved to the Wii itself and not to the game disc, if I ever buy WSR, Bob's Mii will already be an expert swordsman. You know, like in real life. :-)
I was a little bit anxious about taking the guys on the ferry to Governors Island because I knew people weren't being allowed to go into the water at New York City beaches and I didn't know whether the Water Taxis to the island would be affected by the remnants of big storms out in the Atlantic. I looked on the Internet, and as far as I could tell, the ferries were still running regularly, so off we went.
We took a 3 train to the Clark Street station in Brooklyn Heights
and walked to the Fulton Ferry Landing. The ferries run every 20 minutes between the landing and Pier 101 on the island so I didn't really try to time it so we'd get there right before one arrived. But as luck would have it, one was due 5 minutes after we made it to the landing. And it came on time. I asked one of the two people manning the boat whether the trip was any rougher than usual, and she said it wasn't. I needn't have worried. The boat ride was shorter than the subway ride, and it wasn't at all rocky. And despite my urging them to look at the Manhattan skyline, the boys had their noses stuck in their DSes the whole way. Before we got to the ferry landing, I took a picture of them with the skyline in the background, though.
The first thing we did when we arrived on
the island was call my Dad and Granny since it was right at the time I usually call them on a Saturday anyway. Then we started walking toward our main goal, the miniature golf course, which was about as far from Pier 101 as you could get on the island. The guys were hungry for lunch, and we serendipitously talked to a cute, young park ranger outside the entrance to Water Taxi Beach, which he said was the only place the island had to eat that was a step above a snack bar.
All three of us got burgers, and we split two orders of fries. I was quite impressed with the quality of the food. The burgers were irregularly shaped, so you could tell they were made by hand and weren't long-frozen, bought-by-the-case patties. The fries were good too, with a little spice to go along with the salt. The best part was the fixings bar. They had several kinds of ketchup and mustard plus relish. I put pineapple chipotle ketchup on my burger (it had tomato in it too), and M&M got honey mustard for their fries. Mike said he liked this food better than what he's gotten at 5 Guys. Matt liked it a lot, but he thought 5 Guys' was better. Both still thought the best burger they've ever had was at a Bobby's Burger Palace. They liked the unusual things you can get for your burger at that place, and they said I'd like it for that reason too. At Bobby's, you can get potato chips on your burger; it's called crunchify-ing it. At the beach grill, there were bits of potato chip at the fixings bar too, and M&M were convinced they were there so you could crunchify your burger. And maybe they were; the bits were pretty small.
By the time we were done lunch, the rain had completely stopped. Yipee! And we set out for the golf course. There were some cool sculptures near the course:

This one is called Hivemind.
This creepy-looking one, from front and back, is The Agony of Man.
Figment's City of Dreams Mini Golf Course was
certainly challenging, even though Michael got a hole-in-one on the second hole. He hit the ball right up into the Maneki Neko Japanese cat sculpture. In fact, he got four holes-in-one altogether.
We all got holes-in-one on hole 17, which was purposefully designed to allow everyone to feel "a few moments of victory and the assurance that we are capable of greatness." Now look here, mister hippy-dippy artsy-fartsy mini-golf-hole-creating guy! If the world had wanted me to feel that way, I would have been born into the Bush, Russert, Cheney, Goldberg, Bayh, Casey, Kristol, or Hastert families. I'm a Hawley. I'm supposed to work for my holes-in-one—and my political/media jobs.
I think I can speak for the guys when I say that our favorite hole was the one set up like skee ball. You shot the ball three times and took the lowest-point hole you were able to get it into as your score. Matt
got a 2, and Mike and I both got a 4.
Hole 8 was cool looking but crazy difficult, and the score card listed it as a par 1. I was going to file a complaint with the governing body for American mini golfers, but I see on the Web site I linked to above that it's meant to be a par 4. That's more like it. I got it in the hole in 5, and both of the guys took a 10 on that.
After we were done with the golf, we decided to head back to the ferry and not look into any of the art galleries on the island. Maybe some other day.
I was really digging the old buildings on the grounds. I'll put up some more photos of them in a part III of this post.
Mike posed with the sign marking the Governor's House, which was right near Pier 101. The text says, in part: "The name 'Governor's House' is a misnomer as no New York State governor ever occupied the building. In 1698, the British officially acquired the island, and English colonial governors established a headquarters here, resulting in the name 'Governors Island.' The house may have been called 'the Governor's House' due to its proximity to the location of the original English colonial governor's residence, which no longer survives."

I posed in front of the house itself.

I'd told the guys I planned to make spaghetti and salad for dinner, and they asked me to make meatballs like I had for them the previous time they spent the weekend with me. They'd complained that they were a little too spicy at the time, but this time, they specifically asked me whether I had red pepper flakes to put in them, so they'd taste like they did before. Winna!
The guys helped me make the meatballs and some
citrus vinaigrette, which we also had two years ago. We used a combination of orange and grapefruit as the main juices, plus a tablespoon of lemon. I heated up jar sauce, the Seeds of Change brand, and cooked fresh pasta from Breezy Hill Orchard that I'd frozen. I did up a package of regular and a package of whole wheat pasta, which were shaped like fettuccini. It was a lot of food for the three of us. The boys wolfed down their salads, and they ate all of their meatballs and made good dents in their pasta.
After dinner, I wanted us to watch The Prince of Egypt, the first cartoon DreamWorks made. I'd recorded it for us to watch two years ago, but we didn't get a chance to see it then. It'd gotten good reviews, and I thought the boys would get a kick out of watching a movie from the year they were born: 1998. Eh, what do I know? M&M weren't too enthused, but I pulled rank. We weren't going to have time to watch the whole thing before they had to get ready for bed, but I said we could catch the last half hour in the morning.
The guys thought the animation was bad, and it was—when compared with what they're used to watching. I thought the parting and unparting of the Red Sea were very nicely done, though. And they didn't seem to think the movie sucked too bad overall.
I love the movie's trivia page on imdb. The producers consulted "roughly 600 religious experts to make the film as accurate as possible." And yet, as the movie makes clear at the outset, they took liberties with the Biblical story of Moses, some of which I recalled and some of which I had to read about to remember. For instance, it was Pharaoh's daughter—not his wife, as shown in the movie—who pulled Moses from the bulrushes and adopted him as her own child. Making that change allowed for the rivalry between Moses and Pharaoh's birth son, who'd become Egypt's leader by the time Moses demanded that the Egyptians free his people. The movie also made Moses's brother, Aaron, a wuss who didn't do much of anything to help the Hebrews get out of captivity, even though both he and Moses went before Pharaoh in the Biblical account. And he, not Moses, turned the Nile to blood. And I remembered that Moses deliberately and passionately murdered an Egyptian who was mistreating the Hebrew slaves; in the movie, the killing is shown as mostly accidental.
And the most outrageous misrepresentation to me was that in one scene, some of God's Chosen People are shown paying retail. You expect us to believe that? Come on! :-)
On Sunday morning, Matt, Mike, and I went to La Bagel Delight for breakfast. Then we watched the end of the movie, and they were going to teach me how to play Garbage, but their parents showed up just as we were starting to deal the cards.
Rudy and I went out to the gate to greet Tracey and David. M&M stayed inside, which gave me a chance to jokingly tell T&D, "The last time I saw the boys, they were running like hell down Flatbush." Later, when Tracey asked me whether they'd been good, I said, "After I managed to get them back from the white slavers, they were so glad to see the apartment again that they were perfect angels." Hah! It's always funny when you kid that you were totally incompetent at keeping someone's children—and your own flesh and blood—safe.
The five of us went to La Villa, so David could try the world's best Sicilian pizza. Then we stopped at the 5th Avenue Farmers Market, where I bought some more pasta and both David and I bought several bars from Daisy May Natural Soap. I also loaded up on peaches and nectarines.
On the walk back to the apartment—where we were going to have some more of the chocolate-and-mint cupcakes and Tracey was going to try my lemon verbena ice cream, which I'll write about in my next all-food-and-drinks post—we talked about my possibly selling ice cream under the Huge Pooch brand at that farmers market next summer. Tracey said I needed to create a Tricolor Basset flavor that had something white, something black, and something brown in it. And somebody else—was it Matt or Mike?—suggested a Basset Tracks flavor along the line of Moose Tracks. Michael offered to create any art I'd need. And David asked whether I planned to take Rudy to the market with me. I said I might. He said I should announce it ahead of time to generate excitement for his visit: "The Huge Pooch himself will be at the market in three weeks!" All good ideas, for sure.
After dessert, when it was time for the guys to go, they said they were going to miss me. And I said the same thing. We had a great time. And we have to do it again next year, if not sooner.