A NEW ONE FOR THE BURGER CULT

while we were away taking portland by storm, all our friends started raving about this burger place we'd never heard of on the west side of town. so on saturday we decided to take ourselves down there to investigate. i was a little bit more excited than necessary on account of i take my burgers pretty seriously, as we all know. 

new york is doing that thing right now where it's thinking about becoming springtime but it's not totally committed all the way, so we get a warm-ish day followed by a cold-ish day, and then a warm-ish day, and the snow does its best to melt but it can't really, and so things just get grosser and slushier ... but it's okay, i'm okay with it. it's kind of a fun, frustrating time to be alive, march is. the weather is a yo-yo, we're all a yo-yo, you get a sunny day and all of instagram is all "HEY IT'S SUNNY!" and then the next day it turns cloudy and instagram is all "aw, blurp. here, look at my cat." it's fun. human nature! and... nature! what is the point of this blog post so far? (now that i'm finished writing this thing and giving it the once over i can assure you, it only gets worse from here.)

so, this first photo is of a really impressive pile of dirty snow. i'd just like for this visual reminder of what march looks like in the city to exist on this blog for forever, or for at least until i decide to edit it out, cause sometimes i do that. i also think 60 degrees might be the perfect amount of degrees. i just want it to be sweater weather for always, don't you?

beeteedub i want you to note i have five cup holders on my stroller. this is not an excessive amount of cup holders, it turns out. surprising, but true. i use them all. one of them acts as a garbage can. 

here's another quick side step now: a few rad commenters in the accompany giveaway last weekend requested that i write some more about the companies i come across that champion the ethical + handmade, so i'm doing that right this minute. scroll if you must! scaramanga uk sent this beautiful leather satchel as a gift, it's really just a lovely bit of beat up leather, i've really loved it to death. scaramanga bags are all handmade, from leather tanned using a semi-vegetable method (fewer dangerous chemicals, check), they work with many small-scale suppliers and family-run producers in traditional artisan + craft based industries using traditional materials, methods and skills, the owner of the company goes to india himself on buying trips + always takes the time to visit the families of his suppliers. so add them to your list. you can read more about them HERE. thumbs up. now, burgers.

okay wait, inadvisable tangent coming first. a few weeks ago a friend i follow on instagram wrote a post on her blog about where mommy blogs fall short. i agreed with her on lots of it and said as much in a comment, and then the more i sat and ruminated on it, the more i came around to it from a different angle all together. now, this is a really inadvisable tangent, i wrote it planning all the while to erase it but then, hey! so here we are. the way blogs have changed and evolved is interesting to watch. sometimes it makes me feel sad that being really personal in blogs is becoming rarer and rarer, but i think it is too nuanced an issue to ever peg on blogs becoming businesses alone. i have my theories. i've always fantasized about killing the blog. someday i will, i'm sure. in the last year that's gotten much louder for me, which i've realized is because i was telling myself i should feel worried about things that, it turns out, i don't really need to worry about. this blog is very, very personal to me. it always will be. it's also a place where i get to pursue the things that excite me, that is so neat. some people collect stamps, some people run for, like, hours. whatever. i like thinking about getting dressed. i like decorating my house. i like looking at pretty things. i like promoting cool people making cool stuff. i also like writing. ain't nothing wrong with it. i think we all have a personal responsibility to ourselves to engage in the things we do like, and not engage in the things we don't like. i have fun doing this. i'm a proud blisness owner. (blog business? roll with it.) as huck gets older--hell, as i get older--and as certain spots in the blogger/reader relationship become ... stranger ... and, well, louder ... it definitely gets harder to put anything too valuable or sensitive in here. it is what it is. but so long as i'm writing this blog, it'll get raw, and it'll get personal. it'll also get sponsored. obviously there's a balance. i've been putting all my raw + personal in a book right now instead of in here, while still keeping pace with the posts about brands i'm excited to be working with, so sure, it can get lopsided. i knew it might. but it'll right itself eventually, and i won't worry about it anymore. i always feel bad when people express their unhappiness with me, but it turns out i can't make the whole internet happy. it was silly of me to feel so strongly that i could, or that i should, in the first place. i make me happy. i make my family happy. and this makes me happy. if the internet makes me unhappy, it's cause i'm doing it wrong. i was doing it wrong. it's like what we say all the time at our house: you gotta be the boss of your own poops, henry holbrook. so, i am. i am releasing the rest of the world's poops from my toilet. hey should we talk about cheeseburgers now? seems like a good segue?

gotham west market! so. gotham west market is a market under this sprawling apartment high rise called gotham west. it sounds so obvious when you say it like that, but somehow that wasn't at all what i was expecting. it's in hell's kitchen, all the good food is in hell's kitchen. the market is a bit of a mecca of aaaaall the hipster things--it's also got a ramen shop, an artisanal coffee shop ("you can't spell artisanal without the anal," which is good to know since i can never remember how to spell artisanal the first time around), and a book shop in the middle selling all sorts of kinfolk--but brandon and i saw that it was good anyway, amen. anyway, we went there, we ate, we wandered around the city, we tried to buy huck a helmet and failed twice, it was a pretty good saturday actually. and the burgers were pretty decent. the sweet potato fries were really decent. praise be to the burger gods. 

"be the lone sweet potato in a basket full of russets!" i don't know, that orange fry was real motivational to me in the moment.

he makes me real happy, too.

the end.