But we all knew that was how it would go.

This post is not to reminisce on New York, but to explain my drought in blog posts with a story.

I was robbed on my last night in New York City.

I left the house around 7 p.m., to take the subway downtown to Madison Square Park for some Shake Shack and last-night-in-NYC farewells.

It was a pleasant night with some really wonderful people. I made it back uptown to my apartment around 3 a.m.. I turned the lock on my door, pushed it open, then “Thud.”

The door wouldn’t open. My roommate had somehow left the chain on the door when he left for his evening of gallivanting.

Why would he do that? So I cursed his name and called him up to ask him.

He said he did no such thing.

It must have been the new tenant, I thought. She had stopped by the day before to measure the rooms. Maybe, she had started her move early and chained us out.

Remembering that the window was most likely open, I went back out and scaled the fence of the playground that borders our apartment. From inside the playground, I could see one of the windows on our first-floor apartment propped open with the familiar piece of wood.

Can you see where this is going? I still had no clue at this point.

So, still feeling agile and ninja-like, I climbed the fence from the playground to the side of our building, shimmied down and wiggled in through the window.

I unchained the door, cursed my silly roommate, then headed to my room.

Now, I have some of the best friends in the world and as I was out celebrating my last night, they were in the process of driving from Michigan through the night to move me out in the morning.

To be as prepared as possible, I had disassembled and packed everything I owned into a nice central pile, awaiting their arrival.

All that was left in my room was a mattress, a dresser and a desk.

I flipped on my bedroom light and noticed one of my duffel bag sitting precariously on my bed. Its contents were strewn out over the mattress.

My dresser drawers were pulled open. Weird. So were my desk drawers.

And where was my computer?

Yup, folks. I was the victim of a robbery.

All in all, they took:

- One 17-inch Macbook Pro
- Two hard drives containing all the media work I had done over the semester
- A point-and-shoot digital camera
- A flip camera
- iPod
- Every charger I owned, including ones to things they didn’t steal (like my cell phone)
- My favorite backpack, which contained my favorite chapstick

The insurance company estimated the thieves made off with $3800 in merch.

Obviously, it was really expensive chapstick.

Then, I had my first negative experience with the police. Apparently the NYPD doesn’t staff the night shift with the older, more considerate officers. They use the young guys, fresh out of the academy who just want to argue with you and dispute what you saw. Luckily, my roommate came home to drunkenly argue theories of robberies with them and allow me to wallow in self-pity, while officer A’s partner incorrectly took down my address, phone number and name.

I spent the rest of the night laying on the floor, watching the sun rise, because I was told not to touch “the crime scene.”

The evidence collection team, who was supposed to come at 6 a.m., arrived around noon, brushed the window sills, gave me a report and hit the road. To their credit, they couldn’t find me because they were given the wrong address. When they arrived, they were incredibly pleasant, almost negating the impression set by their comrades earlier in the morning.

So that’s my story. I got robbed. I didn’t have a computer for a month, thus no blogging.

But the moral of the story is that I have one now. And you know what it cost me? Nothing.

Well, $100 for the year of renter’s insurance. But, obviously that was worth it.

So, if you rent, call your insurance agent. $100 may seem like a lot of money. But $3800 is a lot more. It’s super cheap and if nothing happens, it will be the best $100 you ever wasted. Seriously, do it. I’m broke. I did it. It was obviously worth it. I used State Farm, so I’d recommend you start there.

Now, I’m back on the interwebs. I’ve got a month’s worth of posting to catch up on.

All this week, the hydrant has been gushing on my block. Today after my run, I jumped in. I checked “play in an open fire hydrant during a hot summer day” off my NYC to-do list.

I met him and Snow up in Harlem around 11:30 a.m. Thursday and we hopped in the car and zipped over to Queens.

At the vet, Snow and CJ waited patiently. She didn’t give off the impression of a dog who was two days away from death, but she did do a lot of whining and squirming while we waited for her turn in the examination room.

Much of the argument I am trying to present in my piece on pit bulls is that they are treated almost as a minority. People fear them and hate them without ever really trying to understand them as a breed. It was quite refreshing to see CJ conversing openly with the two other couples about their dogs in the waiting room. They all had much smaller dogs, but it was clear that everyone in the room was speaking the same language: the language of passionate, concerned pet owners.

Questions like “What is she in for?” and “What about your dog, what is he here for?” were thrown around.

They joked about spaying and neutering and their apprehensions, projecting their human fears of their own castration onto their beloved pets. The surgery Snow was facing was essentially a glorified spaying. Her uterus would have to be removed in order to take care of the infection.

After much waiting, Snow got up on the table. She wasn’t too keen on having her swollen and painful private parts probed and put up a bit of a fight by growling and thrashing. Her metal chain and long nails on the metal exam table sounded like hail on a tin roof as she struggled to get down and away from the vet’s probing hands.

The vet very quickly and methodically produced a leather muzzle from the drawer for her to wear as a precaution. CJ and another veterinary technician held her tight. Snow leaned into CJ’s embrace, as if hoping to bury herself in his thick black leather jacket to escape from the uncomfortable probing.

A quick x-ray showed her uterus was in bad shape, and her spine was a bit arthritic from giving birth to puppies.

The uterus is the dark mass near the right half of the x-ray.

CJ haggled a bit with the vet to get the bare minimum of services rendered to get Snow healthy again. Then, he told Snow he’d be back first thing in the morning on Saturday to pick her up.

CJ dropped me off at home. I ran out to the 110th Street station to snap a quick stock shot of the subway for my latest Covering Education blog post.

I’m covering transportation and safety issues for the course and the post was about a new report released by the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy that projected MTA fare hikes to be at least 15 percent to make up for their $400 million budget gap. Last month, they voted to phase out free and discounted MetroCards for the city’s public school students. The report calculated that this hike would cost a working family of four with two school aged children an extra $2300 a year in transportation costs.

For a simple blog post, I spent entirely too much time on an accompanying infographic on the history of MTA fare hikes. I’m pretty proud of it though.

I only took the subway up to 116th St. Then, I walked back down to my apartment. Since I had my camera, I figured I’d finally take the picture I’d seen countless tourists take before on my daily walk to and from school. This is Tom’s Restaurant. Probably best known as “the Seinfeld Restaurant.” Although, the diner scenes were shot on a set, they used this shot of the actual Tom’s Restaurant in the show.

Look familiar?

The restaurant is also the inspiration for the song “Tom’s Diner,” which was released in 1981 by Suzanne Vega.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z66rDVkaK4w&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x234900&color2=0x4e9e00]

My personal favorite, and probably a bit more familiar is the 1990 remix by British group DNA.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWMToInrke0&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x234900&color2=0x4e9e00]

I caught a cool glimpse of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine as I turned to cross the street to head back home.

I finished the day off glued to my computer, working on various projects. The computer work was only broken by a nice run in Central Park. I listened to the first episode of the new Freakonomics podcast. I’m a fan and it will fit nicely into my running repertoire.

I like busy days. I never seem to get through everything i’m supposed to, but I always go to bed feeling complete.

My block has been embracing the snowfall with enthusiasm. The guys in the neighborhood have been out since 11 a.m., crafting this beautiful couple in celebration of the blizzard, Valentine’s Day and Jennifer Lopez (check out the ba-donk-a-donk on that beauty).

Every Tuesday around noon, I return home to grab a meal and retreat into my thoughts before returning to class. It also happens that at noon the children of PS 135 descend on the playground outside my window.

I never get the retreat I’m hoping for.

From my perch at my kitchen table, my window is a frame. There is no need for television during lunchtime. The children provide the entertainment. There is every ingredient for compelling drama in the fifth grade: love, heartbreak, jealousy and anger.

They burst from the school doors as though someone has just split open a bag of coffee beans that is straining under the weight of its load.

They pour onto the sidewalk and their voices shake me out of my thoughts and draw me to the window.

The proctor, enlisted in an attempt to bring order, unlocks the padlock barring the children from their sanctuary. He wipes the rust and sweat from the lock on his trousers and the steady stream that built up behind him bursts once more into the yard.

The pigeons that pick at the puddles and candy wrappers from yesterday´s melee launch to the rooftops. Their foraging is stolen away by screams and trampling feet.

The playground is designed for freedom; inside there is space for running, climbing and half of a basketball court. From the outside, the tall black gates block the lot off like a prison yard.

The girls with fluorescent beads in their hair retreat to the fence behind the sole play structure outside my window. Here, I am privy to all their secrets. They bicker over boys, share headphones and flop about to the beat of their iPods.

A lost basketball strays from the court. It rolls into the girls’ forbidden territory. The boys all point to one of their own. A scout is sacrificed to rescue the ball.

The boy keeps his gaze directed at the ball, never straying to eyes. The girls tower over him; their young bodies have matured much quicker than his, giving them a natural advantage. They could eat him alive if they wanted.

Riverside Park. Near 109th and Riverside Drive.

More Riverside Park. It’s really a haven in there during weekday afternoons. The trees keep all of the sounds out and everything feels green again. I love NYC, but I miss wide open spaces. Not sure what I’m going to do during ski season.

The children. Who needs an alarm clock when you have a playground next door. These kids are great. I can’t watch them too much, for fear of being perceived as a creep, but its nice when I’m fussing about in the kitchen to hear them laughing and playing. Dirty mouths, though. I still thought the f-word was “funk” at this age. They know the correct pronunciation, that’s for sure.

For the past month or so, I think there has been a street fair on the stretch of Broadway at the end of my block every weekend. Yesterday, they shut down the uptown lanes of Broadway all the way from 109th (where I live) to 116th Street. After a morning spent biking through traffic with camera in hand filming the Broadway Bomb, I caught up with my fellow J-schoolers Maia, Mamta and Mustafa for some street fair action. There was the usual fare: gyros, corn on the cob, crafts, a moon bounce and some clowns. The weather was beautiful and all of the Upper West Side was out enjoying the day.

It was a great environment for colors.

Crossing 110th St.