Reason #185: I don't know of any other block besides mine in the entire five boroughs where the price of a good haircut includes a generous glass of twelve year old Macallan single malt Scotch and some Ghirardelli chocolate.

Yesterday evening, after an all-day CLE program in midtown, I headed to my neighborhood and stopped by my favorite haircut place for a long overdue trim. While I waited for Jen to be available, I had a Chivas (Mario was out of single malts, but said he was planning to stock up on Macallan) and chatted with another customer who works at a retained executive search firm. Nice guy, knows his Scotch (had me try a Ghirardelli dark chocolate with the Chivas; very nice), and his father's a lawyer.

Anyway, as Jen was cutting my hair, Mario came back downstairs and asked me for job search advice on behalf of his daughter, who's just about to finish law school next month. Never mind that I'm not thrilled with my own employment situation, but I asked for more about her background so I could be as helpful as possible. Turns out she had started law school part-time while she worked as a paralegal... at a medical malpractice firm here in the city.

"Defense?" I asked.

"How do you mean?"

"Did the firm represent the patients or the doctors?"

"The doctors."

And then we both named my old firm at the same time. He told me his daughter's first name, and I followed it with her last. His daughter left after I'd been there for only about six months, but I did know her, if not very well. All present laughed at the coincidence, then I asked him to convey my congratulations and good wishes to his daughter and that I hope she finds what she's looking for.

Saturday afternoon, after running a few errands in the thick, sweltering soup of the Upper East Side, I was a drenched, disgusting mess. I needed a haircut, and I had originally planned to walk back past my apartment and up to the Supercuts at First and 90th - because it's convenient and relatively inexpensive, and because they usually don't butcher my hair too badly - but on my way up my block of 88th from Second, I saw something new.

Downstairs from Lily's Salon for Women, there was a new place - MetroHair, or MetroNYC, or something like that - having a grand opening sale, haircuts for $20. That's still more than I normally spend (it's $11 at my favorite place in midtown, but they close early on Saturdays, and there's no sense in spending $4 and 45 minutes on the subway to get there and back), but only a bit more than Supercuts, and I thought it might be worth seeing if someone new could do right by my hair.

I walked in, and there was a small bar. A middle-aged man stood behind it, a younger man sitting on one of the stools, both of them watching a flat-screen HDTV with a Yankees game from April playing on it. A bar.

"Sit! Come join us, have a drink, I will get someone to cut your hair. I'm Mario, this is Jim." I was hot, sweaty, and annoyed at the lack of success of some of my errands, so I glanced at the selection, and chose Glenmorangie. Not just Glenmorangie, the 15-year old Glenmorangie. Mario poured me a couple of fingers of Scotch over two small ice cubes, and I settled in. Jim and I chatted and watched as the Yankees overcame a 6-2 deficit in the bottom of the 9th inning to win 8-6 on a walk-off, three-run homer by A-Rod during his absurd, improbable April; then we switched to the live Mets game.

Mario returned and apologized for the delay (not that I was at all upset about it); someone from Lily's would be down shortly (a spiral staircase connects the two shops). He's been trying to find staff just for Metro - "really nice-looking girls with haircutting skills, not to be like Hooters, but to bring in the men" - but has been surprised at how difficult it's been. They've lost customers because of the wait sometimes, despite the HDTV, the bar, the swivel-TVs at each barber chair, the internet access (internet access?!). I told him I wished I knew someone to refer to him, but I surely don't.

A nice woman from Lily's named Liz eventually cut my hair, while I watched the first short while of "The Avengers" (eh). She did a fine job, and I was getting ready to pay my tab when Mario quoted me twenty dollars. "You forgot the Scotch," I said.

"No, no, the drinks are on the house."

I tipped Liz five bucks on the twenty-dollar haircut and left with a big smile on my face. I hope they didn't lose much money on me that day, and I hope the regular price for haircuts isn't too much more than $20, so that I can go back every four weeks or so.

Oh, yeah - and this morning, after growing tired of my moustache-twirling tic, I shaved my face clean of goatee again.

On family vacations when Mark and I were children, and maybe even particularly when we were teenagers, our father was very concerned with punctuality, and he sometimes got pretty upset when we were running late in the morning (which, in fairness, was often). So this morning, when Mark and I were sitting in the lobby of our hotel at 8:37 and wondering why Mom & Dad hadn't yet arrived for breakfast, it was absolutely unprecedented. But we still gave them until 8:45, as they're getting older and deserve a little leeway. When I called their room, they had just woken up - apparently Dad set their alarm for 7:30 in the evening. Whoops! Mark and I enjoyed a quiet breakfast together, during which I predicted they would be fed and ready to go at 10:15. We returned to our room to hang out, and they called, fed and ready to go, at 10:17. Particularly on the first night after the redeye, it would have been nice to have that extra hour or so of sleep, but I won't hold it against them.

First up was a visit to the Louvre. That the Louvre is larger than any other museum you've ever seen, so absurdly large that you won't believe the scale of it, is the kind of statement around which the human brain has difficulty getting itself in the same way it does with "The Grand Canyon is a mile-wide, mile-deep chasm in the desert and you simply won't believe the scale of it," until you see it right in front of you. We split up and spent a decent chunk of Wednesday at the Louvre, and I moved pretty quickly - yet I barely saw 10% of the collection. I would need a week to see everything, and two weeks to do it properly. I did see "Winged Victory" and "Joconde" (Mona Lisa) though, two of the pieces I'd have been annoyed to miss; I also saw most of the German, Flemish, and Dutch paintings and a tiny portion of the enormous, ego-sapping, manhood-robbing avalanche of French paintings. Every few rooms, there would be a student sitting at his or her own canvas, attempting to duplicate (or pay homage to) one of the masterworks on the wall; I took photos where it was allowed.

After a small, mediocre lunch in one of the Louvre's cafes, we went to Les Jardin de Palais Royal, the Academie de Musique (the old opera house), a pillar that Napoleon had stolen and/or built to honor himself, a park called Les Tuilleries, and then after a break for drinks at a cafe in the park, a far smaller museum called L'Orangerie, where we saw some interesting works. Then, a stop at Iglese Madeleine (the Church of Mary Magdelene), and back to the hotel by way of a rather tony street full of shops and boutiques.

Tonight we walked to dinner nearby at Tante Louise (literally, "Aunt Louise"), where we had another lovely bottle of red wine (this one a Pessac-Leognan from Chateau de Rochemorin). I had a pan-fried foie gras and spinach appetizer that was really wonderful, and a roast duck breast entree that was very good, followed by a dessert similar to (but not quite as good as) last night's - rhubarb ravioli with mascarpone ice cream in raspberry juice. After dinner we thought to walk a few blocks out to a very nice part of town we'd passed earlier today to watch the city as it lights up, but we misjudged the timing and would have had to wait another hour to hour and a half before it got dark enough (the sun sets really late in Paris!). So then we took a scenic route home, and my feet were killing me.

Even before dinner, Mark's pedometer claimed that we've walked about 19 miles since arriving in Paris early yesterday morning, and if I doubt its accuracy, I do not doubt the degree of magnitude. We've walked an awful lot, and it's been quite nice out - so Mark and I have both gotten some sunburn. His seems a little worse right now, while I think I've just built up a good base on what I retained from the lacrosse game in Princeton on Saturday. But I will probably try a little harder to remember to put on some sunscreen tomorrow, when it's supposed to be mostly sunny and 81 (today's high was 77). Either way, it'd be kind of funny if I showed up in Ithaca after five days in Florida a slightly more interesting shade of alabaster, yet I came back to New York City from France with a deep beach-type tan. [Ed. note: I came back with a slight tan; too much rain during the second week to sustain any really good color.]

After we returned to the hotel and made our plans for the morning (8:30am for real, this time), I decamped from the room with my laptop to the hotel bar and did some writing over Scotch for a couple of hours as British businessmen got their drink on.