Girls Weekend 2026. Sunday, October 11. New York City

Sunday, October 11, 2026 (Kathi writing)

Our day started considerably earlier than planned when at 4:30 a.m. we were awakened by the doorbell ringing over and over. This house has what I call a “city doorbell” very much like my old apartment in Chicago. It’s not a gentle ding dong, it’s more like a chime that turns into a buzzer. It screams for as long as you hold your finger on it. There are few things more alarming than being sound asleep in an unfamiliar house and suddenly hearing someone insistently ringing your doorbell in the middle of the night. It scared us both to death. I finally went to the door and discovered the young woman who rents the apartment upstairs standing there with her little dog in her arms. Apparently a drunk and/or very distressed friend of hers was outside leaning on the doorbell. She apologized profusely for the disturbance, and once everything quieted down we went back to bed. Two hours later, the smoke detector went off.

Good morning! At that point, we decided our day had started.

After we were settled on the living room couch with our coffee, Lori messaged Jason, our Airbnb host, to let him know about our eventful night, and he was highly apologetic. Later in the morning he came up from his garden apartment to deliver some paper towels and stayed to chat for a while. He explained that there is a problem with crossed wires in the doorbell system, so the poor drunk/distressed visitor probably really did think she was ringing the correct doorbell. Jason wanted to speak with the upstairs tenant about having guests at such rude hours, but we asked him to please go easy on her. She hadn’t done anything wrong and had clearly been embarrassed and apologetic about the whole thing.

As for the smoke detector, Jason explained that the one upstairs is extremely sensitive and will sometimes go off when something is steaming on the stove or someone is taking a particularly hot shower. Also, all the alarms in the three units are interconnected. If one goes off, they ALL go off. He told us that if it happens again, we could take a broomstick (the ceilings are very high in this unit) and poke the button in the middle of the smoke detector to stop it from ringing. During this conversation we also learned quite a bit about New York landlord/tenant laws, and by the time he left I was feeling pretty grateful that my rental property is in Indiana.

After our (double) rude awakening, we set about having one of our favorite GW things: a slow morning. We journaled, read and answered emails, played word games, sorted photos, and generally putzed around doing whatever we felt like doing. At one point Lori walked to to Milk and Pull coffee shop and came back with a chocolate croissant for me, which is one of the many reasons she is my best friend. We also spent an inordinate amount of time trying to alter a photo of Lori’s feet. I had photos of both of our feet and wanted to put them together in a collage, but Lori’s feet were too far apart in hers (see link to photos). Surely, with all the technology available to us, we could just move her feet closer together, right? Apparently not. After spending way too much time trying, we admitted defeat. I did, however, manage to create a sticker of one of Lori’s hiking-boot-clad feet, which I am sure will come in handy someday.

At about 2:00 we finally started showering, dressing and getting ready to leave, and headed out around 2:40. It had been pouring rain all day, so we donned our rain gear and walked to the station to catch the train to visit my friend Alitha Alford at her studio.

Alitha worked for me for most of the years I was the Director of Aftercare and Summer Camps at St. Richard’s Episcopal School. Over those years she became much more than an employee; she became a dear friend to me and a friend and mentor to Ridley. Alitha is an incrediblytalented and innovative contemporary visual artist whose work focuses primarily on collage and mixed media, and Lori and I were excited to have the opportunity to visit her studio and see her work in person.

We spent almost three hours there, catching up with Alitha, looking at her art and asking question after question about her methods and processes. Lori does quite a bit of art journaling herself and was especially fascinated by the techniques Alitha uses to create her work. It was wonderful to have the luxury of sitting in her creative space and hearing directly from her about how her pieces evolve.

For me, though, the most meaningful part of the visit was finally seeing Alitha’s portrait of Ridley in person. She had told me about it and I had seen a photograph, but that could not compare to standing in front of the actual piece. There really are no words for how amazing it is. Alitha’s portraiture is focused entirely on people she loves, which makes the fact that she chose to create one of Ridley especially meaningful to me. Ridley would be so honored. Eventually we decided we had monopolized enough of Alitha’s afternoon and needed to let her get back to work. We said our goodbyes and headed back out into the rain, which was still steadily falling. We made our way home and arrived at the Airbnb at about 7:30.

Earlier in the day Lori had made a creamy lemon chicken dill soup, and there could not possibly have been a more perfect dinner waiting for us after coming in from a cold, rainy evening. We had even remembered to stop at a bodega for some saltines. Oh – I left something out! A few minutes after Lori put a pan on the stove earlier today to start the soup, the smoke detector went off again! Lori grabbed a sponge mop and poked the middle button to turn it off. Jason’s preemptive advice came in very handy and worked like a charm. We ate our yummy soup and journaled for a while, and then somehow launched into one of those conversations that only best girlfriends can have—the kind that starts with one subject, travels through fifteen others, and three hours later you realize you are still sitting in exactly the same place talking. By then it was too late to bother watching any TV, so we went to bed and fell asleep listening to the rain. It was a great day.

If you would like to see some of Alitha’s work, visit alithaaalford.com or find her most recent work on Instagram at @leeleeluvjoyart.