Last Weekend

Our friends Chad and Kimberly came out to visit us last weekend. We had a great time, which unfortunately wasn't well-documented with pictures. Here's what we captured.

Friday night we went out to see a show at the Upright Citizens Brigade. It was a hilarious improv show. After they were done, we were treated to the most painful standup comedy I have ever seen, and we promptly left.

Saturday we were up and around, and headed into the city:

We spent the day out, walking down Spring ave in Soho shopping, going to Nintendo World up near Rock Center, and Kristal and Kimberly spent a couple of hours waiting in line getting us show tickets at TKTS. We ended up getting tickets for a show none of us knew anything about called Super Awesome 80's Prom or something like that.

It's a Tony and Tina's Wedding style event where they basically simulate this 80's prom at Wanaget High and have actors and actresses interacting with the crowd and such. It's hard to explain -- I'll let the pictures do the talking.











Clearly we had a great time.

We were in a cab going to Grey's Papaya (an awesome hot dog joint) when I spotted a Maybach parked on the street. We order the taxi stop and nearly came to a screeching halt. We all pile out, and went to check out the car. Needless to say, we were pretty rowdy by this time, and Chad demonstrated his true feelings for this $375,000 vehicle:


The next day, Sunday, we bummed around the house for the better part of the day.

Monday, which was Presidents Day, we went to the Museum of Modern Art, MOMA, to meet up with some other friends of ours in town, Butch and Dave. We had an amazing time at MOMA (and have since then become members).






After MOMA, we headed down the street to the Stage deli, where we had enormous pastrami sandwiches and huge pieces of NY cheesecake.


All in all we had a great time.

Weekend in Mattituck

I have a good friend who I work with out here named Sean Hallahan. I think it's funny I have a great friend back in Portland named Jay Patrick Callahan, and my co-worker and friend here is named Sean Patrick Hallahan. Yes, they're both Irish. Sean has been in finance and working on wall street for 30+ years. He has an amazing mind, and he's always great to talk to.

Sean lives in Manhattan, but has a house in Mattituck, Long Island:


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This area of Long Island is very New England. -- more accurately, having never been to New England, how I imagine New England being. The landscape is gorgeous. Sean invited us to spend the weekend at his house in Mattituck. We, of course, accepted. The house is a quaint place, part of a subdivision of old 1910-ish houses right on the Great Peconic Bay (between the North fork and the South fork). The North fork is also quite different from the South Fork "Hamptons" everybody thinks of. North is very "small town", traditional, cute little shops and town, and while there is some new construction, most of the building is renevation of old houses that have been there for a hundred years.

Here are a few pics of the boys playing in Sean's front yard:





Clearly it's nice to have room to run!

We then took a walk around the neighborhood, and since most of the houses are seasonally occupied, we were able to cut through a private walk down to the beach (which is also private to the residences on it, but nobody was home):





There was a park close by, and we spent some time on the swings and playing on the play structure:



We called it a day at that point, and retired back to the house for the evening. We played Rummikub for over two hours, told stories, played guitar (Sean has a great Taylor guitar), and hung out all evening. Very nice time.

The next day, we were off again. First we went to the first submarine base constructed in the United States, about 10 minutes from Mattituck:



Behind us was a memorial. Here are some additional shots of the surrounding coastline:





At that location was also a house that Louis Moore Bacon owned and ran some trading functions out of. Louis Bacon is a legendary hedge fund manager and runs Moore Capital, one of the oldest and most successful hedge funds. Louis Bacon made tons and tons of money, has 27 houses around the globe, including a hunting lodge on Robins Island, which is just off the coast of where we're standing in the above pictures (he owns the entire island). He also owns the largest ranch in Colorado, and paid a whopping $175 million for it, which according to the Denver Post, is the most ever paid for a piece of property in the United States!

Here is a picture of the house:


Legend has it that the large set of windows on the right portion of the house used to contain a satellite behind them that beamed private feeds of Reuters and Bloomberg to his residence on Robins Island.

OK, moving on.

We then toured around some old towns and villages in the area, and stumbled across this gem:


This is a house constructed in 1649!! Put in perspective, Portland, OR wasn't even inhabited until 1843, a good 200 years after the construction of this house.

We then drove on to a lighthouse that was commissioned by George Washington. While I for some reason neglected to take any pictures of the actual light house (I'll be honest, it was less than thrilling), we got a shot of Sean pointing something out to us, and of him and the boys:





All in all we had a great time!! Thanks Sean!


We left Seans house around noon, bombed back to Manhattan (which we have to drive across to get home) and since it was Sunday and traffic isn't TOO bad, we drove around Manhattan for a while:




It was actually cool. We came in on the Midtown Tunnel at around 42, then drove uptown until around 70th, cut through central park (which was awesome), then drove around the Upper West Side a bit before heading back down to W 34th where the Lincoln Tunnel is to take us back to Jersey. Managed to rack up 4 Bentley sightings, so not too bad for 10 minutes driving around the city.

We weren't home for 30 minutes when the wind really picked up and it started snowing!





Because it was so windy, it was nearly completely white outside!

Now it's super windy, and with the wind chill, about -3 outside. Yikes!

Until next time, Cheers!

Saturday

We had a busy Saturday yesterday. In fact 24 pictures worth of busy Saturday.

First things first though. Couple of days ago the boys got new shoes. Predictably, miles stuck with Converse (his favorite kind of shoe), and Damion stuck with orange:




OK so on to yesterday!

First the boys and I made breakfast. We made bacon and pancakes:






Miles made plain, Damion made blueberry. They weren't bad either!

We had plans to go into the city for lunch. Lunch at this point was going to be around 3pm at the rate we were going because breakfast took so long, but that's ok. Kristal found "the best fish and chips" in NYC, a place called A Salt and Battery. Not only was this rated very high, but it was featured on that Food Network show "Throwdown with Bobby Flay." This is where Bobby Flay rolls into the "best of the best" of things (Fish and Chips, Pizza, etc...) and tries to beat them with his own recipes. Apparently A Salt and Battery actually beat him!

The place was TINY, only sat six people. We lucked out and got three chairs, and ate our fish and chips. Honestly, kristal and the boys didn't really care for them. I think that's because we got different kinds of fish than usual, but I really liked them. Of course, I like nearly all fish and chips. :-)

We walked around Greenwich Village for about an hour, ducking into different shops, and managed to take zero pictures except for one shop. It was a baby store with hilarious onesies for babies:





There was also a really cool tea place that we will visit next time we're in the area:


Our good friends Tom and Lisa have a daughter named Mckenna so we thought this was funny:


We'll keep an eye out for Ari's Pub next time! :-)

So with no more pictures of Greenwich Village, we made our way home. Here's out at the Hoboken train station and ferry terminal:


And on the lite rail going home:



All of a sudden with all this talk of trains I figured I'd clarify our situation. We're on the NW side of Hoboken which is on the opposite side of the terminal. The Hoboken terminal is a 12-track train station that feeds into all over Jersey. Also at the terminal is the Path train which is a subway system that goes under the Hudson between Jersey and New York. Also at the terminal is a lite rail stop, and the lite rail runs along west of Hoboken, Jersey City, etc.

Since we're on the opposite side of Jersey from the terminal, it's a good 1.2-3 mile walk there. Not convenient, but not unquestionable either. It's about a 20 minute walk. Anyhow, conveniently there is a lite rail stop about 3 blocks from us, which goes to the terminal. This is super easy, but really doesn't save much time given wait times for the train and transit times. So, net net, the time is about the same, it just depends on how much walking you want to do.

Once at the terminal, you can either take the path train in to the city or the ferry. We still haven't taken the ferry, mainly because the path is so convenient and runs all the time. Very little waiting!

OK so back to our Saturday. We came home and bummed around for a while. Miles got a really cool magnet mosaic set from Sean and Deborah (I work with Sean and he's a good friend of mine here). So as a thank you, Miles created this:


At around 5, Kebra asked if Kristal and I wanted to go out and do something. Seemed like a great idea to us! So I hopped on Time Out and did a search for stuff going on in the city last night -- 578 options! Cool, we should be able to find something to do!

We settled on a burlesque show at The Slipper Room. Supposedly the longest-running burlesque show in New York. Don't know about that, but it was really cool! It was down in the Lower East Side:



In fact, the subway stop for us comes right up two blocks from Katz's Deli, the best pastrami and corned beef in the city!! I've blogged about that before. It's nice to know it's so easy to get there.

Again, there was a sorry lack of pictures from last night, but here are a few. Clearly Kristal was causing people to question all night what in the world a hottie like her was hanging out with a loser like me! :-)

Until next time!