Lance's in New York

Still on the road

2008-12-15T15:27:00.000-08:00

Oliver is ready to get out of the car and luna's sleeping pills are wearing off but we are having a fine time. We are some where in western PA and hoping to make it into Ohio tonight. So far no snow just rain.

IMG00012.jpg

2008-12-15T15:21:00.000-08:00

On the road!!

T minus one week and counting

2008-12-08T06:18:00.000-08:00

Well gang, our year-long adventure in New York is coming to a close. We officially have one more week left. Here's a rundown of that week, I'll do my best to ramp up on the blog and keep the dream alive for a little while longer.

Monday - Wednesday: Packing, packing, packing!
Thursday: Movers come and haul our stuff away
Thursday - Sunday: We move to Manhattan. We are staying there because I have access to an apartment with a couple of beds. We are staying through Sunday because the boys' last piano recital is Sunday.
Monday: We drop Kebs off at JFK, and we hit the road!!

We plan on cramming as much as possible in these last few days. Post a comment if you can think of anything we absolutely must see or do before we leave!

DC

2008-12-06T19:59:00.000-08:00

Another blog from Kristal! So it won't be nearly as informative as Andrew's blogs.
On Nov. 5th we took a quick trip down to DC. By the time we got out of the house and fought though 4 hours of traffic to get to DC we had only a few hours of daylight left.

Here are the boys and I in front of the capitol building.

Andrew checking directions to the Monuments. We thought we had a great parking spot but it turned out we were over a mile away from everything we wanted to see.

The Washington Monument looking like it was so close! Yet it was so far!

The guys standing in the WWII Memorial.

Damion and Miles found their favorite state.

Miles was trying to make it look like he was holding the Washington Monument.

Our visit fell the day after Barack Obama won the election. This was a giant letter to him. It was at the base of the Lincoln Memorial.

At the Lincoln Memorial.

Miles took this picture of us chilling on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

You wouldn't believe how many shots it took to finally get us all in the shot!

Obama's new house!!

Andrew will be back soon to do an update of our following adventures!!

Happy Birthday Kristal

2008-11-03T15:49:00.001-08:00

Kristal's birthday was this past Saturday. We had a full day of fun.

First, Kristal woke up to this on the kitchen table:

Kristal was very anxious to get after the gifts, but we made her wait until after Miles' Famous Pancake Breakfast (I made some bacon to go along).

We got one last parting shot of the gifts...

Then let Kris dig in!

No, I didn't give her a box of Tylenol:

I had to hide some product I bought her in a box so she wouldn't get wise... :-)

After breakfast and gifts, we lounged around the house for a while, then got ready to go to a family concert at Carnegie Hall. It was called Berstein Beat, and was hosted by Leonard Berstein's daughter. They played a lot of music from West Side Story. The boys loved it!

We all had a great time.

We drove home, and had a couple more hours to kill, then Kristal and I got dressed up to go to Le Cirque, a really fancy and famous restaurant in New York City. It's one of the few restaurants I've ever been do that had a dress code -- jackets required for gentlemen.

Picking things off the menu wasn't easy. Being French, we had our choice of the usual things: Escargot, Foi Gras, frog legs, etc etc. for appetizers. We settled in on shrimp for Kristal, and I had a special, off-menu item, risotto with white truffle shaved table-side. He brought our appetizers out, and indeed, shaved a grand amount of white truffle onto my risotto. It was great!

We then moved on to main courses, which, I'll just summarize -- were disappointing. Nearly every choice was fatty and Kristal's pork dish was very fatty. I ordered a duck confit, which I've been on a kick of, but it was all modern and "deconstructed" and frankly, not as good as on-bone duck confit I've had lately.

Kristal had creme brulee for desert, and I had a chocolate mousse. Overall, the food was ok, not great. But the service in the place was unreal. So many waitstaff, bustling around, clearing this, bringing that...it was amazing.

Despite all Le Cirque had to offer, I nearly had a heart attack when the bill came. I was literally sick to my stomach most of the night afterwards. I paid more in tip than it costs me to feed my whole family at some places. It was a great and memory-filled birthday for Kristal, though, and we couldn't have rung in her 30th with anything better.

Halloween

2008-10-31T18:45:00.000-07:00

Happy Halloween everyone! We had a very scary day!

But let's back up. This Halloween was a lesson in urban living. It was eye-opening because of how different it was. For example, in Portland we always go to Sauvie Island to the pumpkin patch. I should say, one of many pumpkin patches -- vast expanses of pumpkins you can pick yourself. There's none of that out here. Even out in the far reaches of Long Island (The Hamptons) the only thing there are vast expanses of are million dollars homes, and marsh.

Secondly, what would you do with a carved pumpkin if not put it out on your front porch or walkway? We don't have one, we, like everyone in this city, live in buildings. We debated whether we should even carve them at all, since I didn't really want the smell of raw, carved pumpkin filling our living room. We decided, in the end, to go ahead and carve pumpkins the night before Halloween, and put them outside our door just for Halloween day.

With pumpkins carved, Halloween day arrived. This morning, we got the boys dressed up in their costumes:

On the left, Miles, we have an Alien. On the right, Damion, we have General Grevous (from Star Wars).

Let's not forget about our other little boy!

Oliver was extremely embarrassed in his costume, and basically hid away on the couch while he had it on. LOL

The boys had a Halloween parade at school today, so Kristal and I dressed up in our costumes and went to the parade:

Here's the boys at their parade:

See the Alien in there? :-)

General Grevous!

After school, we learned another lesson of Halloween here. Like I mentioned, everybody lives in buildings. There aren't any houses. So there really isn't trick or treating. At least, no neighborhood trick or treating. What happens here is that most of the shops on the main strip through town, Washington St., have candy and the kids trick or treat there. Hoboken has a pretty fun Halloween parade, and there were TONS of people there.

Us getting ready for the Halloween parade:

This doesn't really do it justice, but there were thousands of people out, trick or treating on Washington.

Here's Kris, Damion, and Miles rocking it:

Those bags are getting full!!

Me with the dog:

The costumed dachshund doesn't really add to the level of METAL I was going for:

And last but not least, what would a Halloween parade be without an Elvis impersonator:

Stay tuned, we got Kristal's birthday tomorrow which will most certainly lead to some epic blogging!!

Pollini, Crumb

2008-10-29T19:26:00.000-07:00

Well, the critics didn't like Pollini's performance that we saw on Sunday. And they were luke-warm about Crumb on Monday.

Pollini Review, New York Times

Crumb Review, New York Times

Honestly, I have good taste in performers and composers. Really. :-)

Pics of Fall, Carnegie Hall!

2008-10-26T18:13:00.000-07:00

Hello Gang,

Another catch up post. Seriously, I cannot keep up on all the stuff we have been doing lately! OK, first things first.

Last weekend my Grandpa Art and his wife Barbara were visiting New York. We had the opportunity to spend the afternoon with them and have dinner at a great restaurant in Times Square, Carmines. We really enjoyed our time with them!!

I should point out that Miles was taking this picture. I should also point out that there are three generations of Arthur Lance in this picture!

The next day, Sunday, we spent the day in the Hamptons. We wanted to spend one last time there, we loved it so much last time. After consulting the map (i.e. Blackberry) for some last minute directions:

We were off. We did some pumpkin shopping at a roadside farmers market:

And later ate lunch at a great lobster roll place called, locally, Lunch. Cameron Diaz ate here recently. So did Alex Baldwin.

These are blowfish poppers. They are actually the tails of blowfish, deep fried. They were awesome good.

Kristal got a haircut this week that was a complete change!

Before:

After!!

We spent a lot of time working on Damion's Halloween costume this week and weekend. He wanted to be perhaps the most challenging costume you could possibly get: General Grevous from Star Wars. I actually busted out needle and thread for a portion of it:

Clowning around:

Tonight we had a big night. Damion and I went to Carnegie Hall to see Maurizio Pollini perform a solo piano concert. Just a tad bit of background on this. Pollini is one of my favorite pianists, and has been since college. The first time Kristal and I came to New York City, it was because Pollini was performing a solo piano recital on my birthday, 2001. This year was his 40th anniversary of his Carnegie Hall debut, so it was really cool that I could take Damion to the concert. Here was the program:

BEETHOVEN	Sonata No. 17 in D Minor, Op. 31, No. 2, "The Tempest"
BEETHOVEN	Sonata No. 23 in F Minor "Appassionata"

SCHUMANN	Fantasy in C Major, Op. 17
CHOPIN	Four Mazurkas, Op. 33
CHOPIN	Scherzo No. 2

Damion and I got all dressed up for the occasion:

We had an amazing time tonight. Pollini is inhuman. Just a brief aside about this. In any musical performance, classical piano in particular, there is a sliding scale with technical accuracy on one end, and raw emotive passion on the other side. The pinnacle of any performance is when the performer can infuse so much emotion in their performance that it pushes technical accuracy right to the edge -- it is maintained, but right on the edge. Usually, if you pull back too far, the performance doesn't have wrong notes, but also lacks some sheer passion behind the performance.

Tonight, Pollini managed to break that model. The performance was outrageously energetic and passionate, yet he maintained his true form of technical flawlessness. It was incredible. There's a reason he can sell out two back-to-back shows in Carnegie Hall's largest auditorium. There are very, very few pianists alive today of the same caliber.

While Damion and I were at Carnegie Hall, Miles and Kristal went to the Manhattan Children's Museum, and had a great time! They saw some amazing exhibits.

Miles spent 30 minutes straight working on this cubic puzzle. The goal was to put the tetris-like pieces together into a cube. Mission Accomplished!

In the Greek Mythology exhibit, this was the Trojan Horse:

This looks like ancient Greek architecture blocks to me:

Afterwards, we ate at the Brooklyn Diner, a great restaurant right across the street from Carnegie Hall.

We shared the stories of our afternoons over milkshakes and dinner. The only last picture is here because you wouldn't believe me if I asked you to imagine an $18 hot dog. But here it is!

Welp, that's it for now! Kristal and I are going BACK to Carnegie Hall tomorrow night to see George Crumb and performances of three of his pieces. Yeah, I'm a Carnegie Hall freak. :-)

Family and Fall

2008-10-18T08:09:00.000-07:00

As promised, a catch-up post to bring us up to date.

Last weekend we had the pleasure of spending Saturday with my cousin Eric and his girlfriend Jess.

We went into the city and ate lunch at the Stage Deli, where we enjoyed classic New York pastrami sandwiches. Now, a small apology for the following picture, but a picture trying to get one's mouth wrapped around a sandwich like this is a rite-of-passage, and so, I will shamelessly post one. :-)

We then walked through Times Square, and into the M&M's World store. There were whole walls of M&M dispensers!

We then walked up 5th Ave. to Trump Tower, took a coffee break there for a little while:

And then on to Central Park.

We had a great time that day, and were glad that Eric and Jess came to visit us!

Last weekend was also peak Fall Leaves viewing, so the next day, we drove up into the Catskills in up-state New York to look at leaves. Our destination was the largest two-tier waterfall in New York state, Kaaterskill Falls. You don't realize how many evergreens there are in the Pacific Northwest until you see fall leaves out here, because there are practically NO evergreens. Which means that EVERYTHING is changing color!

We had a great time on the somewhat challenging half-mile hike to the falls:

And we finally made it to the falls!

And a few more:

We captured a few pictures on the way home that really demonstrate how vast the color spectrum really is this time of year:

Drove past this place on the way home, thought it was funny:

All in all, a great time.

This past week, the boys had a school night at the Liberty Science Center, which is a science museum at Liberty State Park.

Never thought I'd get to give McCain rabbit ears!

There was a skyscraper exhibit, and this beam was from the twin towers. It was literally bent in half:

Well that's it. Stay tuned for the other stuff we have going on in the weeks to come!

The coming posts...

2008-10-17T18:56:00.000-07:00

The last time I only posted one post in 30 days was back in March. I don't plan on repeating that. We have a LOT to catch up on, including a great day with my cousin Eric and his girlfriend Jess, a gorgeous drive into upstate New York to look at prime fall leaves, a school trip to the Liberty Science Center at Liberty State Park (i.e. statue of liberty), and the day-to-day stuff going on.

Add to that the future stuff we have planned, including a day with my grandpa Art and Barbara here in New York, a day trip to the Hamptons again, four concerts at Carnegie Hall, Kristal's birthday, a trip to Portland, ME....wow, we have a busy two months ahead of us!!

I usually don't like to promise things like "stay tuned, more blog posts on the way!" but this time, I mean it.

Stay tuned, more blog posts on the way!

In the meantime, go check out the ranting and raving going on at Betsy's blog!!

Kristal and Andrew go to St. Thomas!

2008-09-30T17:59:00.000-07:00

Last night Kristal and I got back from a vacation to St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. We were there for four days - three full days, and a half-day on either side.

The thing is, I could probably sum up our vacation with one sentence and a picture, like this: Despite the searing pain of sunburns, spending four days on a tropical beach, snorkeling in amazing reef, swimming in crystal-clear ocean, and being spoiled by the Ritz-Carlton gave us one of the greatest vacations ever! I mean, c'mon -

But hold the phones. That wouldn't really do this vacation justice. So in pure Andrew-form, we're going to roll from the top, and I'm going to dive in to excruciating detail about this trip. If, as we proceed, I've made you exceedingly jealous, then my job here is done. :-)

Last Thursday, Sept 25, Kristal and I caught a 4:30am towncar to Newark International Airport for our flight. We connected through Atlanta, and while there, had the opportunity to partake in what can only be described as the South's answer to In-N-Out Burger: Chick-Fil-A. I have never experienced a chicken-and-biscuit sandwich quite like it. Here's breakfast:

I'm Andrew Lance, and I approve this breakfast:

We got on our flight from Atlanta to St. Thomas, and by the end, would have rather listened to Sarah Palin interviews than sit another minute in that plane. Between the guy behind Kristal who kept knocking the back of her seat, and the guy next to me who was the most fidgety dude I have ever been consistently nudged by on an airplane, one could summarily say the plane ride sucked.

All was well, though, because after a pleasant drive in a taxi-van (on the "wrong" side of the road!) through 15 miles of St. Thomas, we landed at the destination that would be our haven for the next four days -- Ritz-Carlton St. Thomas.

Before you ask how many nights I had to sell my services on the streets of New York in order to afford this, understand that it's the down season in St. Thomas now (hurricane season) and we scored an amazing deal on our hotel stay. Additionally, because it was our anniversary, we were upgraded to an ocean-front room for free. So all in all, it was a steal. Not cheap, but a great deal.

As I will explain, "Excellent Customer Service" would be an insult to this place. "Outrageously Amazing Spoil-Me-Rotten Customer Service" is probably an understatement. Maybe it was the time of year so we had more one-on-one time, more attentive staff, less distribution of service, who knows, but EVERYBODY on the resort was exceedingly interested in ensuring we were taken care of.

Anyways, as soon as we stepped out of the taxi-van, our bags were unloaded, and we were greeted by a couple of gentlemen who wanted to know how our flight was, how the taxi ride was, if we had any questions, etc. As we were talking with them, a women brought each of us a cold towel and a rum-punch to enjoy, refreshing in the 85 degree, exhausting humidity heat:

As we sipped our drink, one of the guys gave us a tour of the main resort building, where the shops were, restrooms, and accompanied us to the front desk for check in. He said as soon as we checked in to come out and see him and he would escort us to our room.

Upon checkin, we confirmed that we had indeed got the ocean-front room upgrade, were furnished with some resort information and materials, our room key-cards, and then were asked to follow a young lady who would give us our "gift."

She brought us over to her desk and gave us a great canvas beach bag full of "souvenirs." As if the bag wasn't enough, it was filled with other Ritz schwag like a ball cap, a glass sea-horse that hangs in a window, a bottle of custom-bottled Cruzan rum for the Ritz-Carlton, and some other random stuff. Alrighty then!

We met up with our guy outside, and he loaded us up into a golf cart and took us to our building, escorted us to our room, asked us if there was anything we needed, told us to call him if we thought of anything, and left us to our room.

Two king beds, marble-encased bathroom, huge patio off the room, air-conditioner set to "freeze" cranked up in the room; it was awesome.

Here's Kristal on our patio sporting the cap from the beach bag:

And us from the patio as well:

At that point, we went down to the beach, and hit an ocean-side lunch:

And then took it (nearly) all off for some beach lounging:

At this point I do NOT want to see any comments to this post anywhere to the affect of "Hey Andy, you forgot to take your t-shirt off!". Har Har. :-D

Kristal and I spent the afternoon on the beach, then went to dinner ocean-side. Upon returning to our room, we found that they had come in for turn-down service, left chocolates on the pillow, and a complimentary iced bottle of champaign and personalized card for us wishing us happy 11th anniversary.

Here's the uncorking process -

Cheers!

We brought the anniversary cards the boys had made for us, so along with the RC card, here's our display:

And here's how we spent the rest of the night:

The next morning, we were ready to hit the beach:

Here, Kristal demonstrates what we pretty much did the entire trip:

And here was what we looked out over our books at:

Andrew, rocking my excellent tan along with everybody else in the water:

We also grabbed snorkeling gear and went out several times to the reef surrounding the bay. We saw massive amounts of fish, huge schools of fish in and around the reef, some kind of ray, two sea turtles, crabs, urchins, crazy kinds of coral, and some fish type things I still haven't identified. It was a day in the sun, the water, and we loved it.

Just one slight miscalculation.

By afternoon, it was pretty clear we had been sun burned. That night, however, something much, much worse had happened:

My back. Now, for the record, this isn't just a sunburn. This is years of fury the Sun couldn't pour down on us in Portland because of rain and clouds -- this was vengeance. Kristal had the fine pleasure of listening to me rant and rave about false advertising, for our sunscreen did in fact claim to be water resistant, so I never questioned its effectiveness, until Kristal pointed out that there's a difference between water PROOF and water RESISTANCE.

So we might as well have had no sunscreen on at all. And while we suffered immensely for the remainder of the trip, we tried not to let it interfere with our plans. We just went ahead with what we intended to do with two minor alterations -- we did it in the shade, and we did it in pain. :-(

Behind me to the right, top level, is a patio with slats on the top instead of solid roof. That was ours. Quite ideal.

A fountain in the courtyard behind our building:

Kristal in front of the main resort building with the lobby, check-in, offices, shopping, etc.

No picture does justice to the agonizing pain of a brutal sunburn, but this is me psyching myself up, mustering my strength, gathering my courage -- to put on a shirt.

Kristal, preparing for another aloe application:

The second day of our burns, with 1.5 days left of the trip, we sauntered through the lobby so I could get a line-item room charge printout. When you can order room service, and drinks and food on the beach as effortlessly as you could at the Ritz, I needed a sanity check. While there, in response to the usual "How is your stay so far Mr. Lance?" I explained that we were having a lovely time, except for the sun burns. She offered to help us with that.

She explained that they grow Aloe on the property. If we'd like, she could have some picked for us, taken to the kitchen, and prepared into a puree. They would then bring it up to the room and put it in our fridge when it was ready. She said it would smell pretty bad, but lather it on, let it sit 30 minutes, and it will do wonders. Simply amazing.

In fact, the aloe mixture DID do wonders for our sunburn, and we were able to apply it several times with the amount they made for us.

That night, Kristal and I went out to our "fancy" anniversary dinner:

The next day we snapped a few random pictures around the resort:

Before leaving, we caught up with the many iguana's on the grounds:

And finally, Kristal and I waiting for our flight in St. Thomas:

All in all, St. Thomas was a wonderful place to visit, but the real take-away for us was the privilege and opportunity to stay at the Ritz-Carlton. The outstanding service and kind people there really made our vacation great experience.

Trip to Pennsylvania

2008-09-13T19:55:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone! We made a day trip to Pennsylvania today, hoping to accomplish four things:

Get a refrigerator magnet from Intercourse, PA (you know, I heart Intercourse)
In Philadelphia, see:

The Liberty Bell
The Rocky Balboa statue
Get an authentic cheesesteak sandwich

I'm happy to say: Mission Accomplished!

First stop was to Intercourse. This is in the middle of Amish country, and I had never been there. While for some reason I had assumed they would be living out in the sticks away from civilization, they were right there in town and driving carriages along the road. I found this extremely entertaining!

Watch for carriage crossing! LOL

This is what I call a riding lawnmower!!

A few shots of the gorgeous landscape:

Taking in a few shops in Intercourse:

We then headed out to Philadelphia. I have to say, ahead of time, I was having a hard time getting excited about Philly. I just didn't know what to expect. I was utterly shocked at the energy and vibe the town had! It took me completely by surprise. More on that later, our first stop was the Rocky statue. Both Kristal and I are avid Rocky fans, and this was a must-see. Unfortunately we couldn't find any parking and there was an Indian festival in the park next to the museum so it was a zoo down there. We had to settle for a drive-by:

Next we went to the Historic district (Market St.) in search of the Liberty Bell. Initially, we couldn't find it, and actually stumbled across it on accident! It is housed inside a small building lined with glass. Upon first seeing this historic relic, I uttered a statement that I'm sure millions have before me on seeing the famed Liberty Bell -- "That's it??"

OK so it's smaller than I had anticipated. And we couldn't see the crack. Besides that, it was pretty cool to be in the presence of an icon like this. A few other shots from the historic district:

Even though it's blurry, I thought this was a great shot of Kristal so wanted to post it:

We then walked down to South St. which is the hip, more "bohemian" (as described on Wikipedia) area of town. Betsy encouraged us to visit this area for some good cheesesteaks. This was the area that blew me away. I couldn't believe the edge of this area! Small shops of all sorts, tons of people out, music playing loudly, just a really high-energy area of town. And this, coming from me who has spent my fair share of time in New York City!

We didn't get any pics of this area. We waited in line at Jims Steaks for 20 minutes to get our cheesesteaks, we had the dog which was adding all sorts of stress, and we weren't going to do any shopping anyways, so we grabbed our sandwiches and headed back to the historic area to a park to eat in peace. Here's me with a surprisingly contorted and exhausting look on my face, I must be "evaluating" the sandwich or something..

The disappointment was that Kristal and I didn't actually have cheesesteak sandwiches. See, I took for granted that when you order a cheesesteak sandwich from a cheesesteak place, the "cheese" part of that is a given. So when I ordered Kris and I "Pepper Steaks" and the boys "Steaks with just cheese" I thought I was being clear. No. THEY were being more literal than me -- our Pepper steaks had meat and peppers. The boys had Steak and cheese. Go figure! They were still good, and I snagged a few bites from Miles' that I was satisfied.

On full stomachs we headed back home. Turns out it's only an hour and a half from Hoboken to Philly, and only another 45 minutes to Delaware. As much as we would all love to visit again, especially because it's so close, our weekends are quickly coming to an end, so we'll probably not make it. But we're really glad we were able to make this quick trip anyways.

Physics Jokes

2008-09-12T05:08:00.000-07:00

Turning on the Large Hadron Collider prompted the posting of several good physics jokes over at Falkenblog. Here's one of my favorite:

A Higgs-Boson walks into a bar. The bartender says "You know, there were some guys looking for you..."

Large Hadron Collider

2008-09-09T07:56:00.000-07:00

The LHC, which goes online tomorow, is going to be capable of reproducing the conditions shortly after the big bang. Media attention has been brought to the fact that it also has the chance of creating "mini" black holes, in which case, some have speculated that these high-energy conditions could in fact backfire, blowing the Earth to smithereens.

Stephen Hawking disagrees.

Anyways, while reading an article about it, and the grid compute farm that will process its data, I ran across this Gem of prose:

When the experiments get running at the LHC, the four great "eyes" of the machine start observing collisions, they will generate 15 million gigabytes of data every year, that is equivalent to one thousand times the information printed in the form of books annually.
"If you put them on CDs and stacked them up, that stack would be more than 12 miles (20 kilometers) tall." said Dr Bob Jones, Director of the EGEE, Enabling grids for e-science project, which is co-funded by the European Commission.
Or, in terms of iPod data, the annual output of the atom smasher is equivalent to a song running for 24,000 years.

OK. "15 million gigabytes" of data I get. I understand that because my laptop has a 160GB. My backup drive has 500GB. So 15 million GB pretty much blows my mind, but I get it.

So why, then, must this writer give us not one, but THREE, interpretations of what that amount of data means when most people reading about the Large Hadron Collider already get it? 1000 times the amount of information published in books annually?? How am I supposed to comprehend that? How do I have any reference in my head about how much information is published on an annual basis in the form of printed material?

How about the great visual of stacking CD's on top of each other? I suppose that 12 miles of CD's stacked on themselves is such an impressive visual that it gives me a great appreciation for the amount of data that truly is. Unfortunately, it doesn't. Fail.

And the true stroke of genius, the example that should win this guy a Pulitzer, the boiling it down the "iPod data." Take a moment and let the absurdity of that sink in. Now let me paraphrase it for you -- "If the annual amount of data from the LHC were TURNED INTO A SONG, it would play for 24,000 years." Thank you for that. This has actually done more to CONFUSE me about the magnitude of the data than anything.

Confusing examples aside, 15 million GB of data annually is an extraordinary amount of data to be processed, and the technology to support that (the 80,000 node grid farm) is in itself equally amazing.

Video of move footage

2008-09-07T08:22:00.000-07:00

I was messing around with iMovie this weekend and made a pretty uninspiring movie of the move footage. It's actually just a bunch of clips with the backdrop of one of my favorite Man or Astroman? songs. One of these days, maybe when I switch to Final Cut, I'll actually turn this footage into a "real" video.

Continuing our dialog

2008-09-03T18:07:00.000-07:00

First off, I do appreciate the comments. I’m glad to say we now have a new record for comments to a single blog post, finally surpassing the breaking the news that our vet was a playboy playmate. :-)

Let me also state up front one thing -- I will readily admit that I don’t follow much politics. And I’m sure to be corrected a number of times on things I bring up, which I am more than happy to hear and think about.

It is with that, that I need to ask some questions. Bets, you want less government programs and legislation, freedoms to “choose the paths of our lives,” and for the feds to get out of our personal lives. It then seems curious that you would, I guess, support candidates who want to pass sweeping legislation on personal issues like Choice, and who want to discriminate on marriage rights for different groups of people. Aren’t these the kind of personal freedoms you mentioned? Or maybe you meant “other” freedoms? And perhaps states or communities can manage things better -- let’s take public schools in Portland, They’ve got problems -- schools are being closed, programs (P.E., music, art) are being cut, teachers laid off, we have HUGE numbers of kids in the classrooms, and we have one of the shortest school years in the nation. Is this a federal problem? If this is a state or local problem, maybe they can’t do such a great job? Help me understand what you mean by less government and more freedoms in light of these examples.

Dad - People have found it easy to say we don’t want to pay for more government programs. However, I wonder what your position is on increasing defense spending by $500 billion every year since 2003? Do you mind paying for that? I can appreciate lower taxes, but the Government giving money back to us in the form of hundreds of dollars cash doesn’t fund schools, doesn’t fund social security, nor medicaid, nor any other "system" you mentioned. Do I want higher taxes? Of course not. McCain wants to start taxing my health care premiums just so he can give me a “tax credit” if I choose to get my health insurance on the open market. I just don’t see it happening.

Let’s also be clear -- Obama isn’t without frustrations either. There’s no WAY he can get his healthcare plan funded by the proposals he has. Like every presidential candidate before him, there’s no way he can accomplish everything on his ticket. What Obama represents for me is an opportunity for change. Not change for change’s sake, but change in a more progressive, open-minded, accepting way that embraces all people of this country. Yes, that means redistributing things differently than republicans typically like. This boils down to fundamentals, and I wouldn’t expect us to agree on those things.

But it’s fun to discuss... :-)

My, I do have quite the right-wing readership!

2008-09-03T04:33:00.001-07:00

I do love reading the comments posted to my DNC post. This is great!

Believe it or not, I do have some progressive friends. I know a few who even read this blog... :-)

I had a busy yesterday, and a busier today, but I should be able to contribute to our dialog tonight or tomorrow!

Visit with my mom

2008-08-30T18:49:00.000-07:00

My mom has been spending the past week or so with us. We have had a lovely time, and have, in usual Lance style, stayed extremely busy! Unfortunately, we haven't documented everything through photos, but these have captured a few things.

We spent an afternoon in Central Park. Nice picture of the boys:

One highlight for us was finding this amazing Alice and Wonderland sculpture.

Mr. Serious:

And Kristal and I:

And Kristal and Mom:

We took mom to the Chelsea Market in the Meatpacking District, and explored bakeries, food shops, and a maze of other shops.

Mom digging in to a HUGE (typical!) pastrami sandwich at Carnegie Deli:

I'm hope she still calls me a son despite the fact that I posted that... :-)

Kristal, Mom, and the gang perusing the menu one of our favorite restaurants in Greenwich Village, Garage:

And finally, we made a trip to the visitors center at the George Washington Bridge, where we had a picnic dinner and played for a good hour:

In addition to all this stuff, we have:

Gotten stuck trying to get into the Lincoln Tunnel for two hours and nearly got run over by a truck!
Spent the whole day in Greenwich Village shopping and touring around
Spent the day in SOHO doing what else -- shopping!

Tomorrow we are taking a road trip out to the Hamptons for some celebrity spotting and beach time! Hopefully pics soon!

After tonight's DNC speech, just three words

2008-08-28T21:26:00.000-07:00

VOTE FOR OBAMA

3 Miles!

2008-08-24T04:30:00.000-07:00

I have catching up to do, documenting my mom's visit to New York. But before I do, just wanted to post my 3 mile run accomplishment this morning! I don't think I've run three miles since high school! Pretty cool running along the Hudson River in the morning too.

Rzewski and piano

2008-08-15T05:39:00.000-07:00

I ran across this image, and was reminded of the fabulous concert we went to where we had the immense privilege of seeing Frederic Rzewski perform his own piece, as well as Stephen Drury play piano with him.

I have been going through another phase where I listen to The People United Will Never Be Defeated, a gargantuan, 50 minute piano piece by Rzewski. The piece goes down without a doubt as my favorite slice of music of 2008.

Fiercely difficult, I have been playing the piano more, and use parts of this piece as warm up and a break from the main piece I have been practicing, Chopin's "Ocean" Etude, op. 25 no. 12. I continue making very slow progress on The People United -- more a passing interest than something I'm actively working on. But one of the days, when my chops are a little higher, it will be tackled.

Kristal can post blogs also??!!

2008-08-14T18:58:00.000-07:00

Andrew has been bugging me to post on this blog almost as long as I've been bugging him to remember to update!
With summer coming to a close the kids and I are rushing to get to all the things we had planned done. One of those being to visit all the aquariums and zoos in the New York area. As you see from Andrews last post we hit the Bronx Zoo last weekend and earlier in the summer the boys and I went to the Central Park Zoo. Today it was the Prospect Park Zoo in Brooklyn!
I had been to Prospect Park once before with my Mom and Kebra to visit the Botanical Gardens. The Zoo is just right across the entrance to the Botanical Gardens and very close to the subway stop. If only I had remembered that this morning! Damion, Miles, and I spent a good half hour walking through the park in heat and humidity only to end up back where we started and nearly at the entrance to the zoo.
Prospect Park Zoo was a lot like the Central Park Zoo. Very small but nice and clean and a good place to walk around for an hour or so.

Here are the boys standing in front of a big tree on our trek to find the zoo.

We also walked by the duck pond and found it covered in a green slime.

Only to find out it wasn't slime at all but a huge plant that grows over the entire pond. It's duckweed!

And finally we made it to the zoo.
At the entrance there are huge metal sculptures of animals. The kids took these next few photos.
This is an octopus in front of the entrance that Miles photographed.

And Damion took this photo of me and Miles in front of a frog getting eaten by a snake!
(You'll notice we are carrying umbrellas in nearly every picture. We came prepared for the rain that was predicted all day and of course other than sweat we were dry as a bone the entire time!)

The first exhibit we came to were the prairie dogs. They were not there but I spied wacky looking creatures in the bubble.

Miles went back into the bubble and took this picture of me and Damion standing outside of the exhibit shielding ourselves from the blazing hot sun.

Here is Damion looking exceptionally handsome watching the turtles.

Next we went onto have a little snack and watch the sea lion.

It took Miles forever to get a picture of the sea lions head out of the water. He was very patient though and ended up getting his shot.

There were of course other animals that we saw and between Damion and Miles we did get pictures of nearly every one but I will spare you for now.
Next up is the Queens Zoo!!

The End.

Bronx Zoo

2008-08-13T18:19:00.000-07:00

Hi gang,

We went to the Bronx Zoo last weekend. First thing's first -- this zoo is HUGE. We managed to get through only half of it. We had a good time though. First, we took the subway out. Not all of us were thrilled to be going, however:

I then asked Miles for his best frowny face:

But we rallied for smiles around:

It was interesting, because the subways in Manhattan are, of course, all underground. But once they get outside to the other boroughs, they are above ground. This afforded us a very compelling look at The Bronx, a place that I am still too nervous to travel to...

Actually, let me do a quick aside here. I have wanted to see the Bronx, and have researched different areas and the history of the area. Problem is, it is still so rough in most places, that it makes me extremely nervous, both to go alone, or to do a family drive through. So basically, we just resolved to leave the Bronx alone. We did, however, get a great view of many parts of central Bronx from the subway. It truly is a rough and beat-down place. Many of the areas we saw were in shambles, there is graffiti everywhere, and we weren't even in the worst parts. Very eye-opening.

Anyways, the weird thing is that when you take the subway to the Bronx, you basically get off a normal subway station right in the middle of...well, the Bronx. There are very few signs, the area you get dropped off in is questionable, and basically, you have to make a bee-line three blocks one direction to reach the safe haven of the zoo. Which we did:

I'm not going to post pictures of all the animals we saw, but it really was cool. One of the most striking parts of the zoo was that it wasn't "big" like, say, the San Diego zoo is. I don't mean size-wise, but rather, new, commercial, refined, bright, etc. The Bronx zoo has a grit to it, old signs, old paths, an edge. Very, very different than the Portland zoo, which is "new", clean, pristine in many places, friendly, inviting, warm. This was not like that. It had the New York edge we have come to expect with most things.

A few pictures:

After the zoo, we took the subway back into Midtown, and when we got off the subway, it started raining! We frantically ducked under an awning so I could find the address of the Bubba Gumps we were looking for. I am furiously engaged with my blackberry!

We scored a good table, looking over Times Square:

And one last departing shot, courtesy of Damion:

Trip to Portland

2008-08-06T19:39:00.000-07:00

As the fine readers of this blog know, we recently took a vacation. Hawaii? No. Europe? Naw. South America? Nope. We went to a most unsuspecting, discrete location. A place to certainly rival even the most exotic locale across the globe. None other than: Portland, OR.

Yes, we did find ourselves questioning why we would spend a vacations worth of money going "home" as opposed to anyplace else. But we knew it would be worth it, we owed it to the boys to get them back together with their friends, and we knew that the little jaunt to the Northern California coast would be heaven.

Seeing as this post has nearly double the amount of pictures any other post has ever had on this blog, I'm sure I'll be working it all night. And it promises to keep you reading for a while, for better or for worse. So let's get to it!

Leaving our building, the boys are strapped with their messenger bags as carry ons, and their suitcases. We left with 8 bags, we'd come back with 11. Ugh. BUT -- isn't it the sign of any good vacation when you come back with significantly more than you left with?

Miles, patiently waiting in the airport:

Andrew, seriously discussing our flight arrangements with the attendant:

Now, this is when I have to apologize. Because somehow, the fact that our flight in Newark got delayed an hour didn't get captured by photos. The fact that they finally boarded our plane, only to sit on the tarmac for four hours didn't get captured. No pictures were taken of the fact that after 4 hours of waiting on the plane, our pilot decided to turn the mug around and pull us back into the gate. Additionally, no pics of the fact that our pilot told us that despite the fact that we had nearly no food, no beverages, no ice, hardly any water, he still wanted to get the plane to Salt Lake City so we could "stay onboard" if we wanted to and finally get to Salt Lake, our connection city. Somehow, we missed taking pictures of the fact that we didn't make our connection in Salt Lake (obviously) and got to stay in a hotel for 2 hours that night, courtesy of Delta, before we had to get back to the airport, didn't get seats on the first flight out to Portland that next day, and finally made it on seats to Portland later that day (after 1.5 hours delay due to mechanical failures in the arriving plane).

So, sorry for that.

We finally made it to Portland to find out that our rental car company had given away our car because of the delays (even though we called them three times to make sure everything was still good), that our hotel jacked the price up by $10 a day because we didn't stay the first night, and, after all that, were "turned away" by our hotel because we were an hour before checkin and they had no rooms available for us. ARGHH!!

But after that great adventure, we finally dropped our bags into our two-room suite in Embassy Suites in Downtown Portland, nearly 18 hours later than anticipated, and breathed a sigh of relief. Let the vacationing begin!

But not the pictures. Because you see, even though we spent the next four days visiting with our best friends, hanging out in our old hang outs, and seeing the boys play with friends they have been talking to every day on the phone for months, somehow those "routine" things just seemed to comfortable and refreshing we never really thought to capture them on the camera. So while we kind of regret not having pictures of the great times we had with our friends, somehow it just would have been awkward acting so tourist around our friends. Plus, the fact that I'm sharing nearly 50 pictures of about 3 days of trip to you, you're probably glad we didn't take pictures at that rate for the other nine days!!

Kris did capture this picture of the boys at a Max station:

SO -- we spent 4 days in Portland, then split. Damion stayed in PDX with his great friend Adrien, and Kristal, Miles, and I left town and drove down to Redding, CA to visit my family. So Monday, we drive the 7 hours down south. It was a fine drive, everytime we take a road trip like this it blows my mind how well Miles (and Damion) travel. The road trip was no big deal at all. We arrived, and had arranged to have a dinner at my parents house with some of my family. We had a great time visiting Mark and Tracy, Sandy and Doug, Kate, Eric, Cassie, my Grandpa Art, Barbara, and of course, my mom, dad, Betsy, and Pete. We swam in the pool, had great BBQ, and enjoyed visiting with everybody!

The next day, (and honestly, the part Kristal and I were really looking forward to!) Kristal and I drove 299 West to the coast. After suffering through a grueling 150 miles of curvy, mountain road, we made it to our hotel:

Our "room" consisted of nearly the entire bottom floor, including a large entryway, sitting room, bedroom, and bathroom, all in a classic style of rich wood, old-world furnishings, hardwood floors; oh, and ear-plugs because the floor above us and the walls were paper-thin. Oh well, it was still an amazing surprise for us, seeing as we figured this would just be a "room":

Our sitting room, which I think we spent about 10 minutes in:

The rest of the place:

Eureka, CA is a crappy coastal town with a couple things going for it that really draw tourists like us. One, Lost Coast Brewery, a great, staple Northern CA micro brewery. The other is the charming Victorian architecture of some of the buildings and the quaint "Old Town" of antique stores, used bookstores, shoe shops, and decent coffee.

This is the famous Carson Mansion -- perhaps the most iconic representation of this victorian style:

But here's another, some office building:

And us:

The next morning, we went to the Samoa Cookhouse for breakfast. This is an old logging house and does a logging camp style all-you-can-eat breakfast of the basics: decent coffee, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, and potatoes. They also have a "daily special" which we were lucky enough to score biscuits and gravy. Samoa Cookhouse also has a logging museum. As I told the general manager that morning, the greatest thing about the place is that I hadn't been there in about 20 years, and it's just the same as I remember!

I remember hassling my dad about getting me a pair of corked "logging boots" like these when I was a kid. Still think it would be pretty cool to rock those... :-)

Moving right along:

We manage to spot some Elk:

Counting in there, I think there were at least 15 of them in this field!

We then drove another 45 minutes north, through the Redwood National Forest until we reached our destination, Trees of Mystery. This is an awesome, almost indescribable, better-than-roadside-attraction, "park" that takes you through a tour of weird tree formations, huge trees, and weird chainsaw carvings. It's nearly impossible to describe, but so very cool. Hopefully these pics help:

Here's the entrance parking lot with a gigantic Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox.

Just like I remember, 20 years ago at least, they still have a guy that "speaks" through the Paul Bunyon at people in the parking lot. There must be a camera or something, and he's hooked up to a mic and talks to you as you enter and exit the park. Sounds weird, it IS weird. But hey, this is a better-than-roadside-attraction.

Me climbing through a "hole" in the root system of a huge redwood:

Yes, that really says that:

Couple pics of Kris in front of crazy Trees of Mystery:

I told Kris if she took another "say cheese" type picture of me, I was going to strike a pose just for the camera. So I did. In front of a ginormous Redwood:

Few other shots:

We then took a gondola up the side of the mountain, above the redwoods, with an amazing view:

What can I say, we were having a great time...

Few more shots:

We then hiked the "advanced" hike down the mountain we had just ridden up:

Yes, by this time, I was pretty tired of the pics.

So we went shopping. :-) Kris found some great shoes:

And so Kristal donned her shoes for dinner, and we ate an incredible 6 course meal at the award-winning restaurant in our Inn. Boasting one of the largest wine cellars in the nation (over 3800 vintages, several thousand more bottles), it was a real treat (and a real pain on the wallet) to eat there. Overall, however, it's nice to spend 2.5 hours over dinner sometimes -- without kids. :-)

We also hiked some trails by the Trinidad coast, eventually making it to the beach. We rolled our blanket out, settled in to relax, and realized that we don't "do" relaxing on the beach. We do playing in the ocean, making sand creations, digging. Playing "get as close to the ocean as possible but don't let it get you!" with the boys, and collecting rocks. So we lasted about 15 minutes on the blanket:

And pretty much called it good. Not before grabbing this though...

Because, after all, we were having a great time.

On the way back to Redding, we hit a highlight for me, the Bigfoot Museum in Willow Creek, CA. Having had an armchair interest in Bigfoot for, oh, all my life, I was absolutely insistent that we stop here. I chatted with the old lady running the place and got her views of why the Bigfoot in the Patterson Video is real, some of the local Bigfoot spots, and actually scored an invite to join their board of directors of the Bigfoot Museum when we move back from Jersey.

Kristal compared to a Bigfoot print:

Pic says it all, got a pic of the actual cast made by Titmus at the site of the Patterson video. Pretty sweet.

And of course, the epic shot of Bigfoot from the Patterson video:

So, with that, Kris and I returned back to Redding. And we picked up Miles, and cruised back up to Portland where we enjoyed a BBQ with our great friends Chad and Kimberly, and spent the last night in Portland in a hotel by the airport (prepped for a 6am flight). No pics of that. :-)

All in all, we couldn't have picked a better place for our summer vacation. Kinda makes us ready to go back home. :-)

Trip to the Meatpacking District

2008-07-19T13:20:00.000-07:00

The meatpacking district in Manhattan was originally a meatpacking district. By midcentury, there were over 135 packing plants and butchers in the small area below:

By the 1980's, the area was overrun by drug dealers and prostitutes. In the 1990's, however, many boutiques and shops started arriving, and as all things New York, rising prices pushed the seedy, grit out of the area. In 2004, New York magazine called the Meatpacking District "The most fashionable neighborhood in New York."

Anyways, we were researching which events we wanted to go to when Food Network does their big New York Food and Wine Festival event in October. In addition to book signings by all their hosts, we're planning on a kids cooking event with Alton Brown and possibly a evening event hosted by Bobby Flay. We'll see. Anyways, while researching that, I realized that we had completely missed so far what is basically the culinary center of New York -- the Meatpacking District. Those few blocks are jam full with restaurants, shops, boutiques, etc. Plus, the studios of Food Network are down there.

So we got around and headed out for brunch. Parking down there wasn't nearly as bad as anticipated:

The area was a little different than I had expected. There wasn't very many people out. It was still pretty rough around the edges. Lots of brick, beat up closed store fronts, warehouses (some still operating as packing plants), and weird buildings like this:

But a lot of the area was renovated modern-distressed style restaurants and shops, like this one:

After a little walking around, and spotting a new Audi R8:

We then settled into outdoor seating at a little Italian place named Vento.

Despite Miles' frown, we had a lovely time sitting outside people-watching and scoping out the surrounding restaurants and buildings. Kristal thought she spotted a celeb, but we can't tell for sure who it is. Kate Hudson?

We started with some bread:

I knew we were in for a treat after tasting the raisin-fennel bread, and (to the right) the banana bread. The light bread was so soft and airy, nearly melted in your mouth.

Then, our food arrived. Mine, the lower plate, was a mozzarella and italian sausage omelet, Miles and Damion split an eggs benedict:

We got a side of fried mozzarella with a sauce that was UNBELIEVABLY amazing. It was like a fired-tomato sauce, slightly spicy, but very smooth. I spent the whole meal dipping my potato's in it.

Kristal ordered oven-roasted eggs over panncetta, spinach, and potato's. Again, the potato's were outstanding. We think they were boiled, skin on, then dumped in a fryer just long enough to give them a crispy outside. They were then split and seasoned with some herb and coarse salt.

This was easily one of the best meals we have had since coming out here. Service rocked as well, super nice and helpful waiter. We all had a scoop of gelati to finish up (I had Salted Caramel), and we were on to our next sight!

Look behind Damion in this picture:

No, not the R8 again. The brick building to the far right of the picture is the Chelsea Market - an incredible collection of food shops. That's where the Food Network studios are too, but they don't give tours. :-( So that's where we headed next.

Not before spying an Aston Martin (think James Bond) parked across the street:

Let's just say, the Chelsea Market is AWESOME. While rennovated, they have completely left the interior really raw and original. There's old brick, pipes, steel, and all sorts of concrete "things" of all sorts all over the place. Really industrial, really cool:

I thought this was an exceptionally cool view:

There were several large, industrial sized bakery's there, some of whom had store fronts, but a couple that didn't, just a fish-tank bakery. They had windows all along so you could see the bread rising, flour flying this way and that as the bakers...well, baked stuff. :-)

There were many, many candy shops, dessert places, several wine shops, a seafood place with more fish than I had ever seen in one place, and a few random nick-nack shops, including one selling Food Network stuff:

This was a funny name for a bakery:

When we had completed our tour of the Chelsea Market, we were pretty fooded out. We headed back to the car, not before spying a new Maserati Granturismo:

We drove uptown to Midtown to hit a sheet music shop. Kristal snapped this picture, thought it was pretty neat:

With the 100+ temperature outside though, we were pretty much ready to get home and into some air conditioned space. Walking around Midtown just wasn't gonna happen.

With a little more research I did after coming home, turns out the MPD really takes off at night, where people flock to the scene. I think we will have to take the Meatpacking District in on a Friday or Saturday night to really catch the magic, although I can say, we definitely found some good eats today!

Until next time!

Jazz Clasical?

2008-07-18T20:28:00.000-07:00

I studied piano a lot in college, and of course have always sought out new composers and music. I am so glad, however, that I continue to find new composers who have written copious amounts of piano music. One is Nikolai Kapustin, who was a musician who so wanted to be a jazz guy. Unfortunate thing was, however, that he was so steeped in classical training that he couldn't overcome the rigid training of "play the notes" to become an improv jazz performer (I know a thing or two about that). So, he started writing jazz like one would classical music -- by notating every note! Here's a great performance of his music by Marc Andre-Hamelin, an amazing pianist and great proponent of modern classical piano music. Enjoy!

Catching Up

2008-07-17T19:01:00.000-07:00

Yes, another catch up post. Funny how I can never stay current, and always end up having to post in retrospect.

Couple quick updates first. We leave for vacation in 6 days! Here's our itinerary:

Next Wednesday, 5pm, we fly out of Newark and land in beloved Portland International Airport!
Spend Thursday - Sunday in Portland visiting friends, visiting work, going to the SignaCert picnic, going to The Creek with the gang, etc.
Monday morning we drive to Redding, CA with Miles. Damion stays in Portland with friends
Tuesday, Kristal and I leave Miles with my parents, and we book it to Eureka, CA -- on the coast. We then spend two lovely days on a mini-vacation touring northern California breweries, coastal towns, and the redwood forests.
Thursday we come back to Redding and spend the evening celebrating my brother's birthday, July 31 (and Kebra's birthday, although she's in BFE Alaska! :-)
Friday we go back to Portland and spend the weekend
Sunday we fly back to New York

Needless to say, we cannot wait!

In other news, we managed to spend too much money over the past few weeks overhauling our living room. We bought some living room furniture that was long overdue - a bookshelf, some cabinets for DVD's and Nintendo games, a TV stand, and a ginormous TV to set on top of it. Also managed to pick up a A/V receiver so we could finally take advantage of the amazing surround sound the owner of our place has wired into the whole living room. We bought a great area rug for the whole thing, and have created a space we really enjoy. It's been great having people over and hanging out in our new living room.

Work has been going well, we have nearly closed on another big deal which, for a startup, is great news. Kristal has been staying busy (as you will see) with the boys now that summer vacation has set in. The boys have been busy with summer music camp for the past two weeks. The Hoboken School of Music, where they take lessons, lets out for the summer, but they took two weeks of summer lessons with Miles' teacher and have been having a great time. They actually recorded CD's of themselves playing, which I will post this weekend.

OK enough of the rambling, let's get to the pictures.

Last weekend we made our maiden voyage to the Jersey Shore. So first off, we haven't heard anybody out here call the beach the "coast" as we do on the west coast. It's called the "shore." Clearly New Jersey has a "shore" and the real motivation for visiting is that it supposedly offers surfing. So we went to the closest beach there is to us, which is about an hour away (about the same as the Oregon coast from Portland). These pictures were taken from the 'pet-friendly beach' which wasn't actually on the ocean but rather on a little bay where boats passed from dock to open ocean:

As for surf, let's just say that if I felt like surfing crowded, ghetto New Jersey beach break with self-inflated jock New Jersey types, maybe I'd brew the board out. After all, I did bring it all this way. However, it really was a downer out there because even though it was great being on a beach again, it was full of beach-type people. This, as opposed to the great oregon coast -- sweatshirt-wearing, hippie, granola, chill people. Here, it's bikini's, lords with fake tans, way too many muscles for me to feel comfortable, and tons and tons of people on the beach. Will we return? Most likely. But enjoy it like we do the Oregon coast? Never.

Onward.

On the way home, Kristal captured another classic "Andrew-driving" pic:

And we had the good fortune of encountering the really cool self-pay toll on the highway. See, most of the tolls around here (and there are PLENTY; we keep a $20 in the car nearly all the time just to take care of the frequent tolls we encounter) are "you-pay-an-attendant" type. This kind is cool -- you just toss your change in this plastic chute, it automatically counts it, and authorizes you through. Clearly difficult to capture with a stil pic, it was really fun tossing a handful of change into a plastic bucket and having it auto-count it!

See the chute?

The other day, Kristal and the boys had a great day out. First, they hit a couple of parks, one with a fountain. If I had kept a blog of us in Portland, these pictures would have been commonplace -- nearly every park in PDX has a fountain.

We're trying not to take for granted that the New York skyline, specifically the Empire State Building, is our backdrop for things like this:

Afterwards, Kristal and the boys went to lunch and Johnny Rockets, a retro burger-joint. The boys ordered, for the first time, "grown-up" burgers. In fact, so grown-up that Miles said to the waitress that he would like a "grown-up Smokehouse burger." Obviously they had their mouths full, no pun intended!

And a few more pics to round out the day:

Until next time!

That's MISS August to you!

2008-07-15T16:55:00.001-07:00

Found out a few days ago that our veterinarian was Miss August 2003 for Playboy. What's more, a guy downstairs had the issue, and had to show me What's more, she maintains a web site and occasionally updates with "membership only" pics. With her "friends." All I can say is:

Catching Up

2008-07-06T19:22:00.000-07:00

Hello gang,

Another catch up post. Kristal and the boys went to the Central Park Zoo the other day, so I wanted to post some pics of that, as well as Oliver after getting fixed and having his dew claws removed. Poor guy was in pretty bad shape!

One additional note, I have made the linked images larger, and will try that for a while. So when you click a picture in the blog, it should take you to a bit bigger picture than before. Hopefully that works.

Anyhow, on with the pics.

The boys and Kristal found the statue of Balto. The boys read a story about Balto and ever since then we've wanted to find him in Central Park!

Miles hauling the backpack for a while:

Watch out -- Giant Spiders!!!

Miles keeping a keen eye on the goat...

Looks like they're having a great time so far!

Keep the good times going....

After Central Park, the boys and Kris went to FAO Schwartz, which is right at the southeastern corner of Central Park. This is the flagship store on Fifth Avenue.

Miles hugging a huge Ugly Doll:

Will it be Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, or Slytherin????

Poor Ollie:

Our semi-interesting weekend

2008-06-29T18:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we decided to go into the city, and in the spirit of seeing new places, we decided to tour the Lower East Side. Hit up wikipedia for a synopsis of this area, but in a nutshell, this largely Jewish area has historically been a working class neighborhood and up until 20 - 30 years ago, an area typically not visited due to the crime and rough edges. Like everywhere in Manhattan, it has been smoothed over and soaring real estate prices have pushed out many of the blue-collar people that once lived there. Home to Katz's deli, arguably the best pastrami in the nation, and we had actually been down in the area before, at night, to visit a burlesque club some months ago.

Anyways, as some of these pictures show, much of the streets probably haven't changed for a long time:

Kris told me this is Lil Kim:

The boys entertaining themselves as we walked down the sidewalk:

Thought this was funny:

So as you can tell, this is clearly a "different" sort of neighborhood than Greenwich Village or Midtown. While fascinating, this isn't the sort of place a family tends to take a leisurely stroll. Most of the folks we encountered were clearly locals. We had some incredible Greek gyro's though.

After that we drove around the city looking for something interesting (and celebrities), up 2nd from LES up into the Upper East Side (East 80's and 90's) then over the Fifth Avenue and drove down Fifth. Figured it was probably time to get home, so we booked it back through the Lincoln Tunnel and into Hoboken. We pretty much laid low the rest of the day.

Today we were productive for the first half of the day. Kris and I both hit the gym, made a great (late) brunch, took the dog for walks, etc. But all that came to a screeching halt around 2 when the thunder storms rolled in and it started raining like crazy. So we made another pot of coffee and spent most of the afternoon reading.

Rained so much today that areas of Hoboken, as usual, flooded:

Click on the above pic for more "Hoboken is flooded" pictures from the local blog.

Around 7 the fire alarm started going off in the building, so we all hurry to the front door, nearly rush out when we realized that Miles wasn't wearing any clothes under his little Kimono he was wearing! So I rushed him back into the room for some clothes, then we busted down the stairs and congregated with others exiting the building. FOUR fire trucks pull up, and no less than 12 guys in full gear enter the building to do the sweep. Turns out the garage was too hot. Go figure! I forgot my phone or else would have been twittering the hell out of that.

Pretty much entered our nightly "shower, brush teeth, read for 30 minutes, go to sleep" routine after that.

I have a back log of pictures that I have been meaning to blog, just haven't had the chance. I'll do an 'update' post before too long. I'm in the city tomorrow and in Greenwich, CT on Wednesday, so can probably find some time in there to post them.

Take care all!

Some NY news

2008-06-24T17:39:00.000-07:00

Reading through the Gothamist tonight, here's a sampling of some news clips in the area:

# Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a pedestrian was struck on 41st St. and 8th Ave. in Manhattan, someone found a grenade on Pitkin Ave. in Brooklyn, and a hostage situation on Oval Terrace in the Bronx.

# An 11-year-old boy was arrested after he stabbed a 13-year-old in Mt. Vernon, north of the city.

# A 26-year-old man from the Bronx ran up and down Park Ave. on the Upper East Side yesterday afternoon groping the breasts of almost ten women.

Regarding that last headline, I like how the New York Post described the assailant:

A serial fondler terrorized the Upper East Side last week...

IMG00034.jpg

2008-06-24T10:04:00.000-07:00

And here is a Maybach 62s which I think runs about $450k. Not a bad car day so far!

IMG00033.jpg

2008-06-24T09:57:00.000-07:00

This rolls royce phantom is parked outside Zegna with rap music cranked and couple of dudes in the back seat. Gotta be somebody famous.

Twitter Updates

2008-06-23T07:57:00.000-07:00

I setup twitter updates on the blog over to the right. Can everybody see them? The last one should be "Just made it half way through....."

Post in the comments if you see five twitter updates or if you just see the header Twitter Updates, then Follow me on Twitter, then into my del.icio.us bookmarks.

Thanks!

Trailer

2008-06-21T15:06:00.000-07:00

Here's a trailer I put together to tease you for what should be coming soon -- the full movie. It's a little belated, but I just now found the footage of our trip out so am starting to put some stuff together. Enjoy!

Test from blackberry

2008-06-21T11:00:00.001-07:00

Testing

2008-06-21T10:58:00.001-07:00

A test post from Gmail.

First Recital

2008-06-08T17:43:00.000-07:00

Today the boy's had their first piano recital. We made a YouTube video of it, which you can see here. But first, a couple of pictures you don't see in the video (and a couple you do!):

Getting ready:

We all wore our new shoes today:

Pre-recital pics:

At the recital:

Miles was exhausted after his performance! He slept through most of the rest!

Hope you like the video!

When peacocks attack...

2008-06-01T18:51:00.000-07:00

Here's an article that had Kristal and I laughing tonight. You might have to sign up for an account to read it, unfortunately. Apparently a free-roaming peacock at the Oregon Zoo "attacked" a toddler. While the child did suffer some pretty brutal scratches, I wonder how much of this was prompted by some kid getting up in the peacock's grill...

Apparently this is not the first time it has happened. This was from an incident in 2006:

“We were next to the tigers when the peacock came up… it goes down to get a piece of purple candy and my son stepped towards the peacock and it jumped up on him and grabbed my son on both shoulders with its talons and stuck its beak into his chest,” said Shane Woodward.

Talons... :-)

Anyways, Zoo Director Tony Vecchio knows what to do:

"I've told the staff to round this peacock up and we'll put him in a time-out for a while until we figure out what to do next."

Yes, a time out for the peacock. That should do the trick!

Wii Fit

2008-05-28T18:56:00.000-07:00

Nothing pleases me more than having the entire family addicted to a "game" we waited in line for three hours for. Wii Fit is a big hit for us, with all of us competing on each challenge to see who has the highest score. I went through my full fitness routine tonight for the first time since we got it, and am tired! I will probably be sore tomorrow.

Speaking of tomorrow, I have a busy day, but should be fun. Up at 5am because I have to be at grand central station by 6:45. Hop a 6:57 train to Stamford, CT, where me and a colleague are meeting with a hedge fund for a couple of hours. At 10am it's off to another hedge fund in the area for a couple hours, then BACK to the original one for lunch with a lead IT guy. After lunch we're meeting with a sysadmin to go over the implementation of our stuff.

Should get done with that by 3pm, then need to get back home for a meeting with our CEO. So all in all, full day.

No plans for the weekend yet.

Got Wii Fit

2008-05-26T08:48:00.001-07:00

As I mentioned in the last post, we were up at 6:15 this morning to get to Nintendo World to get Wii Fit. As anticipated, there were already 6 people in line when we arrived around 7:15. The store opened at 10am.

We had a good time waiting around. There was a kid in 5th grade with his parents behind us, so the boys talked about video games with him, and took turns playing the DS. I chatted with a gal in front of us, a single 50-something year old who loved her Wii, and was currently obsessed with Guitar Hero.

We also had the pleasure of listening to the B-52's this morning. They were on the Today Show, which they were filming just around the corner. So we jammed in line to Love Shack and Rock Lobster, which is my favorite B-52's song!

Sorry this is such a poor picture, here's the only pic we got of us in line:

Here's Damion with Pikachu!

And here's us when we got home:

It's not every day...

2008-05-25T18:21:00.000-07:00

...you have a $150 breakfast!

Of course, it's not everyday that you have breakfast on the ice rink of Rockefeller Center. Read on!

This morning we drove into Manhattan to Nintendo World to try and pick up Wii Fit. This is a "game" for the Nintento Wii that comes with a pad that enables you to do exercises and it tracks your progress over time. It's hard to explain, go here to find out more.

Anyways, we drive in, park at Rockefeller Center, and there's a line literally wrapping around the block for Nintendo World:

Clearly they weren't going to have any left by the time the queue was empty. So I'm going in with Damion and Miles at 6:30am tomorrow (a father's love knows no bounds!) to wait in line for 3 hours hoping to snag one. Of course, then there's my friend Jay who apparently had no issues buying one in Portland.

Having struck out on Wii Fit, we decided to make the best of it -- have breakfast at Rock Center.

Where the ice rink normally is, they have tables and turn it into a restaurant, the Rock Center Cafe. I've been by this a million times because I normally meet my boss in the city at the Terrace Club, a private club he belongs to just across the street. So we went on down, and were greeted with the most ridiculous childrens menu I have EVER seen:

Filet Mignon?!?!!?!? And this was the Brunch menu!! I fear for what I would have seen on the children's dinner menu!

We had a lovely brunch though:

The sun was shining (I actually got sunburned today from sitting in the sun here), people seemed to be in an exceptionally good mood (probably due to the phenomenal weather), and it made you want to walk fifth avenue with the millions of other folks having a great morning.

We came home and dorked around the house for a while. Kristal and I rearranged our bedroom. The boys painted:

And Damion is learning the guitar:

We're making the best of this holiday weekend. What is everybody else up to this weekend? Post in the comments!

Andrew and Fam

Greenwich For Real

2008-05-24T19:49:00.000-07:00

Just a note, I'm posting TWO posts tonight, so after you get done reading this one, you can continue on to a "catch up" post. Or you can skip down there and read that one first to keep this all chronological and stuff. :-)

Today was a Greenwich Village do-over day. Since we got rained out last weekend (see the prior blog post), we decided to do our walking tour and everything today.

We started out with a great breakfast:

Miles was a great help in the kitchen as we whipped up some chocolate-chip pancakes and bacon. Oliver was anxious to help too!

We got ready to go, and decided to drive in. Driving into the city is actually super easy for us, and costs about half as much as if we took trains. Driving in Manhattan isn't too bad either, as long as you get into the vibe of the Drift. The Drift is that maneuver by taxi's and most other drivers on the road where the vehicle is left to just drift across lanes. No signal, no clear intent, just moving in fluid motion across the lanes of traffic. It's as if there were no lanes. Once you realize that drifting happens nearly all the time, you start to adapt and accommodate. I have gotten down the technique of the Drift, but I still use my turn signal. :-)

We found FREE parking in Greenwich Village right at Hudson and Bleeker and took in the shopping down Bleeker street. Oh, and before I get ahead of myself, Kristal...

looking exceptionally hot today!

After Bleeker, we hit a house that Walt Disney had lived in:

We then took a detour and headed over for lunch. Here are the boys while we waited for our order:

We went to this mexican restaurant, sat outside, it was great. We ordered this Tapas plate with a bunch of "mini" stuff -- mini tacos, mini burritos, mini quesadillas, and mini taquitos. We thought we were getting a great deal because the whole thing was $19 -- less than $5 each for lunch! We also ordered soda's -- BIG MISTAKE. The soda's were $4 apiece!! A four dollar glass of Diet Coke???? Yeah, officially the most expensive glass of soda I've ever had.

Moving on, we took in some stately brownstones:

With cool street addresses:

Here is the brownstone that was used for exterior shots of the Huxtable house, on the Cosby Show:

Maybe it was in better shape 20 years ago. :-)

Here's a funny picture Kristal took of us walking. I look like I'm trying to wax eloquent about something and her knowing smile that seems to say "yes Dear, how fascinating." :-)

We ran across this wall, one of the last examples I've seen of "old New York" before it was cleaned up:

You just don't see tagging like this anywhere in Manhattan. It's almost like a preserve to see it in Greenwich Village. As an aside, I have NEVER seen more tagging than in Newark, NJ. That place is GHETTO. And scary. I actually watched a show on A&E called Gangland (about modern gangs), and they featured the MS13 gang, and they have a huge presence in Newark. And modern gangs aren't just the crap you think of in East LA back in the 80's, like Beat It style, we're talking about brutal, (inter)nationally organized gangs. Jersey is apparently a haven for this stuff, not just Mafia.

ANYWAYS, by this time, we were all starting to get a little tired:

On our way back to the car, we ran across Gay St. It's a cute little street:

Everybody who passed it would stop and take out their camera's to take a picture. You'll also notice that there are no people on the sidewalks. Walking on the residential streets of Greenwich Village was really cool as they were nearly empty. Just a few locals now and then. Which is a stark contrast to practically everywhere else in "mainstream" New York. The boys loved it because they had plenty of space to play (pretending to be Indiana Jones on some adventure).

We hit Washington Park on our way out. This park used to be a haven for drug dealers and other seedy folks, but is now a generally cool hang out with TONS of musicians playing instruments of all sorts. It's right by NYU so you get lots of university hippy's as well.

And last but not least, Miles took this great picture of Damion, Kristal, and myself:

So that was our day in Greenwich Village!

Catching Up

2008-05-24T19:24:00.000-07:00

This is not the first time I've had to do a "catch up" post. Here are a few pics of the past two weeks since the last blog post.

Ok so we've had a few Oliver requests, so to oblige, here's how our puppy is doing. First off, he's grown a TON. And we discovered that he's not the "mini dachshund" as advertised. Definitely too big to be a mini. But he's great to have around the house, loves playing with the boys, and if we could just get him to stop chewing up Kristal's shoes, we'd be in great shape!

Now a few random pics. Here is me at "work" (at home). Doing what I do out here, I split my time between being in suits, and in jeans and a sweatshirt (notice my Vermont souvenir!):

Here's Miles and Mom:

OK so last weekend, Miles' piano teacher invited us to a performance she was participating in at a music school in Manhattan. Upon researching it, turns out this place, Greenwich House, in Greenwich Village, is a 100 year old music school, who's alumni include John Cage and Henry Cowell. This place is an institution in Manhattan, and it was very cool to have the opportunity to visit. Miles' piano teacher is a soprano, and was singing children's songs. It was a great recital, the boys really enjoyed it.

The plan was to visit Greenwich House for the recital, then do a walking tour of Greenwich Village. I mapped it all out, and all the sights we were going to see. Unfortunately, we got rained out! So since we had driven, we took a detour home over the Brooklyn Bridge:

I couldn't help but comment to Kristal how much steel actually comprises the bridge. It seems to me there was an awful lot of "extra steel" if there can be such a thing. Take a look at this picture:

See that? There are beams, cross beams, extra support lines, more beams, random fan-looking-structures of steel, and more beams. :-) Oh well, am I a structural engineer? No.

Anyways, after coming back from Brooklyn, we were hungry, so decided to land right back where we started, Greenwich Village, for dinner, at a funny place called Jekyll and Hyde's. For some reason we didn't take any pictures of the place, but it was a Horror-themed restaurant. So there was creepy stuff everywhere, the lights were so dim you could barely see, they played creepy music, etc. Most of it was tongue-in-cheek, and actually quite funny (i.e. think Monster Mash), but pretty cool. And not a complete rip-off like Midtown theme restaurants.

As we were walking back to the car, the boys stumbled across this gem -- a narrow doorway leading to who-knows-where with the coolest street addresses:

Our week with Sebra

2008-05-11T17:38:00.000-07:00

Sebra, Kristal's mom, has been staying with us for the past week. It has been a lot of fun having her with us. I wanted to post a few pictures of the past week and the great things we have done.

Last Saturday we went to the Statue of Liberty:

Of all the tourist things we tend to do with people who visit, this one doesn't seem to get tiring. Screwing around with all the people on the ferry's and the lines get tiring, but it's a pretty cool landmark. Sebra found her grandmother and her grandmother's sister's names on the wall on Ellis Island. Very cool.

We also went to the Hoboken Arts and Music festival last weekend. As you can see it was crazy busy, but really cool. It was almost like a farmers market but with a lot more venders. I guess like a Saturday Market sort of thing. There were also two stages where none other than Mickey Dolenz was headlining that night. He's one of the guys from The Monkees. Unfortunately, we were too tired after walking for three hours to stick around for him, so we'll just have to catch him on reruns of the show. :-)

You can't see it very well, but Kristal was wearing an adorable skirt with music and piano notes on it. Very appropriate for the Arts and Music festival.

Little Oliver also got a new surprise -- a doggie bag!

He looks really cute in it. We took him to Central Park today in his bag (on the subways) and he did really good, and got lots of smiles from kids and women.

Here are a few more pics of him:

Here is Oliver playing with his new bag:

Kebra moved to Alaska this past Friday. She is spending the summer at a resort in Denali National Park doing seasonal work out there. It should be a great opportunity and a lot of fun for her. As a going away thing, Kristal, Kebra, and their mother all got pedicures:

And finally, for Monther's Day today, we all went to Central Park and Midtown. We always do a Mother's Day Picnic, so thought it fitting to do this years in Central Park.

The boys and I gave the necklace to Kristal this year. It was made by a local jeweler and is called a 'Loveprint.' We took thumbprints of Miles and Damion, the fingerprints are cast in Silver, and then she made them into a necklace:

On the back of each one is the boys' name. It's a really cool idea, the necklace turned out great, and it looks really good on Kristal.

That's all for now!

Brooklyn Botanic Gardens

2008-05-02T19:54:00.000-07:00

Kristal's mother, Sebra, is visiting for a while. Yesterday Kris took Kebra and Sebra to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. They captured great pictures. The cherry blossoms are amazing. This is definitely something that the boys and I will have to return to with Kris.

I don't have a lot of commentary on these pictures because I wasn't there, but here are some that Kristal captured:

Cute isn't she:

Kebra stopping to smell the lilacs:

This was a great picture of Kebra with Oliver:

And me in front of Carnegie Hall at a concert Kristal and I went to last night:

Weekend in Vermont

2008-04-27T19:06:00.001-07:00

Well everybody, pour a cup of coffee, tea, scotch, grab a beer -- whatever you need to settle back and read our blog for a while, because we had quite a weekend up in Vermont for the past three days, and I'm going to tell you all about it.

First things first, the planning. Last week was Spring Break for the kids. So about a month ago, we decided to go up to Portland, Maine for a couple of days, then through New Hampshire and over to Vermont for a couple more days, making a good 5 - 6 day trip out of it. Unfortunately, while in the midst of booking last minute hotels early last week, we had a "critical" meeting come up in New York, and I would have to be in the city for it on Thursday. That meant either leaving for our trip on Wednesday as planned but me flying back in to town for the meeting on Thursday, or just postponing our departure until after my Thursday meeting. Rather than leave the kids and Kristal up in Portland by themselves and missing part of the trip myself, we decided to go to Portland another time, hold off on that leg of the trip, and just do Vermont over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Departure

So Thursday after my meeting, we left town, driving north on 95 through Greenwich / New Haven / Hartford, CT then on through Massachusetts and Vermont on 91, then over to Burlington, VT. Burlington was our first stop for a couple of reasons. One, our Friday and Saturday nights were to be spent at a cabin (we'll get to that later) but we needed a place to crash Thursday night late (we didn't get in until 1am). But we also needed to be close to Winooski, the location of our "new addition." :-)

Introducing Oliver

Our new three-month old puppy Dachshund. He's a little guy, full of puppy energy, but cute as can be. Kristal has been looking for another dachshund for a while, specifically another rescue (like Roxie was back in Portland). But the rescue out here was slow to help us, and didn't deliver any options, so Kristal started looking on Craigslist. She knew we were going to be in Vermont for the weekend so fired up the Craigslist for VT, and right at the top was a Dachshund puppy. So she followed up, and one thing led to another, and here we are.

His ears are HUGE compared to his body. We'll do an "Oliver" blog post tomorrow if the weather is good!

Burlington

Burlington is Vermont's largest city, on Lake Champlain on the western border of Vermont. It's unique in that it's the smallest city that is the largest city within a state. Er...in other words, of all the "largest city in a state" cities, it's the smallest. :-) Anyways, it's only around 38k people, so it's still small. We got in at 1am Thursday night, so basically found our hotel and crashed. The next morning, we had breakfast at the hotel, and hopped in the car to explore.

There was a nice waterfront area, and up the street from that what looked like a nice walking area with shops and stuff, along with a brewpub, so we parked down on the waterfront, figuring we'd hit the lake, then walk the town a bit. It proved to be a wonderful time!

On the waterfront:

Just up from the waterfront was an Aquarium. We hit that, and it was really cool -- they had lots of animals on exhibit, supposedly every species of fish in Lake Champlain, etc.

The boys doing an experiment with peat moss:

Standing in front of a fish tank:

Watch out for giant bugs!!!!

After the aquarium, we walked up into the little "downtown area" of Burlington. It was AWESOME. Why? Because this area had two things I really miss from Portland:

Beer:

and Hippies:

I admit it! I miss the hippies. I get tired of seeing Wall Street types and professionals all the time around Hoboken and the City. Nowhere around here do you find lazy hippies in the park hacky-sacking or lounging around in the sun all day. I love it!

Burlington, specifically, and Vermont, in general, had a vibe VERY similar to the Pacific Northwest -- laid back, friendly, progressive, and scenery every bit as gorgeous as what we have. Seriously -- nobody on the east coast I've encountered so far in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Mass, Rhode Island, or New Hampshire compares to how friendly the people were in Vermont.

So we had lunch at the Vermont Pub and Brewery:

This place is fascinating. Not only did they have good beers as far as east coast goes, but they are really active in the brewing community in Vermont. Apparently they lobbied Vermont legislature for three years starting in 1985 until Vermont finally legalized a business for "brew pub." They've been in business since 1988 when it passed. Their beers don't have the amazing depth that Oregon beer has, but they still had the best that I've had out as far as craft beers go. In fact, when we told our waiter we were from Oregon, he said "Ahhh, microbrew capital of the world?" Which is true -- the Oregon Brewers Guild just released 2007 numbers, and Portland, OR has more breweries within its city limits (32) than any other city in the world.

We spent a couple more hours walking down Church street -- a closed-off street of shops and food:

Oh, and like I said before, hippies:

The Cabin

That afternoon, we left Burlington to go find our cabins. We were staying in a cabin outside of Stowe, a quaint little ski community about 10 miles from some mountain. While remote, we still had easy road access so could get in to town. This is important for city-slickers like us, who made regular use of the free wi-fi at a pizza place in town. :-)

That's our cabin. And me. After we settled in, the boys and I did some exploring:

The rest of Friday went like this:

Left our cabin, go meet Oliver and their owners
Kristal makes immediate connection with puppy, transaction complete
Go back to Stowe, stock up on evening essentials: hot dogs for BBQ, chips, cheese and wine for later, beer, soda
Return to cabin
Boys play with dog until they are all exausted

The boys absolutely love a dog they can play with. Our prior Dachshund was old, ill, and physically challenged and the boys never really got to play with her much. Imagine their joy playing with a dog who can keep up with them!

Friday late night, just as Kristal and I were going to bed, we took the dog out, around midnight, and were amazing by the stars we could see -- no moon, pitch black outside, it was truly amazing. Little did we know this would foreshadow some unsettling events to come.....

Vermont Maple Syrup

Kristal has told me for sometime that one of her life goals was to taste Vermont maple syrup straight from the source. We got our chance on Saturday.

Saturday we visited the Bragg Maple Farm. This is a family owned maple farm outside of Stowe about twenty miles. It's actually not too far from Montpelier (which Kristal and I are still debating on pronunciation!).

We showed up, there's a great little gift shop in the front. We talked a little bit with the lady at the counter of the shop, turns out she's married to third generation Bragg and part of the family that lives there and makes maple syrup. She said there was a "tour," which we knew through our research and were terribly excited to see, but that consisted of watching a film, her explaining how maple syrup is made and how they do things on Bragg Farm, then escorting us into their sugarhouse to see how the boiling process is done.

Bragg Farm utilizes over 2200 maple buckets in their harvesting process:

Without going into detail, there are four types of Vermont maple syrup -- "Fancy", the lightest, Grade A Amber, Grade A Medium Amber, and Grade B. They just got darker and darker with a more concentrated maple flavor in each. The samples of the Braggs' maple syrup was enough to have us picking up maple everything, from a pint of syrup to candies, maple fudge, samplers of the four types, even four maple ice-creams!

Yes, they were immensely good!

We were invited to play around the grass they had there and go look at the animals they had. The boys (I mean Miles, Damion, and Oliver!) were really taken with them:

Then Damion and Oliver played around on the grass for a while:

Later that afternoon, we went back to the cabin. The boys and I went down to the creek behind our place, and built a dam and explored. We then brought Mom out to see our handiwork:

We then decided to go out to dinner at the aforementioned pizza joint with free wi-fi, Pie-Casso. We took the long way home afterwards, and saw some amazing things in the backwoods of Vermont.

The grass meadows of Vermont are mindblowing. You'd think they were manicured, mowed, and fertilized. I've seen the most meticulous lawns show worse than natural grass meadows here:

We ran across a home-made maple harvest rigging on a dirt road about 10 miles out of Stowe:

I couldn't guess when this original covered bridge was built, but it typifies Vermont Country:

We found this running watermill out in the country:

And this rusted out Model-T-looking car, who knows how long it's been out there:

The "boys" relaxing in the backseat on the way home:

That night, Saturday night, ended like any normal night. Kristal and I put the boys to bed on the pull out in the living room, we went to our room to watch TV (we got two channels), turned on Law and Order, and relaxed for a while. We then went to sleep.

At around 2am I woke up to pitch black darkness. Now, I'm a city-slicker, and just don't do well in pitch blackness. Besides, we left a light on dimmed in the living room for the boys, and the porch light on, but there was NOTHING on now. I literally couldn't see my hand in front of my face. I kind of freaked out because I couldn't really get oriented -- there was nothing to set my bearings straight!

It didn't help that what woke me wasn't the blackness -- it was a noise. A strange whirring noise that made itself heard every minute or so. I woke Kristal -- she immediately wanted me to "find out what it was." Great. So I grab the trusty Blackberry from the night stand, and using it's screen glow, guide myself into the pitch black night that had enveloped our cabin. The sound stopped altogether, as I explored, and I checked on the boys -- they were fast asleep. I looked out the windows, and sure enough, there were no lights on anywhere, even though I know that a cabin up the way had left its porch light on too. OK, power's out. Fine.

I go back to bed, report to Kristal that the "sound has stopped" and we tried to rest. We were both freaking out though. PITCH BLACK NIGHT. What if the boys woke up? What would they do, how would they find their way? We lay in bed worrying and imaging the worst possible horror flick scenario until we heard an unexpected shuffle in the living room. Crap -- either the slashing killer has finally made it into the cabin, or maybe one of the boys had woken up.

I grab the Blackberry and go in, and thankfully, it was no masked slasher -- Miles had woken up. He asked me "Dad, can we have a nightlight tonight?" LOL. I nearly told him "Miles, I wish I had a nightlight tonight" but having nothing to offer him, told him and a woken Damion to just come in bed with us. Thankfully we had a King bed in our room -- which all five of us crawled into: Oliver, Kristal, Miles, Damion, and me. All night we tossed and turned crammed in that bed, but at least we could keep each other from worrying too much about the uncertainty contained in that black night.

We all woke up Sunday morning tired, but an excited Oliver got us moving pretty quickly. We had business to attend to. After a quick visit to the original location of Ben and Jerry's:

not only did we need to get home, but we needed to visit........

Funspot

If you've never seen the movie King of Kong, go rent it immediately. It's a documentary about the struggle over the world Donkey Kong high score, and if you didn't think there was drama over video game scores, guess again. Anyways, when it comes to the ultra-elite gaming achievements, there are only a few places in the nation you can go that are "sanctioned" as being legitimate, Funspot being the premier site. Funspot is an entertainment place in New Hampshire that has Bingo, mini golf, snacks, etc.. but it's claim to fame is it's retro arcade -- nearly every classic arcade game you can imagine, from Pacman, to Donkey Kong, from Tapper to Timber, it's here. Funspot plays a central role in King of Kong as a place where two players were to duke it out over the world Donkey Kong high score, the reason being that the DK at Funspot was legit -- if you were going to set a world record, hundreds of players do it on Funspot arcade games.

I played a game of Pacman on THE same machine that Billy Mitchell accomplished the first ever "perfect" game of Pacman. What's a perfect Pacman score? According to Wikipedia:

A perfect Pac-Man game occurs when the player completes all 256 levels with a maximum point score and without losing a life...To attain the maximum possible score of 3,333,360 points, it was necessary for [Billy] Mitchell to eat every fruit, every Power Pellet, every blue ghost and every dot for 256 boards without losing a single life...

That is insane. I played Pacman on THAT machine.

We drove through nearly 60 miles of back country New Hampshire to reach Funspot, which really is out in the middle of nowhere. You wouldn't imagine that one of the nations most legimiate classic arcades is located in the middle of backwoods NH, but it is.

A few pics from inside, this is THE Donkey Kong arcade game from the documentary, where near-million point scores of Donkey Kong have been played, and where Steve Weibe accomplished the first kill screen EVER at FunSpot:

Timber was a fun game, where you are a logger and have to go around cutting down trees while a bear throws bee swarms at you. :-)

Our drive through New Hapshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York home was uneventful. We did see this entertaining bumper sticker:

We had an amazing time this weekend, lots of memories made. I hope you felt just a bit of what we experienced through this post.

Take care all!

Some Catchup Time

2008-04-17T17:29:00.000-07:00

It's time to catch up on the last couple of weeks or so. I grabbed some pictures of some of the highlights (not that they're that high, but whatever).

This is "Borscht."

No, I didn't stick my hand in a blender and serve it for dinner. Kristal decided to go out on a limb and serve the family her new favorite food, beets. This is a soup comprised of, primarily, beets -- along with some other stuff.

I actually liked it. Can't say as much for Miles though:

Last weekend we went to Rutt's Hut. It's a hot dog joint in Clifton, NJ, about twenty minutes from us. It also is supposed to have some of the best dogs ever. Now, I have to admit that I find it odd that east-coasters take as much pride in their dogs as they do, but sure enough -- there are so many 'world famous' dogs here: Gray's Papaya, Nathan's, and Rutt's Hut.

Rutt's claim to fame is the Ripper -- a deep fried hot dog. We each got two, and I gotta admit, that was one tasty dog! They've been serving them that way for over 60 years.

One of our highlights over the past couple of weeks was seeing:

Cry-Baby, the Musical. It's a Musical that hasn't "technically" opened yet -- no one is allowed to write reviews about it in the press or anything. It's in pre-showing, and apparently how this works is shows they aren't sure will be a big hit typically open a few weeks early for a 'soft launch.' Depending on the success of those shows, they set ticket prices and the number of performances, etc. We made a great night out of it:

Kristal looking gorgeous:

And her walking in Times Square by the theater:

Judging by the standing ovation we gave the performers, this one's going to do well.

Tonight after dinner we went to the park by our place. The weather is warming up so nice and there's sun late enough that doing things in the evening is a little easier.

So there you have it.

I will do another blog post on Sunday if we do anything this weekend. Not sure what we have planned. We will definitely have downtime next week and weekend because we're going on our spring break trip up to Portland, ME and touring around New Hampshire and Vermont! Look for the exciting blog post about sometime week after next. Should be a good one given what we have planned!!

Central Park today

2008-04-05T17:20:00.000-07:00

It was supposed to rain today, but when we woke up this morning, it was clear as a whistle outside, and warming up! Turned out to be a gorgeous day, so we went to Central Park today.

There are a million things to do, and you could seriously spend a whole day touring all over the park, going to the zoo there, etc. We decided to just walk around and see the sites as opposed to hitting the zoo and doing other activities that are there. It was really weird seeing an ice skating rink in the middle of a park out on a sunny, warm day.

Each of these pictures doesn't really have a story, so I'll just post them:

The boys loved climbing the many rocks within Central Park...

This is, of course, the John Lennon memorial in Strawberry Fields, a 2+ acre conservatory in memory of Lennon.

Clearly not Central Park time, but last night the boys built a fort with a fort building kit that Grandma Sharon sent us. This was a pretty great pic:

They Live!!!!!

2008-03-31T17:56:00.000-07:00

I bet you didn't think this blog existed anymore eh? Well here's to getting back on the saddle. It's funny how quickly time gets away from you when you have the pressure of blogging over your head.

Regardless, we had a great weekend and we wanted to share it with everyone.

Last week I was in Portland for three days, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I took a red-eye back to NYC over Friday night, and got back to JFK Saturday morning at 8am. I got back to Hoboken and our place around 10:00. We decided that since we had the whole weekend ahead of us, and some catching up to do, we would cruise up to Rhode Island for a night and two days. So we left two hours after I got back, loaded up the car with jackets and a suitcase, and hit the road!

Here's the George Washington Bridge on our way up. The GWB crosses the Hudson river from Jersey to Manhattan. It's a massive suspension bridge with two levels.

We bombed down Highway 95 which rolls through the lower portion of New York, into Connecticut through Stamford, Greenwich, New Haven and Mystic, then into Rhode Island (our destination). Here's the route we took:

View Larger Map

Once we got to Rhode Island, we took a detour to hit the Atlantic Ocean for the first time:

It's true that the Atlantic doesn't have NEAR the wave size that the Pacific has. It's much more mellow, which was strange to me because I always associate the ocean with the "sound" of waves crashing, but that wasn't the case out here. It's a "quieter" ocean experience.

On the way to Rhode Island, I had a meeting canceled for Monday, so we decided to extend our trip out a day and stay three days, two nights. This was going to be fun!

We made it to Rhode Island, but it was nearly dark when we got there. After trying an Inn down by the water and them having no vacancy, the guy at the front desk was super helpful in that he directed us to:
1. A town north of NewPort (about five minutes away) called MiddleTown, which had a bunch of hotels we would likely find a room in
2. The worst chinese food I have ever had in my life

I nearly think that the worst chinese food of my life was worth the hotel room, because the hotel we settled on was cheap enough that we decided to get ambitious and try and find an Inn in Newport for the next night.

Our first day in Newport we hit the Cliff Walk. The Cliff Walk runs along the south ridge of an inlet to the north of Newport. It was a gorgeous view not only of the water, but inland were the famous "Newport Mansions". So we had a great time on the 1.5 mile walk:

Kristal gets fancy with our Camera. This reminds me of the photo's Betsy takes:

After our walk, we continued to drive on to our next goal -- Martha's Vineyard. Kristal has always wanted to visit Martha's Vineyard, so we continued driving down highway 1 until we got to the closest ferry point New Bedford, about 30 minutes from Newport. We puttered around New Bedford for about ten minutes looking for the ferry, and when we found it, we pulled up and asked for a ticket. "Ferry doesn't run on the weekends," the ticket-booth-guy said. "Only during the week this time of year." Bummer! He continued: "You can drive down to Woods Hole, it runs. But by the time you get there, be pretty late."

We decided to make Martha's Vineyard another trip. The last thing we wanted to do was spend our Sunday driving all over the place and taking boats when we should be out and about walking around. Not to mention the sun had come out, it was about 55 degrees, and quite warm. I know, I know -- it may not seem warm, especially to those in the Golden State, but really, it's quite pleasant.

So we cruised back to Newport and took in the place. It was actually very, very cool. We took in lunch (late lunch) at a cool Irish Pub named Buskers. We then hit all the shops that are along the waterfront. We then hopped in the car to find our hotel for Sunday night. As we were driving around aimlessly, Kristal spotted a really cool historic hotel called Hotel Viking. It was amazing! We stopped, I cruised in to see about availability, and was able to secure room. This place was exactly what we were hoping for our last night out:

After we checked in, dropped all our stuff out, we then walked down to the waterfront. By the time we made it down there it was dusk, and getting extremely chilly:

We continued driving around the town that evening looking at random sights -- The oldest tavern in the US, the White Horse Tavern, various houses build pre-1650, etc. It was extremely cool.

We went back to Hotel Viking that night, ordered some food and a bottle of wine in the room, and watched three hours of Ax Men on History channel.

The next morning,

we got around, and hit the beach one more time:

then started our drive back. We stopped in a gorgeous little town called Mystic, in Connecticut. This quaint little town is your picturesque little New England town and unfortunately we snapped zero good pictures of it. But we talked to a couple of shop-owners, and will definitely be returning this summer. It's a very cool little town.

We had lunch in a great seafood place. Kristal had a really great lobster salad role:

And despite my generally nervous-looking expression, was really anxious to dig into my lobster taco's:

Before leaving, we tried to take one snapshot of the view we had from this great place of the Mystic drawbridge and shops on Main Street:

After that we drove in pouring down rain nearly the entire way home (home sweet home!) and made it back tonight in time to take a load off and do a blog post.

Again, apologize for the lack of blogs. We have been staying entirely too busy, and please, continue checking back as we come into Spring because I'm sure Kristal will make me blog more regularly.

Bye!!

Last Weekend

2008-02-24T18:21:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-10T18:28:00.000-08:00

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:

View Larger Map

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

2008-02-03T09:15:00.000-08:00

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!

Miles turns 6!

2008-01-29T19:24:00.000-08:00

Yes SIX -- our little one is already six years old. It's striking to reflect on the differences between Miles at 6 and Damion at 6, they are night and day. But in the end, I'm thankful we've had such a broad experience with our boys. Miles has been such a curious little guy -- incredibly creative and yet brilliant with numbers and analysis. He has always been adaptive as well, being a great little brother to Damion. Our boys have a true bond and it's a joy to see.

So as most of you know, I'm a day late on this post -- Miles' birthday was yesterday. And since we had both work and school, it was actually a continuation of his initial birthday event, the Saturday visit to Statue of Liberty (see prior blog post). So after work yesterday, we opened gifts:

Cute isn't he?? :-)

The Tiger-Like-Thing wrapped around his head is a really cute and warm hat that Aunt Betsy brought back for Miles from Korea. It is awesome!

BTW, quick apology -- we suffer from severe "red-eye" with the pictures taken in our place. I use iPhoto's editing capabilities to attempt to remove it, but sometimes it doesn't work so well. It's particularly unfortunate when editing pictures of Miles because his amazing blue eyes never show up as good in pictures as they should. Anyways, onward!

The boys are slowly accumulating little music-making nicknacks like this xylophone. Add to this various percussive objects, harmonicas, the keyboard, piano, guitars, and Guitar Hero, and we have no shortage of music in this house. Which reminds me -- we have identified the "short-list" of piano teachers for the boys and should close on a teacher within the next couple of weeks. It's nice having Julliard so close!

Yes, Miles' favorite lunch is PB&J!

After gifts, we went to dinner at Miles' favorite type of dinner place, a Japanese Grill. The type of place where they cook the food right in front of you on massive grills and typically throw knives and other instruments around while doing it. Unfortunately we don't have any pictures of this, but it was a great experience.

We came home and had a great carrot cake -- Miles' favorite type.

The cake was great, and we built Bionicles the rest of the night.

Happy Birthday Miles!

Haircut day!

2008-01-27T15:11:00.000-08:00

Before:

After!!!

After Damion's haircut, she offered to hair-spray it into a feux-hawk, which damion LOVED. haha Miles' hair has NEVER been this short -- it was a little shorter than we anticipated, but the little curls in the front are awesome!

Population stats

2008-01-26T20:11:00.000-08:00

I had heard a rumor about this so verified it on Wikipedia tonight. I think this is rather amazing.

The population density of Portland is 4,200/ sq. mi.

The population density of Hoboken is 30,000/ sq. mi.

By comparison, New York City has a population density of 23,000 / sq. mi. and of the top 20 most populous cities in the US, only San Francisco is second to New York in density, at 15,000.

Hoboken has a population density twice that of Hong Kong (at 6,500 / sq. km, Hoboken is nearly 12,000).

Liberty Enlightening the World

2008-01-26T18:37:00.001-08:00

Today we visited the Statue of Liberty. Monday is Miles' birthday, and since we won't have the whole day (school and work day!) we decided to do what Miles would have wanted to do on his birthday -- go to the Statue of Liberty. This is actually something we've wanted to do since we got here, so it was a good excuse.

We're fortunate, Liberty State Park is only about 10 minutes away. From there you can SEE the Statue of Liberty, and there's tons of grass and park and a walk along the Hudson. We went there before to see the Statue when we first got here. Also from there you can park and take a ferry over to Liberty Island, which is what we did.

Once on the ferry, you can view back to Jersey City. So Jersey City is just south of Hoboken, in fact, there's no real delineation, they just run together. "Historic" downtown Jersey City has experienced, like so much of this area of Jersey, huge amounts of growth and re-development. It's very "Pearl District" -- old warehouses and buildings being either renovated or demolished and rebuilt. The other thing that is spurring growth to Jersey City is that TONS of banks and Manhattan-based financial companies are moving offices here because it's significantly cheaper than Manhattan, hardly anybody lives in the city anymore anyways, and it's way convenient for many people. So while Deutsche Bank, UBS, and others are busy building new buildings, Goldman Sacs blew them all away with this gargantuan in the south of Jersey City:

Yes, it really is THAT BIG. It literally is twice as tall as any building around it. Maybe the picture doesn't do it justice, but for some reason, this building just blows me away.

Anyways, the ferry to Ellis Island offered great views of the Manhattan skyline:

The ferry ride was cold, but not too long. We didn't realize we'd be island-hopping. We thought it was straight to the Statue of Liberty and back, but it actually takes a first stop on Ellis Island, then to Liberty Island, then back to Jersey.

Our first view of Lady Liberty!

First stop, Ellis Island.

Which was actually amazing. Walking into the main hall, you can feel the history of the place. The construction was modeled after the old train stations, with a huge arched ceiling:

There were room after room of old artifacts, murals, pictures, etc. At one time, that room was the main entry for millions of immigrants, and there were pictures of how they had it divided up over the years. On one particular (record-setting) day, they processed over 11,000 people -- in a single day!! There was also a kiosk where you can look up relatives names if they had been processed between 1892 and 1924.

After using the computer, we went outside to the huge wall they have, and looked up relatives. I found Jacob Heintz, and Kristal found Louis Klein. It was pretty amazing. Here was a shot outside by the wall:

After doing Ellis island, we had some time to kill while we waited for the ferry to take us to Liberty Island, so the boys and I played tag out front:

The ferry picked us up, and after chilling for a while inside where it was warm, we found our first good views of the the Statue, so we went outside and started snapping pics. I think I must have taken 20+ pictures, but here is the best one:

Now, since being on this little adventure of ours out east, we've done some "touristy" things -- Cheesy lodge in Wyoming (The C'mon Inn -- remember!?), Mount Rushmore, The Empire State Building, and now the Statue of Liberty just to name a few, and I have to admit, I haven't been disappointed with a single one of them. I don't know if it's because we're older now and appreciate things like that more, but I'll tell you -- everything has truly been awesome.

The Statue of Liberty is no exception. I was actually amazed -- not only was the size of her outrageous, but the construction and physical characteristics were incredibly compelling. But first, a few more pics after we landed:

Look at that picture, for example. You can see the "seams" in the outer covering of the skeletal framework of the statue. Some 180 panes of copper each 3/32" thick (about two pennies) comprise the exoskeleton. The craftsmanship is easy to take for granted, but truly amazing to behold that close up. The whole interior skeletal structure of her, which was a marvel to build, was designed by Gustave Eiffel three years before he started design of the Eiffel Tower. Frederic Bartholdi, the statue's designer, toiled for years to raise funds necessary to build it.

The other striking thing is the "green" color. It's brighter than you think it should be! She is, of course, constructed in the exterior by copper, which undergoes a kind of oxidation over time called patination. It took thirty years for the shiny copper she was originally built with to patinate into the green you now see. Looking over the New York skyline, this "technique" has been used on many buildings constructed in the early 20th century.

We walked out on the base of the pedestal and took a bunch of pictures. You can then go into this long "museum" on your way up the pedestal to the viewing area at the base of the actual statue. This museum was fascinating, and despite the unfortunate perception the US now has amongst our international community, it instills a sense of national pride for what our country used to stand for.

After freezing our butts off for 45 minutes while waiting for the ferry, we made it home. It really was a lot of fun, and this is the sort of thing we could do several times with visitors so inclined. It's close, and really worth doing.

Oh, and just in case I'm not the only one who has ever wondered what's under the robe:

Museum of Natural History, Manhattan

2008-01-21T17:47:00.000-08:00

Kristal took the boys to the Museum of Natural History today in Manhattan. It was their first jaunt to the city without me. I had to stick around and work.

Here are some pics. Since I wasn't there, I can't comment on most of them, but there's some color commentary here and there:

A woolly Mammoth:

By the end of the day, the boys were exhausted, the subway ride home was too much for them!

Weather.com has a "feels like" temperature that factors in wind chill. It "felt like" 6 degrees outside this morning when I went to the train and the gang were headed out. Thanks to Bets for the warm hats for the boys! Kristal told me that the boys got TONS of attention for their cool Korean hats, people asking where they got them, wanting to look at them. One lady even wanted to take a picture of them!!

We were all sick last weekend, thus no post cuz we didn't do anything, and this week is shaping up to be another really busy week for me. Tomorrow I go to Greenwich, CT for the afternoon to visit a hedge fund, then have a meeting in Mahwah, NJ (north almost to the border of New York / Jersey) on Wednesday morning, followed by a hedge fun in Manhattan in the afternoon, a call with the CEO and lead architect for a partnership deal we're working on, then have a web demo with a company we work with based in Portland but with a Manhattan office. Thursday is in the city, and Friday is back out to Warren, NJ.

Definitely getting my fair share of train rides this week! I'll try and take the camera on some of my travels this week and post if I can.