Over Christmas Break, Lisa and I along with our friends Michele and Greg took the kids into he city to see  the Museum of Natural History, Rockefeller Center (to see the Tree), a short trip to Nintendo World, a stop in the Heartland Brewery and more. While in Nintendo World, I had heard that there was an actual Gameboy in there which had seen combat in the Gulf War. Sure enough, it was there:

I took that picture, but I found a video with some good video footage of the game boy up close. The kids had a nice time in the city. Here is a shot of them sitting in front of the tree:

We also spent some time in Bryant Park on the way back and checked out the outdoor village they have. They have a pretty large ice rink there, but we were short for time as the day was drawing to a close so no-one put skates on.

Sports still dominates our time. Wrestling started but Marco go a bit burned out so we pulled him cause he was getting pretty stressed out about it. Giovanni joined wrestling and is learning it all from scratch. Giovanni hopes to wrestle in one tournament at the end of the season so we hope he does that. Antonio and Marco are doing basketball, which they  love. Antonio is getting really good, regularly scoring each game. Marco has been  in the clinic since first grade and now that he’s in 3rd grade they are starting to play games. He loves basketball as well and is quite the dribbler.

Lisa and I got Giovanni guitar lessons for Christmas and he’s been at 4 lessons so far. The instructor is really great and Giovanni is learning the fourth string right now. He’s doing great and practicing all of the time for fun. When I was his age I took lessons at the same place, it’s been there that long. Only after the 2nd or 3rd lesson, the teacher saw I wasn’t practicing and called me out. I quit right after that.

So, good for Giovanni.

Yesterday, I installed a foosball table in the basement. We’ve played a ton of games and loving the table. My cousin literally gave it to me and we’re so grateful. It came with some extra pieces, which was a good thing since one of the foosmen was broken. Here is a shot of the table in action:

This fall has been full and busy. We’ve been busy with tackle football, chauffeuring kids to friends houses, whiskey fest, beer fest, a fall BBQ, Lisa doing all kinds of 5k runs, seeing a lot of friends, and ripping gigs and gigs of home video.

Football has taken the majority of our time. With two kids on two teams, we had 2 practices a week and 2 games a weekend. Our schedule more or less revolved around whether we had a game that day. Marco’s team had a very good record, 7-2 and made it into Tier 2 playoffs. Playoffs are divided into divisions based on your record and run through 2 rounds + a superbowl final. The top division, Tier 1, has the best 8 teams in it. Tier 2 has the second 8, etc. Marco’s team lost their first playoff game and his season is over. Today, Antonio plays in his Round 2 game. His team’s record as not as good, 3-5-1, and his team made it into Tier 4 playoffs. I feel they had a rough schedule and should have been in Tier 3. We’ll see if I’m right if they crush today’s team like they crushed Glen Cove 31-0 last week and they go on to win the Super Bowl.

Tailgating during the games has been a good time. Often there will be a string of home games so the parents will stay and watch other games and eat BBQ and have coffee or beer. Antonio and Marco always get together with a group of friends and play football off the sidelines while the other brother is playing. Most of the games have been on beautiful days, but the Sunday after our October winter storm was brutally cold and Marco had to stop playing because he complained he couldn’t move his fingers.

Our friends Tom and Gigi had a great BBQ in October, sporting a fantastic selection of beer and food. I brought over a 6-pack of Founders Red’s Rye and Tom had the Breakfast Stout for me to try (and love). A bunch of the kids and I went to the local schoolyard and played football for an hour to burn off the turkey deep fried in peanut oil. Desserts were out of this world.

I attended Whiskey Fest in New York with one of my friends and The Long Island Beer Festival in Nassau Coliseum with my cousin. Both events saw us having a very good time. Whiskey Fest had an amazing selection of whiskey and other spirits and top-grade food and canapés. Beer fest had hundreds of beers on tap by local, regional, and national brewers and bratwurst and pretzels. Beer fest is held every 6 months and I vow to get a larger crew together in the Spring. The more the merrier.

Lisa has been doing 5k runs almost every weekend this fall. One of the more interesting runs was the Merrell Down and Dirty run. You could better describe this run as an obstacle course with mud. It’s a 5k “mud” run where they have you jumping over walls, climbing ropes and surfaces, and swimming through an actual mud pit. She had a great time. This was on Marco’s Birthday and Marco had a football game so I wasn’t there to take any pictures. Damn!

I’ll save my adventures in recording and editing hours and hours of video related to football for another post. Needless to say, I’m running low on drive space again!

Tomorrow, I leave for California with my family. Today, I battened down the hatches in preparation for hurricane Irene. The brilliant sunshine of the day was a bit ominous as the storm heads up the East coast. While the storm has just been downgraded, it still represents a bit of risk to my home since I won’t be here to address any issues should they come up. I took the day off to pack and it turns out that I was quite a bit busier than I expected.

Moving all possible projectiles into my garage was just the start. I emptied my pool a few inches and left the evacuation hose out. If the pool floods, I may be able to have someone turn on the pump to empty it a bit more. I secured my BBQ to our jungle gym. I might even secure the jungle gym to the trees in my backyard. I have a special pump that activates every 60 seconds and turns off after a few seconds if it detects no water. It wasn’t set up right so I set it up properly and ran the hose away from my house. If a tree falls on my house or we lose power then there is not much I can do. Flooding from the excessive rain is my main concern and with the pump set up, there is little more I can do.

The goods news is my mom is going to ride out the storm in my house while I’m away. Her house is more or less in the flood zone so it’s smart to be out of there so you don’t have to evacuate during the storm.

I wish all my NY friends luck this weekend.

As many of you know, I’ve beent taking Tae Kwon Do since I was about 26 years old… that’s almost 16 years. Tae Kwon Do is a Korean martial art and competitions are almost entirely kicks. In 2000, I got a black belt and in 2005 I got a 2nd degree black belt. I competed in two tournaments, got a gold medal both times, but was never really a complete ass kicker. My technique was very good in some areas and very poor in others. I was always a bit pudgy and my attendance waned over the years. For whatever reason, I hit a wall and was losing interest. Plus, I was doing triathlon training for the past two years and a guy only has so much time in their calendar. I’d like to one day return and get my 4th degree which is a big milestone where you’re considered a master, a title of considerable respect. But for now, me and Tae Kwon Do are taking a break.

In the meantime, I figured I’d try something new. While on a boat trip with my brothers and a few friends, my brother Tom’s friend Ken was talking about Judo. He said it would be an excellent martial art for Marco since if can compliment wrestling rather well. I was intrigued as well so I figure I’d take a couple classes myself and bring Marco in once I’d gotten familiar with the school. As it turns out, Marco has a very busy calendar since Football is keeping him pretty busy, and I’ve only been able to get him to one class. Sera and Antonio also took a class. Everyone liked it and I’m sure I’ll have them al-l going once a week once school starts.

As for me, I’m pretty hooked. Judo is taught on some days and Brazillian Jiu Jitsu on other days. The classes are far more brutal than I’m used to. I’ve been choked, stretched, and contorted in ways I didn’t know were possible. The classes are all over an hour and a half  and I typically stay for almost two hours for open mat. All of the technique is totally new and foreign to me. Its harder. It hurts. The other students are all strong and experienced and I’m basically getting my ass kicked ten times over.

But it’s a lot of fun and I’ve been feeling my flexibility come back and feeling my strength come back. For the past two years, I’ve been doing these crazy triathlons and while the training definitely helped improve my stamina, the training is not something I love to do. It’s not something I look forward to. Right now, I look forward to these classes and  they seem like the right thing for me to be doing right now.

On Wednesday night, my brother Tom took his boat out with me and our older brother and four of my cousins. Our destination? Zachs Bay. The special thing about Zachs Bay is that it’s right outside the Jones Beach Theatre in Wantagh. Tom parked the boat and we had a lot of laughs while listening to Journey and Foreigner songs. We could see the audience pretty clearly,  there were tons of lights shining on them and the music was pretty easily discerned. We saw a nice sunset, just to the right of the Theatre and watch the blood-red moon rise to the east around 9pm. I only had my cell phone on me so I don’t have a good picture of the moonrise.

To relieve ourselves, we peed in a canister about the size of a plastic pretzel barrel. The canister was, by the way, actually a plastic pretzel barrel. We had to do this because the boats that were parked around us were rather close. So we basically got down low, did what we needed to do into the plastic pretzel barrel, and dumped the yellow contents overboard. To be nice, we would wash out the canister (you remember, the plastic pretzel barrel) with sea water. When we did that, we noticed a wonderful glow that happened when we disturbed the water.

What was this?

We were fascinated. So, we went to the back of the boat and began to stir up the water by hand. What we found was a billion billion jelly creatures that glowed when you disturbed them. It was amazing. I thought at first they were jellyfish, but then we caught one in our hands and it didn’t sting. Recall why we were all peeing and you can imagine how we were seeing double rainbows in the water with these little fucking jellies.

Soon after, a group of sea birds (maybe swans) came by to greet us. They waddled along and just started at our boat, floating and waiting patiently. Now, I know you’re not supposed to feed these cute guys (they are actually kind of big and scary-looking) but I wanted to do it anyway. My cousin was like, NO DUDE DON’T DO THAT. I was like, LETS SEE WHAT HAPPENS MAN?! Then he went onto say how the goose would come on board and wreak havok. I can remember wanting to feed them more than ever after hearing that. In the end, it was toward the end of the night and we had EATEN EVERY BIT OF FOOD ON THE BOAT. So there was none left for the geese.

When we got back to Tom’s dock, we ordered a pizza and hung out for a while. We had a lot of laughs that night.

Years ago (2005!) I posted a picture that demonstrated probably my favorite optical illusion of all time, the same-shade-on-checkerboard-with-shadow-from-column illusion. Here is that post:

http://www.primordia.com/blog/archives/2005/03/it_cant_be_true.html

Now, someone went and did this in real life. The effect is even more profound and amazing.

For almost a year, my friend and ex-Liquidnetter Arif Huque has been traveling through Asia snapping photos, blogging, tweeting, and journaling his journey in wondrous detail. I met Arif in 2009 when we went to Rwanda together (some links). To date, Arif has traveled through Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, Malaysia, Bangladesh, India, Hong Kong, and now China. He’s posted over 800 journal entries and taken thousands of photos. He’s met with many people on the way, and travels sometimes alone and sometimes in a group. I keep asking him when this trip will come to a close and he keeps telling me, I don’t know. This is simply amazing. I’m terribly jealous, but have resigned to live vicariously through my friend.

You can check out his main blog or subscribe to him on twitter. Below is a sampling of some of his recent images:

One of my fellow Ragnar teammates forwarded this great picture from the finish line:

The original link is here.

I saw this on hacker news:

@newsycombinator: How to Cure Deep Procrastination http://j.mp/oleHU7