Summer begins

Posted on July 1st, 2011

So, summer began officially last week with the Summer Solstice, school ending, and surely now with the passing of June 2011 into memory. So far things have been really going well. Weather has been good, kids have been having fun with their friends, and we’ve been getting outdoors a bunch.

June saw many track meets and I got quite the tan just by sitting in the stands for 6 hours at a clip. Marco finished Lacrosse camp this week and it looks like we have a new favorite sport for him. Antonio started to get interested as well. I hope they both want to play in a league next spring. I’ve been trying to get them to play for years and it came down to downright tricks just to get them to try it. Now it looks like they’re hooked. Oh, and don’t let me forget about Serafina. She was right out there with the boys and she is able to scoop and throw like she was born with that lacrosse stick in her hand. It was amazing. I am definitely going to do my best to get her to sign up for a league next year!

Football season starts in a little over a month and I’m looking forward to that. LI Broncos football takes a lot out of our schedule, but the games are exciting to watch and the organization is well-run. Lots of cool people are involved and last year we had a blast.

We’ve been doing a lot outdoors, too. From playing in the front yard, to diving into the pool, to fishing at the Marina. I did a fishing clinic with Marco last week out east in Wading River. We learned a lot and the kids loved it.

Hope everyone has a happy and healthy Independence Day, enjoy the long weekend.

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May Flowers

Posted on May 26th, 2011

So, May is here and it’s finally getting warm and oh, shit, I forgot to plant my hot peppers. I don’t have a garden, per say, but I did plant in pots last year and produced no more than a measly patch of hot peppers. This year, Lisa went and used my pots for flowers so I need to get new ones. I’ll start this weekend with some new pots and pour all kinds of growing chemicals that are at least not proven to cause cancer. Then, hopefully, they will all grow to a nice radioactive red before the cold grip of fall withers them to mush.

I don’t know where all of the time went, well, maybe that’s a lie. Last weekend I ran in an overnight relay from new Haven CT to Boston MA… or Yale to Harvard as some are fond of saying. This, my friends, is the Ragnar Relay New England version. The pictures are on flickr, go check them out.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickcody/sets/72157626792594846/

My favorite comment on the photoset was one of my friends on Facebook, “Are you sure you guys ran? Cause it looks more like a party.” Well, yeh. It was a pretty damn awesome time. This year, we made 3 major improvements over last year and each contributed to this year’s awesomeness:

  • Paid for volunteers so we didn’t have to do it ourselves. Last year, we had to volunteer for three shifts and it was a miserable time of no sleep, driving  back and forth, and general paranoia.
  • Got a hotel mid-race. Van 1 slept there at midnight and handed the keys to Van 2 slept there from 5-9.
  • Stayed in Boston and partied righteously. Last year we had a beer in Dobbs Ferry and simply left after an hour or two.

I’m not a good runner, but I barreled through it as best I could. My Garmin runs are here: Leg 1, Leg 2, and Leg 3. I ran a total of 13.5 miles. One of the legs, my second, was brutal as it was a constant incline for 5.6 miles. That sucked. the highlight of the race, though, was running with my dad’s picture next to my race numbers. Here is a picture of it:

Miss you dad!

Looking forward to two track meets this weekend. One tomorrow and one on Saturday. Last week I missed the regionals. Antonio didn’t make the Regionals and the coach didn’t run him in dashes, which was a bummer. Antonio is wicked fast and certainly deserved to make it to the CYO championships. Giovanni is running track this year, too, and didn’t medal either. But such is life. Marco may have made it. He placed gold in his heat, bronze by time, and we’ll see if his time is good enough for championships soon. Serafina runs track too! She’s pre-k and ran with the 2nd graders in the regionals. She’s really wicked fast for her age and has a naturally strong, long stride. I can’t wait to see what she does with over the next few years.

Looking forward to the long weekend! Hope yours is happy and safe.

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Ohio Tournament of Champions

Posted on April 22nd, 2011

Last weekend, Marco wrestled in a regional/national tournament called the Ohio Tournament of Champions. This was by far the biggest and most difficult tournament that we’ve ever been to. Marco wrestled so well, finishing 2-2. Trophies are awarded to places 1-6 and 7th place winners get their name on the website results section. Marco finished in a 5-way tie for 9th place. Considering that there were a monstrous 40 kids in his bracket, clearly he did an awesome job.

I took two days off work for the trip, driving up on Thursday. It took about 11 hours with frequent stops, ideally it’s a 9.6 hour drive according to Google.

Friday, we went to Goodale Park and the science center, COSI. Both were a lot of fun. Around 4, we brought Marco to the convention center to be weighed in. It was a zoo. The weigh-in wasn’t a big deal, but the line to get the bracket printouts took almost an hour! Marco was initially over 50lbs by 0.2 lbs, but we had him pee and he was fine after that. Once we did all that, we left for the Spaghetti Warehouse and had a nice pasta meal. We all ate like lions, Marco put away an enormous amount of food, too, which I was glad to see.

Overall, I was really, really impressed with Columbus as a city. It had a city feel, but it was simpler. It was clean, hip, and full of life. Ohio State was an immense school; regal and dignified. The football stadium was an absolute marvel. I’ve always said that kids should go away to college if they can and seeing awesomeness like the Ohio state campus re-affirms my belief.

The next morning was competition time. We went to Bob Evans for breakfast and had a solid meal that would take us through the tournament and into a late lunch/early dinner. We arrived at the convention center around 8:30am and I was amazed by the sheer scale of the tournament. There were over 40 mats. Despite the enormous size of he tournament, our event was run quite well.

Kudos to Giovanni for his great and steady camera work. Giovanni was a huge help during the tournament and even though he wasn’t too hot on the idea of going to Ohio for this, he had a great experience when all was said and done. One of the highlights for Giovanni was meeting and getting a photo with Diary of a Wimpy Kid stars Zachary Gordon and Grayson Russel. Here is that photo:

A video of all Marco’s matches is below.

Marco dominated in his first match, winning by technical fall 13-1. He was beat by pin in his second match with about 20 seconds to go. The guy that beat him went on to win 2nd place. Marco had an amazing comeback pin in his third match, he was losing until that point. That was pretty exciting! Then, in his last match he was beat by the NYS Champion for 2011, the same kid that beat Marco in  the second round of the states.

In addition to the great wrestling, Marco made a few friends. In fact, he made friends with the two kids that tied for 7th place. Here is a gallery of some photos I took on the trip, enjoy!

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March

Posted on March 23rd, 2011

Another month is almost over. Lots happened. I already wrote about Marco’s NYS Championship. The very next week, my brothers and I went up to my dad’s place again in Binghamton, NY. We did a lot more organizing of is things when compared to what we did in our last visit just after he passed away. We did some cooking rather than eating out for our Saturday dinner. We used ingredients that dad had laying around: angel hair paste, frozen shrimp (which was like a year old), and mozzarella. This was the result. Hint, it was awesome.

On our way back, we stopped at a really good cheesesteak place called Cosmos. They make a good cheesesteak and have some decent sauces and fresh peppers you can add.

This past Saturday, my oldest son Giovanni and I ventured into the city for some volunteer work painting at a city middle school. It was a good experience for Giovanni. We even took the subway from Penn station. It wasn’t a short ride, but Giovanni learned a lot. Here is a picture of us together:

After that, we ventured uptown to the Hayden Planetarium at the AMNH. Giovanni is super-excited about Astronomy and Physics right now so I caught him at the peak of his interest. We saw one of the shows (which was just ‘ok’) and walked around the exhibits for an hour or two before heading home.

When I got home, I found out that we had 3 sleepovers going. Marco had his friend Joey, Antonio, his friend Joe, and Serafina (yes, you heard me) Serafina had her friend Andrew sleep over. I asked Lisa. I was like, Sera is… like 5… and she has a sleepover, with a boy?! Times are certainly changing.

Spring looks to be very, very busy:

  • Marco and Antonio are wrestling in the spring session
  • Marco has a national-level wrestling tournament in April where I’m driving to Columbus, Ohio.
  • All four kids joined CYO track!
  • Antonio and Marco joined flag football

Finally, I spent 5 hours and I completely cleaned my garage this weekend, yay!

Booyaa!

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NY State Youth Wrestling Championships

Posted on March 10th, 2011

This past weekend, my son Marco competed in the NY State Youth Wrestling Championships as a 50lb. bantam. This is an event which you need to qualify for. Because he placed 1st in the County Qualifier, States was next.  There were 15 competitors, seemed that most were local but a few were from as far as Brockport. Marco started strong, pinning his first opponent in 1:39. His second match was a lot tougher and Marco suffered his first pin ever in a competition, in 2:39. Before this, Marco lost only two matches in his entire career. The first loss was in his first tournament ever last year. The second was a few weeks ago when we wrestled him up one weight class at 55lbs.

The guy who beat Marco was a fantastic wrestler and went on to win the competition. Losing this match was pretty demoralizing for Marco. He was very upset and wanted to quit the tournament. Nothing I could say would change his mind. It was at this time, alone in the locker room, where I left him to think things over. After a little while, my brother Tom came to sit with him and talk to him about when he was a young wrestler. I don’t know exactly what Tom said, but Marco came out of the locker room ready to wrestle.

Tournaments are double-elimination. If you lose, you move over to the back side of the brackets and compete in wrestle-backs. The best you can do here is get 3rd as the 1st and 2nd place winners go to the finals undefeated. In the wrestle-backs, as they call them, Marco dominated and beat all of his opponents, 4 in a row. In total, Marco wrestled 6 times to achieve a bronze metal in the NY State Championship! I could not be more proud than to see him get knocked down and come back up like that. Here is the video of the entire event:

There are more tournaments in the post-season, some are at the national level. We know we’ll be going to at least one of these and hope to do a few in nearby states or NJ/PA. Also, my son Antonio has joined the wrestling team! I’m glad he’ll get some practice in this Spring and summer before the 2011/2012 season next winter. Go Antonio!

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February

Posted on March 3rd, 2011

February went by quickly. I went on two ski trips, one awesome one to Mount Snow with the Szinger family and the Puzak/Contreras families. I’ll be doing one more trip to Jiminey Peak this weekend, driving back Saturday night so I can make Marco’s State Youth Wrestling CHampionship. Go Marco!

Work has been going well, doing some interesting coding projects with grails. I don’t have a huge familiarity with a lot of the web frameworks that have gotten popular over the last 5-6 years, but grails seems decent enough and almost fun to work with. Fun, until you work with date types in Java and you want to fucking kill someone. Lots of my earlier experience with HTML/CSS is coming into play, and now I feel like I’m learning it all for real rather than for play as I’ve been doing for the past decade. Good stuff.

I drew this picture one day, when all of us were at the table doing arts and crafts.

World Nebula

The kids drew some cool pictures, too. I’ll try and scan and post those soon.

March will see the start of a second session of wrestling for Marco and Antonio, CYO track for all four kids, flag football for Marco and Antonio, and a pause on my Tae Kwon Do membership until probably June. Just about every weeknight will be filled with sports so there will simply be no time to attend class. Oh well.

 

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Seafood on the Barbie

Posted on July 23rd, 2008

I have discovered a new favorite hobby. Cooking scallops and shrimp on the BBQ. My dad was in town and I decided to try something new.

At lunch, we sat with a pad and thought about what we wanted for dinner. Seafood came up and since I had been wanting to grill some shrimp at some point, I thought this an excellent time to try it. Shrimp went on the list.

When I got to the seafood store, I noticed how good those scallops looked and I thought they would cook equally well on the BBQ. I was a little torn over bay or sea scallops. Bay scallops are much smaller than sea scallops and I wondered which might fare better on a skewer.

When I got home, I rubbed some Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Seafood Magic on all of the seafood and stuck all of the meat onto skewers. I fired up the BBQ and layed down some tinfoil as I was afraid the scallops would fall apart. You can see here a mixture of bay and sea scallops simmering.

As it turns out, sea scallops suck ass on the BBQ. They get all tender and fall apart, leaving behind a big mess. The bay scallops clung happily to the skewer and came out fantastic! Once the scallops were done cooking on the tin-foil, I placed them directly on he grill so they would get seared a bit to add to the flavor.

Still, the king of the BBQ today, in my eyes, were the shrimp. Shrimp are extremely sturdy on the skewer and cook in moments. It took about 60 seconds on each side and they were done.

We served a salad with dinner and I made some homemade guacamole. My dad bought a raw piece of tuna and sliced it sashimi thin. We mixed up some of our own wasabi from powder, poured on some soy sauce and enjoyed some of the best tuna sushimi I ever had. Sorry, no pictures.

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old man skate party

Posted on July 22nd, 2008

old man skate party, originally uploaded by yerko.

A few friends from the office, just chillin’

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