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For my birthday this year my wife and I went out for a very special dinner to Blue Hill at Stone Barn. The restaurant is co-located on a working farm and agricultural center. The food is prepared with ingredients from the surrounding lands and the menu is seasonal. To say that the meal was fantastic would not do it justice. We had an eight course farmers feast with paired wines.

Each dish was distinct and delicious. For a teaser they served shots of mushroom soup with fresh carrot and well seasoned cauliflower. Following this was an eggplant satay with miniature beet burgers - a bite sized perfection. A pairing of soy beans, prosciutto and homemade bologna accompanied a sparkling wine. This was the first course.

Our second course was a green tomato puree with crab meat, served cold with a chardonnay. The wine was not oak aged, not a flavor we’re fond of but it went well with the crab. The next dish my wife described as heaven. A poached egg in mushroom broth with collard greens, bacon and a divine Riesling. Fourth was butternut squash with speck and we changed over to red wines with a glass of Pinot.

Following the spec was one of my favorite dishes, a poached salmon with a medley of chickpeas and vegetables (the details of which escape me). I can’t remember which wine it was, though my best guess would be a Syrah. The sixth dish was ricotta filled gnocchi with hen of the wood mushroom. The wine pairing was a Cab/Merlot blend. They brought out a fresh mushroom to show us - it was the size of a beach ball.

The final savory dish, which we were both too full to finish, was pork loin, with sausage and basil. I can’t remember the wine for this course either. Since we sat for dinner at 9, it was now approaching midnight and we were both tired, full and a bit tipsy.

As palate cleanser they served a sweet celery and apple consomme with yogurt sorbet. We each were served a different desert, the components of which I cannot recall. The desert wine was sweet Chardonnay from Macari vineyards in long island.

If you have the opportunity and can plan at least a month in advance, I would strongly recommend the experience at Blue Hill at Stone Barn.

Wife: how…it’s like you’re twelve Me: did you not read my blog post?

We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet: and, amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us.
- Maurice Maeterlinck

If the stereotype is that at 40 men buy a fast car to console the passing dreams of a once adventurous life, then at 30 (or as we approach 30 in my case) we cling to our fanciful childhood (especially those of us with children) by delighting in new gadgets and toys that transport us back to the games of our youth. It was for this purpose that I have this past year been eye-ing a most excellent riding toy called the Whiptide. For those of your familiar with Snakeboards (now called Streetboards) the device is of similar design. Imagine a skateboard with two inline wheels on each of two paddles (for total of four) connected by an axis that has three degrees of freedom (or click the Whiptide link and watch the video - that’s me doing the Ollie).

As with the Streetboard (and unlike a skateboard), the rider must self-propel by wiggling back and forth (see the Streetboard link for a beginners demo video). Unlike the Streetboard, a Whiptide (or Waveboard or RipStick) rider cannot stand still (because the wheels are inline). The advantage is that as with inline skates the rider can carve as one does a snowboard or surfboard (again because the wheels are inline). The combination of wiggling and wobbling when properly executed by a skilled teenager produces a graceful choreography that creates a sense of majestic motion.

Following months of negotiations my loving wife (after renewing the life insurance policy) conceded to purchasing a Whiptide on the condition that we also present my 2 year old son with a Strider Bike. The goal we agreed was to promote father-son bonding as we both might stumble our way down Memorial Drive on Sunday mornings.

With the board delivered this past Thursday night I spent the following evenings practicing my balance in our dining room hall, knocking all of the books, pictures and other assorted items off the shelves. With ten feet of practice under my belt, I was ready to take it up a notch. Thus this morning, brimming with confidence, we set out to the park down the street so I could acquire my bruises and scrapes in the confines of a fenced in street hockey court.

To my surprise the Whiptide was incredibly easy to learn. After a few false starts, my snakeboarding skills (which I earned sophomore year of college and refined in the wide open spaces of the dorm basement…and a certificate to prove it) aligned with my snowboarding skills and I found myself whipping across the court at a blistering 1 mph. A half our of practice later and I was carving like a 10 year old…ok, maybe 8. Tomorrow we adventure out to Memorial Drive to either impress or bemuse the runners, bikers and rollerbladers - Gideon just discovering the delights and freedom of his childhood and me reliving mine.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

We were plagued by incredibly slow and unreliable internet all weekend. Since we were only only sporadically it wasn’t until this morning that I called our provider to see what was going on. They took me through the usual drill which did not help.
This evening I started poking around my router settings, upgrading the firmware, etc. I discovered that QoS engine was enabled and promptly disabled it, rebooted the router and discovered that our problems went away.
I’m still baffled why this all of a sudden started to cause problems - perhaps it was tagging our packets and our provider recently started to pay attention (in a bad way)?