Author: Even that’s Odd

  • Tesla Isn’t Smart. It Was Just Sold That Way.

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    I’m a little confused by the over-exuberant Tesla love. Seven months and a few thousand miles into my 2023 Model Y Long Range, and the consensus among the fanbase still doesn’t track for me. I’m an Apple person, so I understand the dynamic. But even with Apple, I can name the things they get wrong…

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  • What is the Best Chore Boot? Bogs vs. Muck, With Reservations

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    If you live somewhere that actually has winter, regular rubber boots stop working below freezing. You need insulated neoprene. The question is which pair, and after two rounds I have an honest answer with a caveat. Round One: Bogs Classic High My first serious pair was the Bogs Classic High. They kept my feet warm…

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  • My Search for the Perfect Chore Coat

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    I bought my first Carhartt C01 at Dave’s on 6th Avenue when I moved to NYC in the mid-90s. It hung in my closet, unworn, for years. Then we started building a house, and the coat earned its keep — wood-chopping, pricker-bush wading, firewood gathering, every chilly outdoor task I could throw at it. By…

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  • Something Chewed Through My Tesla’s Charging Cable

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    Walked out this morning to find my Tesla mobile connector cable chewed through, wires exposed. No idea what did it — squirrel, rat, rabbit, the chipmunks under the deck. Something out here decided a $300 piece of EV equipment looked edible. Going to need to replace it. If anyone has tricks for keeping cables safe…

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  • Tesla Model Y Accessories: The Stuff Tesla Should Have Included

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    After bringing home my Model Y 7-seater, I quickly figured out what every Tesla owner figures out: this is the beginning of your spending, not the end. The car is sold on a minimalism story — fewer features, fewer parts, lower price. What that actually means in practice is a thriving aftermarket where owners spend…

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  • NYC Family Staycation with Kids 12 & 11

    We had our 11 and 12-year-olds on spring break and a big Scandinavia trip planned with the grandparents in May, so we decided to keep things local. “Local” being a relative term — we live 70 miles north of NYC and somehow decided what the family really needed was a couple of days of urban…

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  • Tesla Renamed the Bug to Make It a Feature

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    Tesla’s latest software update supposedly fixed the automatic high-beam adjustment. The release notes said as much. Mine still doesn’t work — and I think I’ve figured out what happened. The car is not switching down to low beam when it detects an oncoming car. The blue high-beam indicator on the dash stays lit the entire…

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  • Tesla Model Y LR 7-Seat: The Four-Month Reality Check

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    After four months and about 6,000 miles with my first EV — a used 2023 7-seat Model Y Long Range with the Acceleration Boost — I’m ready to give an honest report. The short version: I’d probably make the same decision today, but with significant reservations about which parts of the car I actually got…

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  • How We Ended Up With a Model Y 7 Seater (And Which Parts I Actually Liked)

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    I had a 2019 Honda Ridgeline and I really liked it. But we’d decided we needed a third row — for the occasional extra kid, or for piling everyone into one car when the grandparents came along. With two boys around 11 and 12, we started looking at hybrids as our first toe in the…

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  • Defacing My Own Tesla Before Anyone Else Could

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    Yes, I bought a Tesla in November 2024. I want to address that up front, because it matters for everything that follows. By the time I bought the Model Y, the politics around the company were already fully on fire. Musk had spent the election cycle as the world’s loudest surrogate for a candidate I…

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  • Screen Time Doesn’t Work Because Apple Doesn’t Want It To

    Peer pressure around getting phones for kids, tweens, and teens is intense. If your kid already struggles to fit in, not having a device makes them feel worse. The cruel irony: giving them a device can isolate them further, just in a new direction. There’s no good answer. Schools should ban devices outright, but that’s…

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  • Electrolux Washer Review: The Second-Floor Guarantee That Wasn’t

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    I’d had Electrolux earmarked as our next washer practically from the day we bought our LG in 2010. Our LG was reliable, but when it hit the spin cycle it shook the whole house like a small earthquake. With laundry on the second floor, that’s less an inconvenience than a structural concern. When our thirteen-year-old…

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  • Electrolux Dryer Review: Built to Match, Not to Dry

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    We needed to stack our washer and dryer because of laundry-room space, and stacking kits aren’t universal — so once we picked the washer, we were locked into the matching Electrolux dryer. That’s how I ended up with the Electrolux Front Load Perfect Steam Gas Dryer with Instant Refresh, model ELFG7437AW. A name longer than…

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  • Montreal with Kids 10 & 9

    We wanted to feel like we’d traveled somewhere foreign without spending a day in airports getting there. Montreal is the easiest version of that from the Hudson Valley. Five hours in the car, you cross a border, the signs change to French, and you’re somewhere else. We pulled the kids out of school early on…

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  • Jungle to Beach: Our Spring Break Family Adventure in Belize with Kids 11 & 10

    By spring break 2024 we’d done three cold-weather trips in a row — Ireland, Iceland, Germany — and we’d had enough of packing fleeces in March. We wanted heat. We wanted not to rent a car. We wanted a flight that wasn’t a brutal haul. Belize hit all of it, and we’d loved the Yucatán…

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  • Snowboarding: $30. Urgent Care: $3,000

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    I spent a good part of my teenage and college winters skiing, and I’d always wanted to share that with our kids. But here’s the thing: skiing (or snowboarding) is now REALLY expensive. Rentals, helmets, tickets, clothing — it adds up to more than $1,000 for a family of four. All for an outing our…

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  • Iceland with Kids 10 & 8

    By fall 2022 we were finally crawling out of the COVID years and wanted to do something that felt like a real trip again. Play Airlines had just started flying out of Stewart — our regional airport, twenty minutes from the house — which made Iceland suddenly stupid-easy to get to. Henry was 10, Elias…

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  • Café GE Refrigerator: The Good, The Bad, and The “Did Anyone Actually Test This Thing?”

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    Our Kitchen Aid refrigerator gave up, and we had to go shopping. When we built the house, most of the appliances came from online retailers and big-box stores. This time we went local. The criteria seemed simple: 36″ French door with bottom freezer, dual compressors or evaporators for efficiency, interior water dispenser. Some of that…

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  • A Memorial Journey Through Germany with Kids 10 & 9

    The trip to Germany was supposed to happen earlier. Originally spring 2022, to visit my mom, who was living there with my sister. We postponed when my sister tested COVID-positive days before departure, then postponed again when our younger son tested positive the morning we were supposed to leave. Then in May, my mom died…

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  • DC with Kids 9 & 8

    Between Christmas and New Year’s 2021 we’d had enough of the Hudson Valley in winter and decided to take the boys — Henry 9, Elias 7 — down to DC for the first time. The pandemic was still rolling along in its second-year exhaustion phase, and four days of walking a city with two kids…

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  • Better Late Than Never: 2019 Honda Ridgeline Black Edition Review

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    When I bought my Ridgeline in 2019, Honda sent me a survey. I did a thorough job on it, which apparently flagged me as someone worth asking more, because they sent a second, longer one. I gave them detailed answers — but it was all in their format, so I never kept a copy. I…

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  • Follow Me Tandem: The Ultimate Family Cycling Solution

    Beyond the Woom bikes themselves, the best thing I bought for riding with young kids was the Follow Me Tandem. Honestly, one of the best things I’ve ever bought, period. The genius of it: your kid rides solo until they’re tired, then you hook their bike up to the tandem coupling and tow them the…

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  • Woom Bikes: The Ultimate Kids Bike Brand

    When I was looking to get our kids started on bikes, I did a lot of research. Two things came out of it: training wheels are a bad idea, and the right place to start is a balance bike. After the balance bike stage, what mattered most was weight and kid-specific ergonomics — bikes actually…

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  • Williamsburg with Kids 7 & 6

    April 14-19, 2019. Drove down from the Hudson Valley with Henry, 7, and Elias, 6. Five nights at the Williamsburg Lodge. The most important thing I can tell you about Colonial Williamsburg with kids in this age range is the muskets. Every single child in the historic district is carrying one — wooden replica long…

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  • Ireland with Kids 6 & 5 and Family: A Comedy of Errors and Emerald Isle Magic

    Norwegian Air briefly offered direct flights from Stewart Airport to Dublin in 2018 (RIP Norwegian Air, we hardly knew ye), which is the kind of opportunity you don’t pass up when you live in the Hudson Valley and the alternative is dragging two small kids and two grandparents through JFK. So in March we packed…

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  • Tulum with Kids 5 & 4

    After another brutal New York winter we wanted sun, so we picked Tulum, which Jennifer and I had loved on pre-kid trips. January 2017. Henry was 5, Elias was 4. The plan was relaxed, uncrowded, familiar. Logistics: JetBlue out of JFK, reserved parking. Lightweight, narrow travel car seats designed for getting through airports without dislocating…

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