We just got back from Portugal and it was fantastic. Lisbon, Porto, the hills, the pastéis de nata, the Super Bock — loved all of it. I dress for the weather. I dress for the walking.…
If you read my Portugal post, you know how this started. Jennifer had opinions about my travel wardrobe. The citizens of Lisbon had opinions about my travel wardrobe. I came home suitably chastened and with a…
I was listening to BBC Newshour the other day. A Democratic senator was trying to talk about immigration, and the reporter kept pushing the same question: these people broke the law to get here, so why…
Ten years ago, right around our older son’s third birthday, a microburst tore through our road. We saw it coming — our nanny at the time, who was from the Midwest, took one look at a…
We just got back from Cooperstown, from the Cooperstown Dreams Park tournament, for my younger son. It’s a giant 12-year-old tournament they run up there, and I figured I’d sort of jot down some of our…
It took me embarrassingly long to figure this one out. For years, I’ve been annoyed by the same thing on every car I’ve owned: headlights that go cloudy and yellow long before the rest of the…
This is the first political post I ever wrote, and I want to be honest about where it came from. I’d been hearing the word “fascism” thrown around about the current administration and I had two reactions at the same…
My pants requirements are simple: 100% cotton, blue or grey, can handle actual work, can also be worn somewhere my wife wants me to look slightly dressed up. This combination is apparently impossible to buy. For everyday wear I default…
My hoodie requirements are simple: heavyweight, 100% cotton. That’s the whole list. In 2026, this turns out to be unreasonable. I run an e-commerce shop with print-on-demand, and the only 100% cotton hoodies in the catalog are cost-prohibitive. For everyday…
My footwear requirements are not unreasonable: keep my feet dry when it’s below 60°F, survive muddy youth sports sidelines, and let me do something vaguely athletic if my kid needs a catch partner during warmups. That’s the list. Almost nothing…
I finally finished my concrete drain board refurbish. It’s blotchy as hell. The shape is perfect. It looks exactly like a drain board should look. But after all the layers, all the different materials, and all the well-intentioned repair attempts…
Somewhere around March, the blue high beam indicator on my Tesla stopped switching to green when another car was approaching. I called Tesla. I waited months for an update. Eventually I gave up. This is the same company making the…
Back in 2010, when YouTube had DIY videos but nothing like today’s endless stream of concrete countertop influencers, my wife and I poured our own concrete countertops. The information I found online was decent but limited. Most of the instructions…
If you laid my resume out chronologically, it would not look like a career. It would look like someone who couldn’t make up his mind. Farm chores starting around age four or five. Lawn mowing. Hay bales. McDonald’s. Roofing. Decks.…
My dad died in 2007, which means he never saw the Tesla in my driveway, the heat pump in the basement, or the solar panels on half the houses on my road. Which is a shame, because everything he did…
I own an EV. I am not opposed to EVs. And the more I drive mine, the more I think going fully electric — meaning battery-only, plug-only — is short-sighted. ICE alone is a worse answer. The complexity, the maintenance,…
I have a long-running obsession, unusual for an American, with station wagons. Why the wagon got such a bad rap here, I’m honestly not sure. They were never considered cool even before National Lampoon’s Vacation permanently chained them to the…
When we asked Nonna and Grandpa Charles where they wanted to go for their big trip, we secretly hoped they’d say somewhere warm. The kids had been lobbying hard for Italy or Japan. Charles is Swedish though, and Swedish heritage…
Some of my most miserable moments have been cold and soaked at the same time. Wet alone, fine. Cold alone, fine. Cold and wet together is the worst feeling I know, which is part of why I will never go…
My work boot problem isn’t fit, durability, or style. It’s that I go in and out of the house fifteen times a day and almost nobody makes a waterproof slip-on work boot that still looks like a work boot. Seven…
I’m a Red Wing fan, and after four pairs I think they’re making all the right boots — they’re just not combining them. The boot I actually want from Red Wing doesn’t exist, and it should. Red Wing 8249 Steel…
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…
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…
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 —…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Even that's Odd 