Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Category: Brooklyn

  • Eat Here

    Tonight was a great Brooklyn night. Danielle had a sleep over at a friend’s place and they picked Danielle up after school. So Victoria got a night by herself. Now Tori loves Danielle and misses her, but this was a bit of an only child experience that she never gets.

    Since Danny was out for the night, it made sense to try to go out for a nice dinner. Tori is the more adventurous eater, so we tried a trendy place that we haven’t been to before. With no reservations, a table would have taken a while, but they have counter seating in front of the chefs and we could sit right away.

    This was actually a bonus for Tori. This is one of those places where the entire kitchen is right out in the middle of everything. So watching them cook everything was totally entertaining.

    The place is called Colonie and was fantastic. The chefs were going crazy keeping up with the crowd as we watched, but they still looked up to say hi to Tori.

    The food was excellent. The kind of place you don’t find elsewhere. Tori ate well and was rewarded with a Brownie Sundae that was out of this world.

    Have I mentioned how much Brooklyn rocks?

  • Daily Napkins

    There’s an article in Mashable today about a mom who illustrates her kids napkins for lunch every single day. She has two sons, now 6 and 10.

    Her sons go to my daughter’s school, are the same ages and are in my daughter’s classes. Tori and Ansel are good friends. I’ve seen these napkins for years. As a daily project they are frankly quite impressive.

    The Mashable article led me to her blog, Daily Napkins, where she displays them. That blog led me to a NY Times article from a year ago on the same topic. So she’s been somewhat famous for this for a while.

    A napkin for lunch every day since 2006. Crazy? Artistic? Amazing? Persistent? Choice D, all of the above.

  • Random Lizz Comments

    A blog post from our upstairs neighbor Lizz Winstead.

  • CitiBike

    This could be nice. New York is starting a bike share program. Imagine bike stations all over the city. You can get a bike at one spot and drop it off somewhere else. Sign up for a $100 annual membership and you can grab a bike anytime for 45 minutes for no charge (longer rentals will cost more).

    They are putting in the bike stands right now. The program is supposed to start in May. The program can only be useful if those stations are in lots of convenient locations. Seems like there are going to be a lot of them.

    It turns out that there is one about a block from our apartment and there’s another one right in front of my office. So I can just hop on a bike and ride to/from work (that trip would be 10 minutes tops).

    I’m looking forward to trying it out.

  • Heartwalk

    I’ve been away for a few days so when I got back to my office I was surprised to see this in the plaza right in front:

    20130314_115830

    Turns out this is Heartwalk, a project built from wooden planks salvaged from the boardwalks destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. It had been sitting in Times Square for about a month and I guess they relocated it.

    Working in Dumbo is never dull…

  • Broooooklyn

    The Brooklyn Nets won the first NBA battle for New York against the Knicks in the new Barclays Center. So many fun things about this:

    – Hearing the crowd chant “Brooooklyn”

    – Watching it on TV and seeing the going to commercial shots of Brooklyn and thinking, “that’s my neighborhood”.

    – Quality NBA hoops 5 blocks from my place.

    – Quality sports in Brooklyn period.

    – Seeing Beyonce in the stands

    Seriously, it’s all good.

  • Tech to the rescue–sort of

    This web site showing gas stations in the Sandy affected area that actually have gas is really cool.

    Though as of right now, it’s still a depressingly small number.

  • New York Magazine Cover

    If you haven’t already seen it…

    (Photo: Iwan Baan for New York Magazine)

  • I Love Dumbo

    I know I say this all the time, but Dumbo just cracks me up. I’m going to my office and there’s some sort of New Orleans style brass band warming up right across the street.

    Sure enough, by the time I’m in my office, they’ve started marching up and down the streets of Dumbo playing away. Why? Who knows? It’s Dumbo, stuff like this happens all the time. Brass band marching around at 8:30 in the morning. Why not? Probably making some kind of crazy video.

    And for the record, they are pretty good.

    This is a lousy picture, but it’s the view from my office window:

    20121101_084813

    If you want to know exactly where this is, here’s the Google Map.

  • More Famous People Among Us

    Well, perhaps kind of famous is more accurate. A while back I mentioned that the co-creator of The Daily Show lived in our building and I had no idea who she was.

    Today I discovered that our neighbor two doors down is a twice Grammy nominated musician. I knew she was a musician, but I mainly thought of her as the nice woman with two black labs.

    Truthfully, I don’t know her music, but this was apparently her biggest hit: