Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Category: Victoria

  • Best Day of the Year

    OK, exaggeration. But we look forward to the Atlantic Antic every year. It is unofficially the oldest and largest street festival in New York City and it’s right in front of our place (we live on Atlantic in the Ex-Lax building).

     

    For me street fairs are largely about food, and the Atlantic Antic is better than other street fairs because this is a foody neighborhood. You can get the normal street fair stuff (nothing wrong with that) but also crazy awesome local stuff. There’s a Spanish church on Atlantic that shows up with crazy good food. I try to keep a running list of what I eat every year.

    This year I ate:

    There’s a local gumbo place that was serving gator and andouille sausage jambalaya, but I was too full to try it:

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    Of course, there was music and shopping and kids stuff and all that other stuff. I’m just too full to write about it…

  • Then & Now

    If you use Google Photos you have seen this, particularly if you have kids. Since Google can recognize faces, they have some sort of algorithm that tries to find a picture of your child X years ago doing something similar to a recent picture of them. So every once in a while you get a notification with a cute “Then & Now” combination picture.

    This is a pretty good example. If a human saw these two pictures separately, I’m not sure it would be clear that it’s the same kid. They are about seven years apart, with glasses and a bicycle helmet in the older picture. And the algorithm interpreted “climbing in a playground” and “sitting in fake dinosaur eggs at the zoo” as similar things. Which is a pretty fuzzy relationship for AI.

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    Makes a nice picture…

  • Blossom Brooklyn

    I blogged about this place already, but we were there again tonight and I took video. This is Tori’s order, Strawberry, Graham Cracker Vanilla (it has a better name, but those are the ingredients). If you don’t feel like reading the old post, the idea is that the pan is super cooled so it is freezing into ice cream while they smash the ingredients. Then they flatten it and roll it.

     

  • Drone Racing

    I’ve mentioned Governors Island before (four years ago, actually). It was once a Coast Guard installation and later the NYFD used the abandoned buildings for fire training. Bloomberg cleaned it up and turned it into a tourist destination.

    I took Victoria over on the ferry last Sunday. Her usual favorites are mini golf:

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    and walking the goats:

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    This time, near the farm we saw drone racing. Turns out it was the national drone racing championships.

    We didn’t stay long, there were goats to walk, but damn those things were fast. You will have to click to enlarge and then you’ll barely see one in the upper right:

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  • Birthday Sunset

    We had Victoria’s birthday party at the relatively new Prospect Park ice skating rink.

    It was a great party and everyone had fun. But it was topped off with a freakishly good sunset. The pictures don’t do it justice.

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  • Practice What You Preach

    I blogged about the Please Touch the Art exhibit in Brooklyn Bridge Park. So here’s Victoria doing just that…

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  • Forcing My Music

    I’ve mentioned how much my girls like our Amazon Echo for music. But tonight they were being bickering sisters and couldn’t agree on a station. And they were arguing over a Demi Lovato station vs. an Ariana Grande station.

    I mean, seriously, how different would those stations be?

    So I said, “sorry, I choose the station”. They said, “no jazz” (because that’s what I really like). I know they like old Elton John (Crocodile Rock) so I said “Alexa play Elton John station”.

    We got old classics. I skipped some marginal songs, but made them listen to anything really classic.

    • Eagles, Hotel California (they grumbled at the beginning, but was ok)
    • James Taylor, Fire and Rain (too slow, but also ok)
    • Crocodile Rock (finally actual Elton John, danced along)
    • Bee-Gees Staying Alive (they totally knew this one and totally danced)

    I had to skip some more and exceeded my skip limit, so we switched to the Pandora Elton John station:

    • Elton John, Candle in the Wind (too slow, and me explaining who it was about didn’t help, since they have no idea who Marilyn Monroe is).
    • Journey, Don’t Stop Believing (Danielle knew this one and liked it)
    • Van Morrison, Brown Eyed Girl (they vaguely recognized it, and liked it)

    So total bickering turned into an old classics dance fest. Pretty fun.

  • Let’s Go Knicks?

    Through work, my wife got 4 nice tickets to the Knicks game last night. Our girls have never been to an NBA game (Victoria had never been to Madison Square Garden) so it sounded like fun, even if the Knicks are horrible.

    And these were very nice seats.

    The seats came with $20 per ticket to spend on stuff. At first that seemed really odd to me. Why would any normal person buy tickets like that? When we got there it was obvious. Normal people don’t buy these seats.

    These seats were on the same level as the fancy suites. We weren’t in a suite, but we had nice cushioned seats with a TV screen and we could walk back to a big area that had a ton of free food. Booze was extra but the girls could get hot dogs, popcorn, lemonade, cotton candy, etc. (which they did).

    These tickets are designed to be corporate give-aways and with the crazy prices for stuff at The Garden, they solve the “these free tickets will end up costing me $200” problem. And for that target audience, it makes total sense.

    Anyway, it was a fun night. The Knicks were playing Golden State so of course they lost (lots of Stephen Curry jersey in the crowd), but everyone had a good time.

    May have turned my girls in Warriors fans though…

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    The pre-game view…

  • Snow Day

    The blizzard may have been a bust, but there was still snow to play in…

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  • A Baby Journee Christmas

    We had a very nice Christmas. Plenty of electronics, random flying things (Flutterbye and mini quadcopters) good food and family.

    But our niece Journee was the main attraction:

    With her cousin Alex:

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    Alex’s mom, Connie:

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    with Danielle (and her new GoPro):

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    Getting ready to walk:

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    and with Tori (in her new Giraffe PJs):

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    Journee’s first Christmas was a good one.