Category: Uncategorized

Cars I’ve owned

While I’m a bike and pedestrian advocate, we still live in a society where it’s pretty tough to live without a car. And I DO like to drive. Today Facebook reminded me it’s been four years since our trusty Mazda 3 was rear-ended. Given that our latest car was stolen two weeks ago (a story for another day), I got to thinking about the cars I’ve had.

1988 Acura Integra

This was my first car. My parents bought it for me because I was going to high school an hour away from home and they couldn’t get me there (at least not without turning their lives upside down). Such a great little car. Reliability of a Honda Civic but SO much more fun to drive. I didn’t have it long – I was rear-ended on 97N on the way to take the AP Spanish test. I got a ride to school from a Maryland state trooper and I was deeply disappointed that everyone was in class by then so no one saw me getting dropped off.

1989 Acura Integra

Insurance paid for the replacement. This was one trim level up from the first one. I loved it even more. Both Integras had giant subwoofers in the trunk and I installed a kill switch to turn them off as I approached my house so my mom didn’t get mad. When I went to college I didn’t get to keep the car. I think my siblings ran it into the ground.

1988 Honda Accord

It had 175,000 miles when I got it. Incredibly well-maintained, incredibly boring. It had a manual transmission and a sunroof, though, so it wasn’t all bad.

1995 Toyota Tacoma

This was the first car I purchased myself. Manual transmission, 4X4. It could drive over anything. Highlights include 1) putting a tarp in the back for a house party, filling it with ice, and using it as a cooler 2) pulling a stuck Chevy pickup out of the mud 3) driving in the snow 4) having a cicada fly in the window on 66 and explode against the back window. Lowlights were mostly helping literally everyone in the DMV move at one time or another. It had 70K miles when I bought it. I sold it to my then-brother-in-law with 235K and the original clutch. It broke 250k before the transmission died on him and he got rid of it. It’s probably still out there somewhere.

2006 Mazda 3

My first new car. I had just bought a condo and was living on my own for the first time. The condo was not the greatest investment (absolute peak of the market, I had a $31,000 escalation clause on my offer) but the I got my money’s worth out of the Mazda. It drove my wife to the birth center to give birth to both our kids and carted them around through middle school. It was rear-ended on the way home from Rehoboth summer of 2020.

2020 Toyota RAV4 hybrid

First time I ever owned an automatic transmission. Good car. You could coax 52 MPG out of it if you were easy on the gas. 40 MPG with normal driving. It was stolen from outside our hotel in Montreal two weeks ago.

Next?

Almost definitely another RAV4 hybrid. I would love something fully electric but they are SUPER expensive and we don’t have off-street parking to charge it, so it would be a constant hassle.

Food in Spain

I recently had the opportunity to spend about a week in Madrid and Barcelona, and in that time I ate a lot of food. I was there to retrieve the older child after her two week student exchange program. I arrived in Madrid Monday morning, March 18. I picked her up Wednesday (at 4am before the rest of her trip left for the airport, the things we do for our children).

That first day I was tired and unable to check in to the hotel until 3pm, but I could at least drop my bags. I headed to the Reina Sofia, which may be considered the Prado’s little sister museum, but it’s fantastic. This is the first time I’ve been to 1) a foreign country and 2) a museum all on my own. It was fun, I recommend it, though I was happy to have company later in the week.

After the museum, I wandered for a bit, looking for some food. I ended up at La Buga del Lobo (C. de Argumosa, 11, Centro, 28012 Madrid, Spain). This was the first time I expereinced the wonderful Spanish tradition where if you just order a beer, they bring you snacks. This time it was just a little snack mix, but I was starving and it was salty. I ordered the degustacion de croquetas, which is a plate of all three types of croquetas they serve. This was my first opportunity to try out my rusty and very limited Spanish. I wanted to know if what I was ordering was appropriate for one person or if I was about to get a mound of croquetas. I wasn’t honestly sure what a croqueta was at this point. I managed to express myself effectively enough that she was able to answer, and I was able to understand her answer. This was one of my most successful interactions with anyone in Spanish during the whole trip and I was quite pleased with myself.

Six croquetas on a white plate on top of a colorful tablecloth

If you haven’t bothered to click through to read what a croqueta is, they are essentially a béchamel sauce, breaded and fried. They are delightful, and I recommend them unless you have food texture issues. I wouldn’t mind a little more structure to the béchamel, but the flavors were really nice.

That night I ate dinner at the Hotel Catalonia Atocha where I was staying. It was pleasant but the food was sort of boring. The wine was really nice, and I had a chat with the server about wine, and how the Spanish wine is excellent and inexpensive and wine back in the DC area is not quite so excellent. People in Madrid were much more willing to speak with me in Spanish than people in Barcelona were. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to dig in to what this says about each city (hint: it says nothing, it’s just a small anecdote from someone who speaks a little bit of Spanish, poorly).

Day two was my Madrid food tour, which deserves its own post (link to come once I write the post). I really like doing food tours when traveling to other cities. It’s a great way to see a bit of the city you might not otherwise and you’re bound to learn a little bit about local culture and tradition. And the food, of course. It’s also a nice way to have some company in a strange place if you aren’t the type to just make friends with strangers. This was my second European food tour that had a couple from Belgium on it, so I could talk about how my last name is Belgian, brought over to the UK in the early 1600’s by my 10th or so gre
at-grandfather.

After the food tour I took a nap and then went to the Prado. At my food tour guide’s suggestion, I started in the basement with Goya’s Pinturas Negras, which are fascinating and a bit out of the ordinary for the museum.

I had seen a brewery pop up on Google Maps at some point (La Osita, C. de la Cava Baja, 10, Centro, 28005 Madrid, Spain), and I had to try it out, knowing that it would be less of a traditional Spanish experience, but not caring. Turns out literally everyone there, customers and staff, spoke English. I briefly chatted with an American who was thinking of moving to DC when his girlfriend was finished her degree in Madrid. Small world.

A beer in a pint glass on a bar in front of a row of beer cans. There is also a small plate of bread and meat

Here I got another little snack with my beer – bread and some kind of meat. This is a custom that we could adopt here in the US, just putting that out there. The beer was good if you like American-style IPAs, which I do. I can tell myself that I wanted to get the Spanish take on an American style, but really it’s just that’s what I like to drink. I tell myself that it’s not at all like the stereotype of Americans traveling the world to complain how you can’t get a decent hamburger.

One last Madrid snack with drink at Bar Benteveo (C. de Sta. Isabel, 15, Centro, 28012 Madrid, Spain). Bread with something like hummus but it probably had meat in it.

A glass of wine on a red bar top with a small plate containing a piece of bread with a spread on top

And my dinner – a lomito (pork) sandwich with chips. I don’t know if I’m supposed to have sharper teeth or something but this was a little hard to eat. I kept getting more meat in a single bite than I was really prepared for. But it was quite good. You can get this with an egg on top as well – that sounded great but a little more than I was looking for at that point. Maybe next time.

A glass of wine on a red bar top next to a plate containing a meat sandwich and a small cup of chips

Next – food tour!

A Perfect Storm of Laziness

In 2018, I biked 3,213 miles. About two thirds of that was on the longtail cargo bike, and much of THAT was hauling the kids as the three of us bumped up against the weight limit of the bike. I was in pretty fantastic shape for a guy who had just turned 40.

Enter 2019. March 8th, I tore my Achilles. It wouldn’t be until July 5th that I rode a bike again. In the meantime, the kids were growing and growing and I was really no longer able to haul both of them for any distance, even if they wanted me to, which they increasingly did not. Then 2020 came around and COVID took away most of my motivation to bike – who wants to ride somewhere when you can’t go inside?

My strategy to deal with all of this and keep my fitness level was to pretend it wasn’t happening, and this clearly isn’t working. I’ve tried nothing, and it isn’t working.

I’ve always been pretty good about keeping up with fitness so long as it didn’t take any real time out of my day. Now that I have to work at it, it’s not going so well.

Maybe don’t run five year old scripts without testing

So maybe in the future I should remind myself that mindlessly running a script you haven’t touched in 5+ years without bothering to back up your old blog is not exactly a smart decision. I think I’ve gotten things maybe 75% fixed, but it’s likely that the URLs aren’t the same as they used to be, so any old links from old blogs are probably dead. Good thing no one writes or reads blogs anymore.

Anyway, thinking of getting back into blogging again. I like to write. I’m not terrible at it, even if the bulk of the content on this blog suggests otherwise. It’s a great time to be blogging since no one cares about the medium anymore. Maybe I’ll have these auto-post to Instagram so the kids will see it and ignore it there instead of ignoring it here.

Did we learn nothing?

I have to admit that I watch very little TV these days. What I do watch is usually through our Roku, which I love. But I can’t help seeing these articles on putting Roku hardware into tvs, I can’t help thinking about TVs with built in VHS. Media players are always obsolete faster than TVs. Even the whole concept of a “smart TV” is kind of silly. I get it from a marketing perspective, but I really can’t understand what consumer would want this.

I’m in the New York Times!

I’m quoted in an article in the New York Times about [family biking] (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/23/style/families-ditch-cars-for-cargo-bikes.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0 “Families Ditch Cars for Cargo Bikes”). Full disclosure – the author has kids at our kids’ school, and we’ve talked before about bikes, so it’s not like someone randomly found me and realized I was awesome or anything like that.

And I was in the Washington Post earlier this year, though purely by chance, and not in the online edition. A photographer got a picture of me taking the girls home from school and it was used in an article about DC charter schools because I happened to be passing by one when he snapped the photo.

I’m trying to decide what paper would really complete the trifecta. The Boston Globe, to keep up the East Coast thing? The LA Times to really branch out? Maybe a Chicago paper? I’m pulling for LA because, really, how the heck would I get into an LA paper?

Also, a note on the article – the author is aware that there are only quotes from men. What she submitted had quotes from women, and they didn’t make the final. I can’t speak to why that is, and I’m honestly not sure whether it’s better that the NYT editor did it on purpose, or that they are just that clueless. Either way, it’s absurd to ingore the women who are embracing cargo bikes instead of minivans. Anecdotally, I know more women who do it than men.