Lounge Act

Noah at Baldwin

Today Noah took his first trip to the Birmingham Library! And dad paid the largest library fine he has ever paid. Very embarrassing. Apparently we took out "The Happiest Baby on the Block" back in October 2004, and then Lauren had Noah, and we forgot to return it for several weeks months.


Note all of the books I am checking out. Now that Noah has a bed time, we have a little discretionary time in the evenings. I am really looking forward to digging into Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World and American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine.


I do hope that Noah likes to read. I get so much from it, and I read as much as I can. Looks like he is into it so far. He certainly likes chewing on books, which is like reading by osmosis.


Mmmm...words.

Look at this Space Pod!

This is the new CLS55 AMG, and we saw it at Babies 'R' Us, of all places. 469 Horsepower!! $87,000!!

Here is how I configured mine: Everest Green Metallic, High Gloss Laurel Woood trim, Cashmere Beige Napa Leather, winning big game lottery ticket.

More on TV

Here is one of Noah's best friends, Moose A. Moose. As I mentioned, I am not thrilled about babies watching a ton of TV, but;


this week is "Move to the Music Week" on Noggin, so Lauren and I will look forward to Dan Zanes, Laurie Berkner and the theme from "64 Zoo Lane" in an endless loop. Noah will love it, he can recognize a lot of the songs already.

House Hunting

Lauren and I saw this on realtor.com and decided to drive over and take a lot. It is ok, but the street is not great and our property taxes would go way up. This was definitely a house that was more cute when you could just see the front view in the ad. We are starting to think a bit more space might be nice though. Hard to find reasonably in Detroit though.

Date Night

Last night Lauren and I went to Cafe Habana in Royal Oak for dinner.


Noah stayed with his Nana, and we got to go get dinner. We were going to see the Enron documentary, but Lauren wanted to go get sunglasses at Target instead.


Lauren's arepas. I had a very nice hanger steak with chimichurri sauce.


On closed circuit TV at Target.


New purses: I'm on the list, That's Hot, I Heart Bling, I Heart Me....

More on Matzoh Balls

You might recall that Sunday morning I wrote about what a strange food Matzoh Balls are, and how I had planned on making some that afternoon in the soup to take out a cold. Therefore it was with some delight that I read Emily Yoffe's article in Slate about the wonderful, but disturbing "Ruthie & Gussie's/Empire Kosher Matzo Ball-Eating Championship" held (where else) at the Friar's Club.

I say disturbing because I picture the contestants swelling up after the contest like Violet Beauregarde after she ate the blueberry gum, and being taken off to be juiced from the balcony of the Henny Youngman terrace (Note: If the Friar's Club does not have a Henny Youngman terrace, it should). My brother Daniel has attended the annual Fourth of July hot dog-eating contest at Nathan's Coney Island, and he says it is really quite a spectacle. I'll see if he can send some pictures. By the way, mutiple spellings of "matzoh" are correct, I happen to like the silent "H," I think it rounds out the word in print.

Aaaaaaaaaaaagggggghhhh!

I am about to lose it. I was just reading the deal site Cheap Stingy Bastard and they posted a deal where you can get a "Weatherproof Silk Cotton Button Down Woven Long Sleeve Shirt" for 11 bucks.

I thought, "I want a Weatherproof Silk Cotton Button Down Woven Long Sleeve Shirt for 11 bucks."

So I clicked the link. And the smallest size? Medium.

And the accompanying "Weatherproof Men's Three Gauge Cotton Sweater"?

Medium.

Am I missing something here? Maybe I should have asked for growth hormones when I was in junior high.

Rant: American Haberdashery

Look at the link - if you want a Le Tigre shirt from bluefly.com, you had better be at least a medium. No smalls in stock. I'm a reasonable person, and I work for a retail products company, so I know that retailers can be out of stock occasionally. But no smalls? At all? I mean, I'm not medium, I'm small. American retailers do not care about men who wear smalls. They don't like to make shirts with a 14 1/2 neck, they don't like to sell suits in a 36 Short, they just have a lousy selection of clothes if you are not a stereotypical 5'9" male. Armani to Zegna, it is tough to find your size.

I have not been able to find a suit I really love since Napolean's Closet in Birmingham closed. That place was amazing - if you needed a Burberry suit in a 34S, they had it. If you were taller than 5'8", they couldn't help you. Awesome store. I went into Banana Republic last week and they told me if I wanted a 3-button refined linen blazer in "Tobacco," I would have to get it online, because they do not carry the 36S's in the stores. Well, I just looked, and they do not make the 36S, period.

I am frustrated to the point where I want to start having clothes custom made - the only problem being that I am not the kind of wealthy dude who can go get clothes custom made. There is no room in my life for $2800 Brioni suits and $120 dress shirts, minimum order 6. I also don't have the opportunity to get them made more inexpensively in Hong Kong or Buenos Aires. Frankly, I am bummed about this.

Mr. Ripe, or Mr. Ripe Now

I was reading the Detroit News yesterday, and there is just so much going on right now. If you had read the paper yesterday you would know that the Pistons are two games up on Philadelphia, auto suppliers are cutting benefits all over the place to try to stay competitive, and that He Drove, She Drove did not like the Infiniti FX35.

Most importantly, you would know that Kroger had some generic ice cream for $1 a half gallon, with plus card. No dummy, I got in Lauren's car and pointed those flower wheels up Woodward to check out the ice cream. Now, we're not talking Stroh's or Breyers - this is basically unbranded ice cream, and the only flavor that looked interesting was chocolate. I called Lauren and said, "Two grams of fat, one gram saturated fat, 5 grams of cholesterol," to which she replied, "Go see how much is in Starbucks bars." We ended up with the bars of course, which it turns out have exactly as much fat and cholesterol per serving as dollar ice cream. They're three times as expensive, which defeated the purpose of going, but I found a few other bargains that made the trip worthwhile.

Hass Avocados - 10 for $10! Word, this is a legitimate deal. They were ripe now, so I bought 5 and started making guacamole. It was great, but I had to salt it extra heavy to make it taste good with matzoh.

Strawberries - 2 pound box for $3! Oddly, two one-pound boxes were $4. Now I just need to figure out what to do with 2 pounds of strawberries. Worst case: I just eat them. Still fine.

Onions - I don't know what these cost but I bought 4, because the ones on our counter were starting to sprout giant green appendages. Time to go.

Once Upon a Time.....

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I had so much free time on my hands that I started trying out crafting projects in Martha Sterwart magazine. I saw this article about a woman who made a beautiful wedding bouquet out of flowers made from tiny seed beads. I decided to try it being that I didn't have any diapers to change or laundry loads full of tiny socks and burp clothes to do. Although I only got through three flowers rather than a full arrangment due to a lack of ritalin supply, my fine craft did not go to waste. After counting out percise rows of impossibly small beads for days and days on end,I mounted the gorgeous gems on a ribbon and presented it to my friend Caroline for her Birthday. My creation: a choker. Um yeah...I thought she could wear it out. Like to a bar or dinner or something. Yeah, the giant flower and the velvety leaves and the fake bird. All right there, all around her neck. Yeah, pretty seductive and cool huh? Sorry Caroline. I'll whip up something even more awesome next year!

A Run-in at Target

So as not to completely confuse you, this picture has nothing to do with the story. I thought I'd just add some visual interest with a cute picture of Noah when he was just a very wee boy.

So I was telling this story in an e-mail tonight and thought I'd share it with you too:

I was in Target the other day and this Mom just came up to me and said " Oh how old is your son"? I said "5 months" and she said ; "so is my daughter"! and then said "But she isn't as big as yours, more that size" where she pointed to my friend's more "slender" baby. Everyone makes fun of my baby's fabulous chub. Anyway though, so this complete stranger Mom in Target says ; "So, are you going to put your son in Birmingham schools"? I was like... "umm..uh..I guess I think so..um".(not knowing what to say) "Well you know" she said; "My daughter is the same age and I just had to put her on the waiting list for the preschool at Midvale and it's THE BEST you know"!

HELLO!!!!!!! My son is practically still a zygote and I don't know you!!!

I should have said something to really freak her out like; "Oh, I'm just planning to home school".

Jeez!

New Car Kit Test

Blogwise

Blogwise has been kind enough to link How Bourgeois to their site (see link), hence the new button on the sidebar. Blogwise is a site that makes it easier to find blogs and the information on them, and updates to this site will be reflected on Blogwise. Lots of great stuff there, with almost 50,000 sites already listed. Impressive effort and worth browsing.

Lauren and Noah at Leo's Coney Island

Honkers

I did not make matzoh ball soup yesterday.

Instead of waking up from his nap refreshed and ready to party with kosher chickens and the Times Review of Books, Noah crabbed it up to the point where we didn't do much of anything but try to keep him entertained. Turns out he likes to see old dad jump up and down and go "Ooh ooh ooh," literally, like a monkey.

Which is great, but I am still sniffling and we did finally get to go to Trader Joe's and get some grapefruit juice, after Noah took an astounding doze, his best nap ever - until today.




Noah is delightfully smart and engaging, but he has not to date been what one would call a great sleeper. The last couple of days though he has taken nice sound naps and been cheerful in the afternoon. I'm cautiously optimistic that it could be a trend.




Sometimes when we're up we watch some Noggin, which has no commercials and only educational programming - hence the Honkers. There are some great shows, but I am concerned because I read several studies today correlating television under age two with ADHD later in life. The major study could not show causality, but it does make one think that a little bit is plenty, even of the good stuff. Still, Noah smiles at Moose A. Moose whenever he comes on, and it is amazing to me that a five-month-old can recognize an animated moose from the television. To me there is some good stuff going on with Noggin regarding memory/repetition and song and learning, but at the same time, is the pace too fast for an infant? Lots of people really love their Baby Einstein videos, but is it because the baby is learning or because you can go throw in a load of laundry? If anyone with experience would like to comment, I'd be interested.

Floods

Swing

A tiny guy at five days old. 6 pounds.



A big boy at five months old! 19 pounds.

Our magnolia bloomed!

Granted, it has been snowing all weekend. We'll see how good it looks in a couple of days.

Noah Recap

Here are a couple of miscellaneous Noah photos.


Guess which one of us has teeth so far? By the way, Sarah traded Lauren this hat for an hour of babysitting. Guess whose baby behaved? (Hint: It probably wasn't Noah).


Sometimes Noah fights napping in his crib, but Saturday morning he hung out with us after he woke up (at 6), and ended up sleeping until 8 am!


Tummy time.

Our Morning

It's not quite 8:30 on Sunday morning, and I just put Noah down for his first nap of the day. Why this early? Because he has been up since about 6:15, and after he ate he played in his office (excersaucer), in the jumperoo, with that map with the dangly toys, and sat in the swing while we watched Sesame Street. We're both beat. So he's ready for bed, and when he wakes up we'll go get the New York Times and some Empire chickens.

Why chickens? Becuase Lauren and I both have colds that came on suddenly, so I'm going to make soup. With matzoh balls. While I was feeding Noah this morning I was thinking about matzoh balls and what a strange food they are, being, after all, a floating ball made from matzoh right in the middle of the soup. Texturally, they can either be as light as a balloon or as dense as a doorstop, and making them well is an art, complete with secrets. No, you can't have my secrets. For me, the matzoh ball is one of those great foods that I miss when I'm not eating them. They are a hassle to prepare and the commercial mixes are subpar, which means that most of the time I have them when someone else makes them. They are bland without the soup and they have a short shelf life. In short, like anything worth doing they are difficult, which is why I am so glad Noah woke me up so early, so I can have some ready for lunch.

HB Produce Thursday Presents: A Contest

The California Avocado Commission is giving away a year's supply (600) of Avocados. That is a lot of guacamole - and speaking of, click here for eight guacamole recipes, any one of which might be almost as good as mine.

Holy Crap, This is Nuts

In a nutshell, Shabot 6000 is a cartoon about an observant Jew and the robot he hired to work for him on on Shabbat, a time when observant Jews are not permitted to perform any labor. The robot decides he's Jewish too, so he could not perform any work either. The daily strips are annotated to explain all of the religious references therein, which would not be funny to people who do not know what a sheitel is. Or want to, especially.

Anyway, this morning I was forwarded this link to "SEDA' CLUB", "Shabot's Passover Animated Special." I have no intention of spoiling the surprise, just turn it up and watch.

Face

Birmingham Weekend Car Roundup

Saturday was extremely beautiful, so we spent most of the day in downtown Birmingham. As always, I was struck by the quality and variety of vehicles people were out preening in.


Here is a new Benz CLS 500. Have not seen one of these in traffic yet - and I am really struck by how small it is compared to the Dodge Intrepid i left in for reference! It still has amazing road presence, even if it does look like my Uncle Harry's Cadillac Seville from the early eighties melted.


Here is just a sweet T/A. Love these, right? They're getting better with age.


La-di-dah, I am just out for a little drive in my $300,000 convertible. Crazily, I have seen this parked at a meter before. Hate to get a door ding on this, but maybe you just don't care if you can afford to buy this.


This is one of those guys who likes to keep the motor revving at the light.


And finally, even though there is nothing special about this Buick, it is free if you but the house in Birmingham it is parked in front of. Not sure why someone buying a million dollar house in downtown Birmingham wants a white Buick (there was a Benz E55 parked in the drive across the street), but if this works for them then I will buy a Kia to incentivize whoever buys our place when we sell it.

Saleen Sighting

This is why I love living in Detroit - here is a brand-new Saleen Mustang, probably the new S281. I'm not sure if this is for sale yet, but living here you get to see everything first. Saleen Special Vehicles is on Maple Road, around the corner from foneGEAR's office, and so I snapped these in traffic while going to visit a customer.


This is the close-up. I apologize for the low resolution, but I took these with my phone.


The rear-view (the one my Jeep will see most often). I think this looks suitably aggressive, and it compares favorably to the stock body work, which I like (for more on that, go here and here).

Rolling on Things

This is car jewelry, and the look is currently, to my knowledge, one-of-a-few. My colleague V has them on her Hummer H2, and now Lauren's wagon is sporting a shiny new set of pink-chrome plastic floral valve caps with blue rhinestone centers. The best part is that when you roll up Woodward your rims spin a tiny shiny pink circle up the street. I brought some home because I thought they are uniquely suited to Lauren - plus they will last longer than cut flowers.

Test Post, Yo!

Behold, our first audio post ever. This must be how Alexander Graham Bell felt.

HB Presents: 2005 4Runner Mini-review

While I was in Indianapolis we rented a 2005 Toyota 4Runner SR5 4x4 from Hertz. I was definitely interested in how it would measure up against my 2005 Grand Cherokee, but you'll have to wait until the end to find out if I made the right decision.

On my last trip to Indy I drove a colleague's company 4Runner there and back instead of flying. I really enjoyed it, but it is the Limited model, far more posh than this rental and much more expensive. It is loaded up, with heated leather, sunroof, high-end sound system, etc. etc. indefinitely. I liked it a lot. It was powerful, comfortable and well appointed, and it made me seriously consider the 4Runner when I was looking for a new truck. It handled the trip down to Indiana with no drama or effort over several hours in intermittent blowing snow, and it returned decent fuel economy while we traveled down at a brisk pace for a noon meeting. All in all, a great SUV.





The SR5 is a different story. Ungainly-looking in silver and with a depressing charcoal interior, my first impression was that this is not a place I wanted to spend a week, let alone 100,000 miles. Even my old Corolla had a pleasant tweed burgundy interior (I'm not sure if I'm kidding either), so to see Toyota offer something so drab 18 years later is a dissappointment.

Look at this: Can you get more gray?




The uphostelry is mousy and felt-like. It is not nearly as pleasant as the tight-weave cloth in the Jeep. You can sit on it and live to tell, but it is unsatisying aesthetically. I fail to understand why Toyota chose to go with an unappealing two-tone approach, instead of just finding one tone people could live with. The driver and passenger seat adjustments are manual, no big deal in itself but the Jeep has a power driver's seat. The steering wheel is all plastic, nothing new there for Toyota, but for some reason it feels more synthetic than the plastics used in the '95 Camry and '98 RAV4 I have driven extensively. You sit low in this truck, or perhaps I'm just short. Whatever, the impression for me was sort of like driving my bathtub around. Cool in a '32 Ford, silly in a sport utility. Buy this if you're 6'5". Here's a shot of the wheel and gauges:




The controls have a substantial, quality feel to them that one comes to expect from Toyota products. The shift lever has positive actuation through the gears, the buttons for the climate control and stereo enagage with authority, and there is a smoothness to the action of turning on the windshield wipers or headlights. It feels as though you are investing in a quality product that would work every day for a decade. Jeep is making strides in this direction, but Chrysler products still have not caught up with Toyota in this regard. The dash knobs on the Jeep do not feel as though they would fall off in your hand, they are just about 90% as good as these.




The downside is that Toyota has made some questionable ergonomic choices here that detract from the experience. The overall climate/stereo effect here is both discordant and a distraction from driving, because Toyota has chosen to use some of the display components from the excellent Limited model interface, but when combined with the downmarket stereo the look is less than upscale. The climate control butttons themselves are tough to read on the move, non-intuitive for new users, and needlessly complicated. I mean, look at this:




The Jeep has a fan dial, a temperature dial and a position dial, just like cars have had for decades. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel here. It is not innovation, it just smacks of gimmickry. Camry: Dials. RAV4 and Corolla: Levers. All of those cars were substantially less expensive than this truck, and they were all easier to use by feel without having to take one's eyes off the road. Simple solutions are better.

The engine is another story.




This is a powerful motor, and it is stronger than the Jeep V6 by about 35 horsepower, while returning better fuel economy. When you boot it it sounds great and really hustles. The ride is a bit pillowy compared to the Grand Cherokee and I would rather have the Jeep in the curves, but in a straight line this thing is more fun.

It is also more expensive, both to lease and to buy (after Jeep incentives), which made the Jeep that much more compelling. On balance the two are similar in their approach but differ in the execution, but I think the Grand Cherokee is simultaneously more fun to drive and more affordable than the 4Runner. It is definitely more cheerful inside, at least with the tan interior. Styling is subjective and there is an argument for both, and certainly the Toyota has a reputation for immense reliability over time. For two years I am sure I made the right decision. If I had to keep the car for ten years? Tough call. The Jeep makes me feel cool, for what that is worth, but I have never viewed cars as mere A to B transportation so style carries some weight with me. On balance the Jeep gets the nod unless it is the 4Runner Limited, which is out of my league. Over and out.