3 trips to NYC: Part 1

I'm five trips behind in my chronicles, so I'll handle 3 of them now: 3 weeks in a row I went back and forth from HMB to NYC.

The first trip, Thu 6/5 to Sun 6/8, was for my birthday and 1 year anniversary of dating Keiko. 6/5 was the anniversary of our first date, so I took Keiko to the same restaurant that we went to that day: Sette Mezzo, at 70th and Lex. It's a great restaurant owned and operated by the father of one of my former students, who now attends NYU business school. Last year, he had just finished working with me when we went, and his father recognized both me and Keiko and gave us free desserts. Extremely yummy, homemade Italian desserts, I feel obliged to add.

The reason he recognized Keiko, who normally does not interact with too many parents, and if she does, it's almost exclusively via phone or email, is that he would actually come each month to the office to pay personally. In cash. The reason he paid for his not insignificant bills in cash is that his restaurant is a cash-only place.

Funny thing is, I'd forgotten to look that up before we went out last year, and I, thinking I'd be putting it all on Mr. Visa, happily rang up a non-trivial bill. In NYC, my friends, that is a rookie mistake. A LOT of restaurants are cash-only, because it's such tight margins and credit card fees are outrageous, as I'm here to tell you (I actually accept payment ONLY by credit card in my office). So Keiko wound up having to pitch in for our meal. Yes, I am 100% class.

After dinner I took her on a walk down 5th ave, to see a building which my NYC walking guidebook was owned by my student Alix's family back in the day, and which apparently still had their family crest on it. I thought it was pretty cool that their family had a family crest, and I was pretty excited to go see it. And it seemed like a good excuse for a nice nighttime walk in the city. So we headed down 5th ave.

Along the way, we passed the southeast corner of Central Park, where the Armory is located. It's actually a pretty interesting building, with an interesting history, which is comprehensively detailed in a large sign in front of it. I stopped us in front of the sign and we began reading. About a minute later, we had the following conversation:

Keiko: "Wait, are you reading the entire sign?"

Me: "Uh, yeah, I was planning to. Why?"

Keiko: "coughcoughnerdcoughcough"

Me: "GEEK, not NERD. That's an important distinction, I'll have you know."

Keiko: "Uh huh."

So I read the entire sign. As I said, the building has an interesting history- it was built to house munitions, but has also been a police station, an art museum, and a bunch of other stuff I don't remember anymore. Then we continued on our walk down 5th until we got to the building I wanted to see, several blocks farther down.

Along the way, I had explained to Keiko about the crest, and how it would probably look pretty cool, and so when we got to the corner we crossed the street from the building and began looking for a large stone crest, which the guidebook had assured me was right on the front of the building. However, despite looking at the thing from every conceivable angle, there was nary a crest to be found. I kept us there a solid 15 minutes circling the building again and again, determined to find that damned crest, and increasingly humiliated that it wasn't turning up. Keiko was remarkably patient about the whole thing, but I imagined she was probably thinking "How the hell do I get away from this crazy person."

Desperate to salvage some respectability from all this, I fell back on my failsafe secret weapon: my sense of humor.

Me: "Well, that's pretty disappointing. I'm totally, well, crest-fallen." [insert boyish grin]

Keiko: "... ... ... wow."

[awkward pause]

Me: "Uh, yeah, so, uh, why don't I walk you home then..."

And that was our first date: Keiko more or less unexpectedly paid for her own dinner, I empirically proved my geekhood, I took her on a 20 block walk to see something that didn't exist, and then I tried to rescue the evening with puns. As I walked home from Keiko's, I figured that

(a) there would probably not be a second date, and

(b) this was solid evidence in favor of my hypothesis that I am fated to die cold and alone in a refrigerator box under the FDR, with no one to notice my passing until a few days later when joggers notice the smell. Though, on the bright side, there will eventually be a Law & Order episode based on my story.

As an important footnote to the story, the crest DOES exist; it's just made out of dark stone on a dark stone background, and it turns out that it's hard to see a dark stone carving on a dark stone background at night. But it's very clearly there in the daytime.

Anyway, a week later we were seated at the same table at a work function, and (unbeknownst to me) Keiko rearranged the name plates so that I was next to her, and so we chatted the entire evening, and then there was dancing afterward, and that's home court advantage for yours truly, so we got together that night and have been dating ever since.

So on Thursday 6/5, precisely one year after that eventful first date, I took us back to Sette Mezzo. And right about when it was time to order desserts (the father wasn't working that night, so no free desserts- damn!), I realized something Important:

I'd forgotten to go to the ATM.

Now, I did have some cash on me, since I had just arrived that day, and I almost always remember to take out cash when I travel. But I was frantically trying to tally up the meal so far to see if I'd be able to cover it. In the end, I opted not to say anything at first; I just let us order our desserts and then 'fessed up:

Me: "Uh, so this is kinda funny..."

Keiko: "oh no." [One year later, Keiko knows me pretty well.]

Me: "...yeah, uh, I forgot to go to the ATM."

Keiko: "You don't have enough cash AGAIN?"

Me: "Well, I'm not SURE I don't have enough cash. I won't know until the bill comes."

Keiko: "You really know how to sweep a girl off her feet. Are you going to take me on another walk to see the crest that doesn't exist?"

Me: "The crest EXISTS. I saw it a couple weeks later in the daytime. It's visible only in the daytime."

Keiko: "I'm sure it is, baby."

At that point, the bill came. I quickly determined that if I threw in every last dollar I had, I could cover the bill plus a 17% tip. Less than I like to tip, but enough not to hang my head in shame.

Me, in my best Dick Vitale voice, "YES!"

Keiko: "My baby has so much class."

Me: "I paid the bi-ill ... I had the muh-ney..."

And so went our anniversary dinner. Since I had caused Keiko to miss the opening of Sex & the City the previous weekend when all her friends went by asking her to come to the LA wedding, I promised to take her and so we went. As we waited outside the theatre, I surveyed the super long line we were waiting in...

Me: "There's like 5 guys in this line, and all of them are with their girlfriends. The entire rest of this line is female."

Keiko: "No, look, there's two guys waiting together."

Me: "Those guys are gay, baby. They count toward the women statistics."

Keiko: "You don't know for sure they're gay."

Me: "No, of course not, they just were hanging out having some beers down at Molly's and one of them said, 'Dude, let's bag SportsCenter and go watch Sex & the City.' And the other one said, 'Fuckin' hell yeah, man, I'm down for that.'"

Keiko: "grrr."

The movie was, I must say, mostly watchable, which was a big surprise for me. The dialogue only made me want to actually vomit once. A best-case scenario, really.

The next night we saw Kung Fu Panda, which we both enjoyed, and we had dinner with Ed and Alison.

The next morning, I woke up a newly minted 36-year-old. I don't get terribly excited about birthdays [especially as I get older] but I was excited to try my birthday luck at the Belmont Stakes. I figured it would be a good day to win some money, and maybe see Big Brown make history by becoming the first horse in 30 years to win the Triple Crown.

Of course, about 10 million other people had the same idea, so we had to get up somewhat early and take the train out to the racetrack on a super hot day. Ed and his buddy Matty have been going every year for a long time, so Keiko and I joined up with Ed and Alison and we took the 1130am train. Matty and his wife were already there; they had staked out some sweet seats.

We got there around 1230, and it was 95 degrees, with 300% humidity, and no shade. We'd brought plenty of water and provisions, including several large containers of Motts Apple Juice, which Ed had dumped out and replaced with beer, in order to get it through security. He was just praying they wouldn't notice the head on the top of the "apple juice".


Ed and Allison. And the rest of NY. In the heat. But hey, there's "apple juice".










So we began a 6 hour wait until Big Brown's race. His race was the 11th of 13 races that day, so there was a lot of time. Time which we had to spend defending our absolutely-no-shade-whatsoever area against encroachment. I whiled away part of the time learning about different horse betting strategies, and decided to try out the most compelling one, which is the wheel bet.

WARNING: The next bit is tutoring in horse racing betting strategy, so if that doesn't seem like an interesting topic to you, skip ahead to THE RESULTS.

Terminology:

Exacta: you pick the first-place and second place horses
Exacta box: you pick two horses, and are betting on both combinations of first and second place

Trifecta: you pick the first, second, and third-place horses
Trifecta box: you pick three horses, and are betting on all 6 combinations of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd

Superfecta: you pick the first, second, third, and fourth-place horses
Superfecta box: you pick 4 horses, and are betting on all 24 combinations of 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th.

Betting to win: you pick the horse you think will win
Betting to place: you pick a single horse you think will finish either 1st or 2nd
Betting to show: you pick a single horse you think will finish 1st, 2nd, or 3rd

Examples:

Suppose we have 3 horses:

#5 horse is MKisGAY
#7 horse is EDlicksMYballs
#9 horse is HotKeik

The standard bet is $2, and all the winning amounts are posted assuming you're making a $2 bet. Of course, only cheap bastards make $2 bets, so naturally Ed and I made $2 bets all day. When you make a bet, you use this format:

"on the #10 race, give me a $2 exacta box with numbers 5 and 7"

In this case, you've just bet on the 10th race, and you've made TWO different bets at once: you've bet $2 on the #5 horse finishing first, and the #7 horse finishing second, and you've bet $2 on the #7 horse finishing first, and the #5 horse finishing second. So you cough up $4.

Another example:

"On the #8 race, give me a $2 trifecta with #9, #7, and #5."

Here, you've bet on the 8th race, and you've made only one $2 bet: that the #9 horse will finish first, the #7 horse will finish second, and the #5 horse will finish 3rd. Contrast this with:

"On the #8 race, give me a $2 trifecta BOX with #9, #7, and #5."

Here, you've made 6 different $2 bets:

9,7,5
9,5,7
7,9,5
7,5,9
5,7,9
5,9,7

Same kind of thing with the superfecta va. superfecta box.

So here's the thing- most people either make one bet, or bet in bulk using the box methodology. Thing is, any one bet doesn't have great odds, and there's a huge problem with the box, which is that it weights all combinations the same, regardless of probability.

Suppose you think that either #7 EDlicksMYballs and #9 HotKeik could finish first or second, but #5 MKisGAY is sure to finish 3rd. Then you don't want to bet a trifecta box, because 4 of the 6 bets have #5 finishing either first or second, and you're certain MKisGAY is going to finish 3rd. Instead, you use the magic of the wheel bet:

"On the #8 race, give me a $2 trifecta WHEEL with a 7,9; a 7,9; and a 5."

Here, you've made just the 2 bets you're interested in: 7,9,5 and 9,7,5. What the person behind the window hears is: I want to bet on all combinations that have either the 7 or 9 horse winning, the 7 or 9 horse finishing second, and the 5 horse finishing third. Wheel betting is pretty clearly superior from a purely mathematical perspective.

THE RESULTS...

It's a pretty flexible strategy. I used it in the first race I bet on, the fifth race, and that race finished with the top four horses as 7,8,4,2. That was almost the only combination of those four horses that didn't win me a trifecta, dammit. So close to winning like $300...

I had bet 6 combinations, for a total of $12, and I put down a similar strategy on 3 more races, including the Big Brown race. Having spent $48, I decided to take a super longshot and bet _against_ Big Brown by taking a straight $2 superfecta. With the odds so overwhelmingly favoring Big Brown, if i won it'd be huge.

The next race didn't come close to winning for me. But then the #10 race, the one right before Big Brown's came up. In that race, as I'd looked through the odds, I noticed that the 3rd highest odds horse was named "Dancing Forever".

How could I not bet on Dancing Forever?

So I bet a $2 trifecta wheel, with a 10; a 1,5,8; and a 1,5,8. Again, that was effectively 6 different bets:

10,1,5
10,1,8
10,5,1
10,5,8
10,8,1
10,8,5

And wouldn't you know it, but Dancing Forever won. And #5 finished second, and #8 finished third.

TRIFECTA!!!!!


Oh yeah. Winning big on my birthday...


















My winning horses splashed all over the leaderboard. And the bottom row shows my $382 trifecta.









And like magic, the $2 I put on 10,5,8 turned into $382. Enough to cover my $50 of betting, the $20 of entrance fees for me and Keiko, our LIRR tickets, our provisions, and still nearly $300 profit. Now I see how people get addicted to the races.


Flush with victory, and heatstroke.












Next up was Big Brown. After 6 hours of sweating in the sun, we were ready to see him make history. Or, for me, to finish 3rd while the #7 horse won, thus winning me a fortune.



Big Brown. The small one. (#1)












Nearly 100,000 people came out that afternoon, and it seemed like all of them were crowded into our little area. We were standing on our bench, watching as they paraded the horses out. Horse races have varying lengths, and the Belmont Stakes is the longest at 1.5 miles. The starting gate is moved to different points on the track over the course of the day, depending on the length of the race, and presumably on giving each part of the grandstand a decent view of the starting gate at some point during the day.



Lining up in the starting gate...












Matty and his wife had done great work staking out a place close to the front near the center of the grandstand, so we got a great look at the horses, and the start of the race. There was electricity in the air.

AND THEY'RE OFF!

The crowd went nuts. We were all yelling, as Big Brown started off a little slow, but quickly got into third place. "The jockey always does this," said Ed, "He hangs back a little bit, and then at the end he makes a move." We were leaning forward as far as we could go without falling off our bench onto someone's head, breath held, as Big Brown headed for the final turn, still in third. There wasn't much time left to make a move...

And then the jockey pulled him up, and slowed him to a trot. He finished dead last. The audience collectively groaned. People were in shock.

For the record, the #6 horse won. I had the 3rd place horse correct (the #8 horse), though technically, #8 and #9 finished in a dead heat, tying for third. Aside from that, my superfecta got killed. But if you had bet the winning superfecta of 6-4-8-9 or 6-4-9-8, your $2 would have turned into $48,000. Why, oh why, couldn't I have picked those numbers???


Damn. So close to $48,000. OK, not really, but still.











We stuck around for the second to last race, but bailed out after that. Ed and Allison were headed to Brooklyn for sushi, but as someone with no particular affection for either Brooklyn or sushi, I was content to head back to the city with Keiko. But hey, a trifecta on my birthday- not so bad.

Sunday morning I got up super early and took the 540am bus to JFK, and got myself to the gate in a responsibly early fashion. As is typical, getting there early was a big waste, as the flight was way late taking off, and I ended up having to push back my tutoring that day. Although it wasn't a big deal, I want the record to note that once again, being early for a flight does NOT pay off.

Not for me, anyway...

Why I Love Half Moon Bay, Pt 3

Today I went for my morning bike ride a little earlier than usual, because I've figured out that as the temperature differential between the coast and the valley grows over the course of the day, the rising hot air in the valley creates a convection current that manifests itself as the HMB wind.

Basically, earlier in the day = less wind. Less wind is nice because the way the wind blows happens to be in my face for the entire ride back to the house, the last half of which has a slight uphill orientation. A couple of weeks ago, Socci was out west visiting some of his friends, and came down for an afternoon in HMB, which Keiko later dubbed "a middle school playdate" since we rode bikes and played catch. But it was late in the afternoon, by which point the wind had really picked up, and we had to bike all the way back headfirst into it, which was NOT fun.

As a side note, I had gotten the bike that Socci rode so that there would be an extra bike for Keiko to ride when she came out for visits, and although I'd put it together I hadn't actually field-tested it yet. Turns out I had neglected to completely tighten the screw that holds the handlebars in place, so as we were going back across the wooden bridge, the handlebars came loose and Socci crashed into the rusty metal railing. Showing a manly stoicism I wouldn't have thought possible after seeing him wuss out of skydiving ("No way am I jumping out of a plane!"), he remarked only: "So, how long are tetanus shots good for again?" I told him I didn't know, but that whether he lived or died, Keiko would really appreciate his having test drove the bike.

So, today I experimented with an earlier ride. Apparently, this earlier time is primetime for seeing bunnies. I saw 7 of them throughout my ride. Like Hawk the other day, the bunnies were willing to allow me to get surprisingly close before reacting. Then they reacted.

Here's the thing about bunnies. The summer after I graduated from business school, I went on a 7,000 mile, monthlong road trip through the west with Nacole. At one point, we were driving at dusk through Craters of the Moon national park in Idaho. A little piece of trivia about CotM: when you're watching your local news, and they talk about the air quality, and it's determined to be good, or bad, or Los Angeles, or whatever, it's being compared to a benchmark for what great air should be like. That benchmark is CotM, which is a giant exposed lava plain in the middle of nowhere, and because of air currents and the lack of population centers even remotely close by, it has virtually zero pollution.

By virtue of being a giant exposed lava plain, it also has not so much as a visible blade of grass, or a tree, or anything on it. Basically nothing lives there. Except giant jackrabbits. I don't know what they're eating, but whatever it is makes them get big.

Nacole and I discovered them as we were driving through the park at dusk. I was clipping along at around 70mph or so, came around a bend, and my lights illuminated a giant jackrabbit on the side of the road ahead. His eyes were lit up by the reflection of my headlights. I had just enough time to register that he was a very large jackrabbit, and he had just enough time to register in his little herbivore brain that I was both moving very fast and 500 times his size. In that moment, the rabbit, by instinct going into a flight reaction, had a choice between the following two options:

Option 1: turn around and flee into the 300,000 acres of empty lava plain interlaced with 400 trillion miles of tiny passages in which he could hide, and in which God Himself could not find him, or

Option 2: try dashing across the empty, exposed road in front of my car in the hopes that he could make it to the other side without getting annihilated.

The bunny chose Option 2. And was annihilated. For the record, it made an incredible impact on my car. And he had the misfortune of impacting the bumper on the passenger's side of my Hyundai Elantra, which was unfortunate for the following reason:

About 8 months previous, I was leading a group of business school students in a project to provide volunteer consulting services to a local nonprofit, the Shoreline Alliance for the Arts. They provided a number of services that exposed economically underserved kids in coastal southern Connecticut to the arts. Kids like that typically attend public schools that lack money for basic things like books, let alone fancy stuff like art, so for many of the kids the organization worked with, this was the only exposure to the arts that they got.

Historically, the organization had been run by the artists who volunteered for it. At the risk of unfairly stereotyping, in my experience artists are always interesting, often a pleasure to know, and rarely possessed of anything approximating "good business sense". So although the organization was doing a lot of good, from an organizational design and effectiveness perspective it was, not to put too fine a point on it, a train wreck.

Our group had put together some initial findings on simple, quick steps that the organization could take to improve its effectiveness, and since there was no room in the administrative office that could accommodate everyone who wanted/needed to be present for the presentation of our findings, the Executive Director volunteered to host the meeting at her home, a beautiful home in the forest in suburban CT, near a bubbling brook, and at the bottom of a long paved driveway.

I mention that because the morning the 4 of us left for the ED's house, all packed into my little Elantra, it had snowed a bit, and once I got all 4 wheels onto the driveway, we lost all traction and began slowly sliding down.

At the bottom of the driveway, the pavement curved somewhat sharply off to the right, and at the bottom was a long retaining wall, which helped keep the side of the hill from encroaching on the house, and which we were currently accelerating toward head-on. In that moment, I had 2 choices:

Option 1: Attempt to swing the wheel right and hope we slid by the wall without hitting it. If it worked, we would miss the wall, slide along the front of the house, and eventually come to rest in the yard somewhere. If it didn't work, the retaining wall potentially could scrape all along the driver's side of the car, damaging it all the way from front to back, and it we still had enough momentum, put the hood of my car into her front porch.

Option 2: Do nothing but continue to try and regain any traction, and let the front bumper do what it's designed to do and absorb the frontal impact.

Given that we had started at the top from almost a complete stop, I actually did have time to weigh the options in that level of detail in my mind, and I decided (unlike the bunny) not to take the gamble.

So I went with Option 2, and we slowly, majestically, crashed head-on into the wall.

Fortunately, we all had plenty of time to brace for impact, so no one was the slightest bit injured. Except, of course, for Julio (my car). He took it right on the chin, and in inspecting the damage I discovered that the bumper was not solid, but rather was a hollow piece of plastic not unlike tupperware, the major difference being that tupperware does not shatter like glass when you hit it with something.

The other piece of damage was to the retaining wall, in which I put a large, thick crack from the base to the top. So I kicked off our first meeting with our client by explaining that I had just crashed into her house but was happy to pay for all the damage.

Thing was, I had no money to pay for the damage, and thankfully she refused the offer. I also had no money to get the bumper fixed, so from then on I drove around with a shattered front passenger bumper. It was barely hanging on on that side at all, and a few months later when Nacole borrowed Julio to drive to Philadelphia for an audition, and stayed with a college friend, that friend's dad freaked out that the bumper might imminently fall off and so he duct-taped the bumper onto the car.

But by the time of CotM, the jagged shards of bumper had sawed through the duct tape, and so the front of the car on that side was saw-toothed plastic with short strips of duct tape dangling down. And that's where the bunny, his leaping, stretched-out form totally silhouetted in the headlights for a split second, impacted. When I got the car pulled over and got out to take a look, the bumper and the duct tape were covered with bloody bunny bits.

Eeesh.

We got back into the car and started off.

And then it happened AGAIN.

Not 15 minutes later, same drill. Come around a bend, bunny by the side of the road, bunny chooses the wrong option, bunny gets annihilated. This time, I was annoyed. I mean, with instincts like this, how are bunnies not extinct??

I bring all this up because I encountered 7 bunnies on my bike ride today. 4 of them were about 2 feet off the bike path. 3 of them were right on the edge of the bike path. All 7 of them waited until I was passing very close to them (keep in mind that I was not chasing them, I was simply continuing on the path), and then all of them chose between Options 1 and 2.

The results were this: the 4 bunnies 2 feet off the path chose option 1 and turned away from the path and dove into the underbrush. The 3 bunnies right on the edge of the path chose option 2 and dashed across the open, exposed path right in front of me, 1 of them forcing me to hit the brakes, rather than turn around and dive into the much closer underbrush behind them.

This leads me to wonder: if you're a bunny, and a large, fast moving something appears to be headed right for you, presumably causing you to assume the large, fast moving something is a predator bent on eating you, is your dominant strategy to run _toward_ the predator? Presumably then if it misses you on the first pass, by the time it gets itself turned around for another pass at you, you've had time to pretty carefully hide yourself.

Either way, this is why bunnies do not rule the world.

Nevertheless, it was fun to see so many bunnies. And at the end of my ride a pretty big (~ 1.5 ft) snake slithered across the path. I hit the brakes, jumped off the bike, and ran to it hoping to catch it, but it was fast moving, and as a Missourian, my instinct is to hesitate a second before grabbing at it to first verify that it's not a copperhead. That last second of hesitation was all he needed to get far enough under the brush that it wasn't worth trying to go after him.

Upon returning home, I gchatted with Keiko and related the events of the ride. And she asked:

Keiko: "omg, WHY would you try to catch a SNAKE?"

which puzzled me a little, because the answer to the question seems almost painfully obvious:

Me: "Uh... 'cause."

But I guess it's not so obvious, since I had the same gchat with Shara later in the afternoon.

But, it was another small adventure on the bike path today, and that's another reason to love HMB- every day is a little different, and most every day has some little adventure in it...

Why I Love Half Moon Bay, Pt 2

Today on my morning bike ride, as I was coming around the edge of a cliff, I came up on a large red-tailed hawk perched on the ground, on the cliff's edge. I came to an abrupt halt about 8 feet from him, and he gave me a long, appraising look. I kept perfectly still, and after a couple minutes of eyeing me he went back to watching the beach and the surf below.

Somewhat surprised that he did not immediately fly away, I began to edge slowly toward him. I actually got to within 4 feet of him, and then he suddenly fixed me with a look and ruffled his feathers a bit, as if to say, "That's close enough, buster." So I stopped. Just to emphasize his point, he then suddenly lifted up all his tail feathers and dropped a big load of crap, and then looked at me.

I took the hint and stopped trying to get any closer. We contemplated each other for a while... he was really quite beautiful, and surprisingly big. And, I might add, totally unafraid of me. After a while, when it became clear I would respect his space, we each shifted our gaze to the ocean.

It was a beautiful morning in HMB; the surf was coming in high, and there were a bunch of surfers out there taking advantage. There was the occasional person, usually with a dog, walking down on the sand. It was quite warm, for HMB anyway, and the breeze was quite cool. There was quite a bit of haze; not pollution haze, but rather the haze that comes when the temperature is just above the point where the giant fog banks form. That is, the air _wants_ to form a giant fog bank really, really badly, but it's just a little bit too warm and so all you get is a general haze.

All in all, a beautiful day to stand on the edge of a cliff next to Hawk and contemplate life. We probably spent a good 10 minutes together doing just that. Then, he looked back at me, as if to say, "It's been real- see you around," and then he ruffled up his feathers and took off in a long graceful arc, heading north along the cliffs.

And so I headed home, feeling as centered as I have in a while.

I love love love this place.