What I Had For Dinner Last Night!

This one's for you,Baydog! Should've known better than to mention that friends and I indulged in a restaurant week meal at a seafood restaurant of good repute without bothering to say what we ate, right?

We all ordered off of the special prix-fixe menu - in fact I'm copying the descriptions 'cause I can't remember all the little touches.

Starter - seared fluke roll (sushi) with marinated kohlrabi, shiso, ruby red grapefruit. I wasn't sure how they were going to work in the grapefruit but it was just a little bit sprinkled over the top, nice bit of tart sweetness against the saltier flavors.

Entree - Tough call, they had thyme roasted artic char, a crispy brook trout (one of us had that, looked like a cornmeal crust), and a grilled shrimp and braised pork belly dish. I liked the look of the accompaniments for the char (sweet shrimp & tuscan kale risotto, black mission fig, port wine -- I LOVE risotto!) better than the ones with the trout, and although usually I just stop dead when I hit the word "braised" on a menu, I thought since I was at the Blue Water Grill, I should focus on the fish (plus that way I save the pork-belly indulgences for my local fave Purple Yam). It was fantastic.

Dessert, I went for the chocolate espresso thingy - fantastic, sort of a flourless chocolate base with a thin layer of mousse on top. I owed the waiter for that one, I love all kinds of custard and they had a panna cotta and I couldn't decide so I asked the waiter which one he liked better & he didn't have to think about it for a second.

Restaurant Week was such a good invention - M had actually thought of setting up last night's dinner gathering because she and I had just been in Union Square a few weeks ago, walked past the restaurant, and got to reminiscing about this wonderful meal we'd had there a few years ago, when I'd gotten a gift card as a holiday gift at work. Blue Water Grill is a bit beyond our normal means these days, but the Restaurant Week menu was a very reasonable $35.00 (and in fact I didn't see anything on the normal menu that looked better than what I had). Of course, the two of us who indulge in alcohol did make it a little splurgier by splitting a bottle of the suggested red, a very nice Pinot Noir from New Zealand winery Stoneleigh - sometimes not having to drive home really is a good thing!

Can't afford to dine like that too often, but boy, is it ever nice to indulge every now & then.

And, oh boy. It just hit me that next indulgence might just be Bigelow's - there were rumours of another seal paddle this coming weekend! note later - oops. Not happening. Stupid NOAA.

Jones Beach marine forecast:

Saturday: NNW wind 6 to 11 kt increasing to 12 to 17 kt. Winds could gust as high as 25 kt. Snow likely, mainly before 9am. Seas 1 ft or less.

Sunday: NW wind 17 to 20 kt increasing to 21 to 24 kt in the morning. Winds could gust as high as 34 kt. A slight chance of snow showers after noon. Seas 1 ft or less.

Analoguema: Update

Wow. Apparently this "film" is even more of a museum piece than I realized. It's Restaurant Week, and a friend had made reservations for a small group to dine at the Blue Water Grill in Union Square at 7:30. I left work a bit early to go to a large photography store in the area, thinking that they could take my negatives & save the images on a CD. Went to the counter where I thought they could handle that, pulled out my film, said "I'd like to get these saved on a CD". The clerk looked at them & said "Sorry, we actually don't do that here anymore".

At least dinner was good!

Sailing School and Town Dock Operator Wanted, Pier 25, Hudson River Park

In my inbox last night, thought I'd pass it along.
*************************************************
Hudson River Park Trust Seeks Proposals for a Sailing School and Town Dock Operator on the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan: Up to forty mooring spots and a town dock provide an opportunity to develop a thriving and active waterfront business on Pier 25

Hudson River Park Trust, a public benefit corporation in the State of New York and consisting of a partnership between the State and City of New York, announces the release of a request for proposal for a sailing school, town dock, and private vessel mooring concession at Pier 25 in the Tribeca section of Hudson River Park. The Trust is looking for an experienced operator to run a sailing school and town dock; additional opportunity exists to offer transient and seasonal mooring berths. An optional information session will take place on February 17 and responses are due on March 5.

To download the RFP and for more information, go to
http://www.hudsonriverpark.org/organization/bids.asp

Analoguema!

When's the last time most of us had to actually WAIT to see how pictures came out?

(click for detail, sort of, best I could do at home.)

Yes, while the rest of the country was watching the Super Bowl, I was at one of the more unusual gatherings I've been invited to in a long time - a Kodak Film Wake and Crazy Camera Ball! Friend & Sebago clubmate Andy has been a photographer for years -

OK, wait, can't resist, here's a link to my favorite picture from his RedBubble collection, taken at the Quicksilver Pro Long Beach, NY 2011:

http://www.redbubble.com/people/andytechie/works/7739482-kelly-slater-vs-owen-wright

Anyhow, he and a few other people who are film photography enthusiasts decided to get together in Ditmas Park for a little fun with analogue film photography & knowing that I like to take the occasional picture myself, he invited me & TQ to come.

Friday night, I went out and found some black and white film and on Sunday I picked up a nice bottle of wine & headed over (TQ joined us later on). I didn't have a camera, I'd thought I had a cheap old plastic Canon around here somewhere but if it's here, it's buried too deep to find - Andy said he'd fix me up with something though, he's got a few and I ended up with a fun little thing called a Lomo Fisheye.

There it is - isn't it a funny looking little thing? We started with a good bagel-and-smoked-fish feast, then set out for a quick photo-safari around a couple of blocks in Ditmas Park. We then went back to the house where we'd gathered, where we were treated to a demonstration of black and white film development by Vincent Trivett. This was actually a reintroduction for me, I had taken a photography class back in high school, but my dad's camera had gotten damaged just before the class so I ended up doing a lot of stuff where you do the exposures directly on paper - pinhole cameras, shadowgrams, etc., so I didn't get as much practice as some of my classmates. Wrapping the film onto one of the wire reels still felt familiar, though!

I was kicking myself for not bringing my Lumix so I could take pictures of the demo, but it was really interesting to watch. My roll ended up being one of the 2 rolls Vincent developed for the demo, so now I just have to wait for work to settle down enough to take the negatives somewhere to get a DVD for sharing.

After the demo, Andy turned on the game, but we ended up pretty much blowing it off looking at Vincent and Marc Stager's online photo galleries (friends who are Pete Seeger/ Clearwater fans, check out this wonderful Kodachrome shot) until we all decided it was time to head for home.

I was looking at my negatives tonight wondering when I was going to have a chance to get them printed and how they were going to come out when it hit me that the batch photo software I use to shrink pictures for my stop-motion things might be able to invert a picture. Using my monitor as a makeshift lightbox (hence the shot-through-a-wire-screen effect), I took a digital picture of one of the film strips, picked out the Negate feature that reverses all the pixels. It's not pretty, but at least it's something of a preview!

Estonian Trivia (and how a simple run to West Marine for classroom materials turned into Major Vacation Plan-O-Rama!)

Map of Estonia, from the Nations Online Project.

Estonian Trivia!

I had a very busy work day on Friday, but I just HAD to say something about the sudden emergence of an Estonian sailing vacation when my boss sent the official OK to my vacation request ('cause without that it wasn't going to happen) that day.

I then had a quite wonderful day checking in on my Facebook wall, where people were posting all sorts of great Estonian trivia all day (mostly true, even).

I'd kicked it all off by saying:
"Did you know that the Estonian coastline has over 1,500 islands and islets?" and followed it up with "And it's right across the way from Finland" and that was about all I had time for.

Retired friend to the rescue!

After asking (1) if I was actually going (I'd posted on Facebook that I was invited, but I wouldn't have mentioned it if it had fallen through, so the answer there was a YES!) and (2) if this was for the Estonian Sunfish National Championship (answer - NO, this is one of those boats you can nap on), Tillerman went after a bunch more trivia for me.

"Did you know that Estonia is the second least religious country in the world, with 75.7% of the population claiming to be irreligious?" (my response - "I may not get TQ to come back" - he's quite irreligious himself)

"Did you know that Estonia is ranked as the most free country in the world on the State of World Liberty Index? (USA is 8th.)" (my response was along the lines of "I may not come back myself" - and before much longer I had somebody calling dibs on subletting my nice little [lily]pad here in Brooklyn so, hmmm...)

"Did you know that the 1980 Olympic Sailing Regatta was held in Estonia?"

My friend Stevie jumped in with: "A favorite pastime of Estonians is to take the "Love Boat" from Helsinki to Stockholm and back, or at least it seemed like it last time I was there."

Now, I'd gotten myself sucked into the Susan G. Koman fracas at one point, and around the same time as he was getting trivia for me Tillerman said something about it being too bad that the very basic services for so many poor and/or uninsured women depend on Planned Parenthood have to be provided by a not-for-profit, not just a basic right - naturally I had to ask how Estonia was on that front and the answer was:

"Estonia has universal lifetime healthcare, funded mainly through taxation and costing (as a % of GDP) about a third of what the US spends on healthcare.

And did you know that upon giving birth, the Estonian government grants one of the parents 100% of their former salary for 18 months. After 1.5 years, the parent has the right to resume her/his former position."

Jeeze. Can't help wondering about who covers the new parent for the 18 months, but wow, that would certainly make having a kid a much less potentially scary thing, wouldn't it?

Tillerman got back to a less serious vein with his next trivia, which also involved sub-trivia:

Trivia: "In Estonia they have something called a 'porkuni' barrel race where two people sit in a large wooden vat and use kayak paddles. We will need to see pictures of you and TQ doing that". Subtrivia: "Did you know that if you do a Google Image Search on "Porkuni Barrel Race" you only get 16 results and none of them are of people paddling in a barrel? Post the right image on your blog, Bonnie, and you could be the #1 website on the planet for people searching for images of the Porkuni Barrel Race!"

And somewhere in there O-Docker (the napper himself) threw in this little gem:

"Sailboat racing was invented in the Gulf of Finland. Boats crossing from Estonia to Helsinki were said to cross the 'Finnish line'."

BA HA HA HA HAAAAA!

This all made for some very entertaining breaks during an otherwise crazy-busy Friday - thank you all!

Oh, yes, and I think I promised some actual details.

I was so delighted with O-Docker's first comment on the blog post, "Estonia sailing invitations - aisle four, next to the anchors, right?" that I claimed that yes, that's exactly what happened, but what REALLY happened was that I got there, I quickly collected the items I was there to buy, and then I remembered that I'd wanted to get little floats of some type for manuevering practice and wandered back towards the area I thought they might have kids' toys - just as Captain Kat, one of my friends from the days when I had a part-time job crewing on the Schooner Adirondack, came walking down the same aisle from the other end. So really, O-Docker wasn't too far off, it actually started in Aisle 1, between the lifejackets and the signalling devices! She was browsing around waiting for the salesman to finish working on a transaction involving a gift card and a refund for faulty spotlight. I totally forgot about the toys as we got to talking about who was still working for Classic Harbor, who'd moved away, who was going for their captain's license (yay M!), etc. etc. etc. - and then right at the end, her face lit up and she said "Oh - do you want to go sailing in Estonia?"

She named a time of year that I didn't think was going to be too good for work, so my first response was "Probably not" - but I asked her to go ahead & send me the details so I could at least daydream, knowing that any trip she plans is likely to be wonderful material for that particular past-time. After all, she's the one who arranged that wonderful trip to the BVI's that I went on back in November 2005 - this is just the sort of thing she likes to arrange, she's been doing it for years & she's really, really good at it.


Setting out from Road Harbor aboard the Carina, Nov. 2005 - Captain Kat at the helm - yep, that's the same wheel that's featured in my current profile picture!

That BVI's trip remains one of my favorite vacations of all time (neck and neck with the one I took to Hawaii for my 25th reunion and three that TQ and I have taken - Cape Cod, Washington State and Rhode Island were all spectacular) - so when she sent me the details the next day, and I looked at the specific dates and found that they actually fell within the one teeny window during which I could actually possibly sneak away from work for a week, I started to think that this wasn't one to let slip past. The bare-boat charter is very reasonable; plane fares were slightly gasp-inducing but I was able to get my breathing back under control fairly quickly (looking at some maps of the area helped) and with both bosses agreeing to my vacation request on Friday...wow.

It looks like I'm going sailing in Estonia!

The Most Expensive Trip To Worst Marine I've Ever Made.

I walked into the 37th street store last Thursday night planning to buy a couple of waterproof charts and 2012 Eldridge tide & pilot books for myself & the students in an ACA Level 1: Intro to Kayaking class that TQ and I taught in January at the Flushing Meadows Aquatic Center.

I walked out with charts, Eldridges, and an invitation to go sailing in Estonia.

Happy Groundhog Day!

And here's NOAA's forecast for Punxsutawney, PA -
Today: Thursday: Mostly cloudy, with a high near 39. North wind between 3 and 10 mph, with gusts as high as 20 mph%.

Looking pretty good for an early Spring (although maybe not quite as good as yesterday when I first posted this thinking that Groundhog Day was the first day of february and the Punxsutawney forecast was for cloudy drizzle - still feels springy out there, though).

The groundhog posed for a picture on the banks of the French Broad River near Asheville, NC during a trip TQ and I took down there a few years ago. The French broad wasn't around the day we were there.

Note added later: Oh, Phil, you stupid, stupid rodent. 6 more weeks of winter, you say? Well, maybe we'll get through it better with some good, hot, home-cooked meals. Capisce?

Dancing Girls and Beauty Queens

One of my most favorite things about the Chinese New Year Parade - dancing, drumming, float-riding grandmas! Aren't they beautiful?

Click on the picture for a slideshow view.