I’ve created a new blog to document our year in NYC. It is located here.
November 6, 2007
An uneventful day. We had brunch at Cafe con Leche where we had delicious Dominican fried chicken, rice and beans, fried plantains, arroz con pollo and of course, cafe con leche. It was a nice, comforting end to our 6 days in NYC and a reminder that while certain things in NYC are expensive, eating well doesn’t have to be one of them. The whole meal came to like $17.
It was also a reminder of why we were going to NYC. To eat. To me, everything else is secondary. Yes, I’m looking forward to all the other things the city will provide, but most of my excitement comes from the idea of eating authentic and delicious food within blocks of our place.
BTW – If you ever get stuck in Denver airport, check out Pour la France in B concourse. It’s my favorite airport restaurant, which granted, isn’t saying much, and you can’t go wrong there. It ended up ruining an appetite we were saving up for Shiro’s.
November 6, 2007
One thing about selling complex software is that it tends to make you very verbose. Nothing makes sense unless you explain the past, the present and the future.
Everything is a setup.
You spend so much time in the setup that by the time you get to the point, the audience is no longer interested.
I think that is where my blog writing has gone. In an effort to get out the details, I’m missing the point.
And onto the story of day 5
I’d like to tell you that I had a great time getting up at 6am, walking 20 blocks to meet a pack of strangers for bagels in a strange apartment, making small talk for half an hour and slowly making our way into Central Park to watch the Olympic Marathon Trials.
I’d like to tell you that but I’d be lying.
In fact, I was tired. Exhausted even after 3 days of 12 hour apartment hunting with some work thrown in. I mean, I’m glad we saw the trials. It is a decent story, but oh man I really wanted to sleep and except for a few moments at the end of the race, nothing changed my mind about that. Even the cute Asian women among the strangers we met.
After all that and a nap, I went to the broker to finish this apartment deal off. Maybe it was my exhaustion or maybe it was my ego but I quickly grew annoyed with the whole process of ‘qualifying’ for an apartment. Look, we own two properties in Seattle and have never missed a payment on anything in probably 10 years. Our credit scores are both over 700. I’m putting down first, last and another whole month of rent down up front. WTF is the problem?
But just like in every other business, they have a process they follow and they don’t deviate. They aren’t allowed to think for themselves. They just align dots on a page. Somehow landlords in NY have taken a huge upper hand in the rental market and because of that, they can require all sorts of ridiculousness and because of our schedule I just sucked it up and finished it off.
In the end, the landlord is actually fairly nice and we got the place and it all worked out but I can tell you that this whole process wouldn’t fly anywhere else in the country.
November 5, 2007
We decided to call a broker and by noon we were in their office going through apartment listings. After an hour or so, we were in a cab with one of the brokers and on our way to NYU, or at least the neighborhood around there: Soho. The one apartment we saw there wasn’t bad, but looked exactly like something i lived in during college.
We headed up to the UWS afterwards and saw a couple places there (did I mention we were being totally schizophrenic about where we should live?), but none were as nice as the place we saw the day before. After a slightly awkward lunch with our broker, we headed back to see another broker in the LES.
We saw four places in the LES and they were all worth decent enough to live in. Each one was better than the last and after seeing the last one, we knew we wanted it.
And then we learned of the problem. it wouldn’t be available until Dec 1. UGH. Can we wait until Dec 1? We had flights booked for the 12th. Where would we live? should we just take the place on the UWS? It was still available and so was the studio on rivington.
But it was 6pm now and there was nothing we could do now. We would contemplate that night.
We met some friends originally from Seattle at Bua, a very cool little English-type bar with exposed brick walls and a menu consisting of pulled pork sliders and 4 different grilled cheese sandwiches in EV where we had a few beers before stopping at an incredibly mediocre Indian place called Calcutta. it was some of the blandest Indian food I’d had in a long time. Somewhere during this time, we convinced ourselves that we’d rather live in a smaller place in the EV than a nice big and pretty place on the UWS. Not because the UWS is bad, but because it was just generally similar to living in Seattle. If we wanted to do the NY thing, we should do it all-in and go LES.
November 5, 2007
Day three was considerably better than day two. We actually saw apartments that weren’t total slums! We must’ve walked another 10 miles on Thursday but at least the the apartments were mostly better, despite seeing several apartments missing kitchens and plumbing and sometimes even walls and being expected to “imagine” what they would be like and “would i like to take one?”
Aside from that, we checked out a very nice and large apartment on the Upper West Side within half a block on central park. It was veryu cut, but after walking through the UWS, we decided that we wanted to be some place a little dirtier and with more nightlife.
On the Lower East Side / East Village, we did see a few that would be OK including a studio on Rivington with an alcov bedroom and a 1 bdrm on 11th and Avenue A. We listed these as fall backs and seriously considered just taking them, but K talked me into at least trying out a broker. OK. We can try. We called the lady with the UWS apartment and told her that we would not be taking her apartment.
That night we headed down to LES for dinner at Kuma Inn with our friend Seno, stopping on the way at a wine store (that’s going to take some getting used to) to pick up a bottle of chardonnay as Kuma Inn is BYOB. The Japanese tapas were mediocre to great (especially the tofu and chinese sausage), but nothing amazing. Afterwards, we grabbed a couple beers at a local bar before heading home. If the day was stressful adn exhausting, at least the evenings were full of good food and relaxation.
November 3, 2007
Day 2 is very easy to sum up: It sucked!
I made a nice list of places to check out in the LES and EV and booked a few appointments for this Tuesday. We started off on Delancey, which is just a big, nasty street in downtown. We show up to the apt, call the super and he brings up to the 3rd floor of a nasty building to show us a 2bdrm for $2600/month. The building smelled like rotting flesh and the unit itself looked like it had been empty for months. It was dusty, dirty and all around nasty (my fav word today). Moving on.
We walked through the gritter part of LES and made our way to another unit where the super didn’t answer the phone. Off to unit 3 and we have an appointment with something of a broker. We see the unit and it is clean, in a nice building, but incredibly small. Too small and everything is old. All for the bargin price of $2500/month. Good times. Things not looking good.
Over the next 5 hours we looked at several more god awful, nasty buildings and units (anything by Jakobson properties is going to be nasty) and I attended two business meetings in mid-town, shuttling back and forth for each one. The only positive thing that happened on Wednesday was our lunch at The Shake Shack. Even Kelly enjoyed her shake burger and was asking for more the next day.
By the end of the day we were beat and depressed. Rent Direct (which is the listing service where we got our rental infomatio) seemed like a truly worthless service, but after a little rest we hit up craigslist and noticed a few nice places appear in the LES in our budget. With a little bit of restrained enthusiasm, we headed off to a nice dinner at Vice Versa in mid-town and caught a little of the NY Halloween sights. I only wish we’d have had energy to go see the parade in the village.
November 2, 2007
We arrived on Tuesday night at about 6:30pm, having took the United flight through Chicago and arriving in La Guardia, which is the generally the closest airport to Manhattan. We had decided several weeks ago that we didn’t want to ship anything to the city so we packed up 3 full-size boxes with our stuff. The boxes, hovering at the airline 50lb weight limit, arrived quickly at baggage claim looking like they had crossed the ocean. They were severely beat up and each one had been opened by TSA. We took those, along with a full-sized piece of luggage and two large carry-on bags and grabbed a taxi to meet our friend Seno at his apartment on the upper west side.
Seno is nice enough to let us store our luggage there for a couple weeks while we try and find a place to move into. My work is nice enough to put us up into a hotel while we’re here during the week as I have managed to fit in a few meetings into my travels. On friday, we’ll check out and move into Seno’s for a few days and then return to Seattle on Sunday. A week later we’ll come back to NYC with some more things to officially begin our time here. It’s all excitement, nervousness, and a bit of scaredness as we get into the city.
We had dinner at ‘the eatery’ located on 9th and 53rd. Seno used to be K’s boss so they talked about old times and the newest MS gossip, of which there is much. Afterwards, we headed up the street to grab a beer at a local bar (I don’t remember the name) and saw a bit of the opening day of the NBA season. To be honest, I don’t care for the NBA at all. Somehow they score every 20 seconds and to me it is still boring. Of course, it is the one sport K actually likes. Go figure.
Tomorrow is a mix of business meetings and apartment hunting. Poor sleep comes quickly.
November 2, 2007
It’s 4:30 am and I can’t sleep. The half-bottle of wine I drank at dinner caught up to me at about 3:30. Combined with the stress of finding an apartment in the city, figuring out what neighborhood to live in, an uncomfortable hotel room and of course, still working has prevented me from getting a normal night’s sleep.
We arrived on Tuesday night, just over 56 hours ago and since then we’ve seen too many crappy places to coun, along with a few decent/cute ones. The place we’re thinking about seriously renting is on par with my college dorm room, though it does have a separate sleeping space, a full kitchen, and even a washer/dryer unit; which is basically unheard of in the city. To be honest, I was looking forward to sending my laundry out but I guess this would save us money.
Because I can’t sleep, I think I will recap our days here.
October 12, 2007
2 hours. 120 minutes. 7200 seconds.
My dad was a jogger when I was a kid. Almost every morning the man would wake up and run 3 miles around whatever neighborhood we happened to live in. I think it came with being in the Army. They always jog in the Army. March, jog, whatever. I remember a few periods in my childhood where I would run with him, but they were never long spurts. A month or two, here or there, but jogging was never something I had a lot of fun doing. I preferred running when it involved a little white and black speckled ball and placing said ball in a net. All kids are ADD and I probably more so than most.
Fast forward 15 years and jogging is now something I enjoy doing. I ran before I met K, but her constant, train-like dedication to her marathon goals made me take it a bit more seriously. She kept me on track to run those longer distances and because of that I now always take my jogging gear with me on my trips. I don’t run every morning, but I run maybe every-other morning. I really enjoy running around cities that I don’t know very well and I have great memories of running through Central Park in NY, through The Botanical Gardens and up to the Opera House in Sydney, and along the Thames and in Hyde Park in London. If while visiting a city you feel like a tourist, just wake up in the morning and go for a run. You’ll pass by the other tourists with their cameras and feel like the city is yours in some small way.
After watching K run two marathons and several other races, she talked me into doing a half-marathon. I honestly did not have any desire to run a marathon except to get that sense of pride one must get after finishing. I know what it feels like to spend all day or two climbing a mountain and the feeling that comes when you FINALLY, after slogging for hours and hours and eating crappy food and being so cold that your fingers hurt when you put your frozen boots on in the morning, when FINALLY you get to the top. Everything that took to get there goes away when you look out over the rest of the mountain range and realize that you’re looking at such a beautiful view that so many others will never get to see.
And you WORKED for that view. It means so much more internally when you had to WORK to get there. Yea, you can drive up to Hurricane Ridge and see the Olympics up close, but when you hike and climb for 3 days to get to the top of Mt Olympus, the view is that much more breathtaking. The feeling of accomplishment that comes with the summit is something that can’t be replicated. And you feel great, until you realize it is a two day hike out… 🙂
But back to jogging. I decided to do this half back in Feb or March. We were going to run the Vancouver half in May. Plenty of time to get ready. We followed the Runner’s World guide to training for intermediates as I felt like I could run 6 miles without a problem. We only needed to double that. This went fine until sometime in March. We ran 9 or 10 miles one day and then my dad came up from AZ and we went skiing/riding for a few days at Baker. The next weekend, I went for a 4 mile run with Kelly and 1.5 miles in, my knee started to tighten. A lot. By 2 miles in I had to start walking and trying to stretch my knee. I couldn’t finish. WTF?
I stayed off it for a few days, did some more snowboarding (which felt fine) and then tried to run again on a trip. I could barely do two miles. I finally went to the doc and he confirmed what my physical therapist sister had already told me. I had strained my Patella tendon. I felt old. This was my first ever, real sports injury.
No half for me. No fix. Stay off the knee for a few weeks and then start at back at 1/2 mile runs and then increase by 10% each week. TEN PERCENT. I could use the elliptical in the meantime, thankfully.
So I started back at .5 mile runs, three times a week supplemented by 30-45 minutes on the elliptical. The next week I did .6 miles and after a few weeks I was up to a mile and a few weeks later 1.5. By the time I went to Australia I was up to 2 miles. I felt good. I was running a bit faster than I had before. In Sydney, the route I like to take to the Opera House was about 3 miles, but I would walk to the last mile the first few times. On the last day, I decided to just do a one-time jump to 3 miles (50%, or 40% more than the dr said I should).
I came home to a sore knee and was nervous that I had gone back to square one. but a few days off the knee and a short 2.5 mile run and I was back to 3 without any problems. From there I slowly went to 4 and then because I was running out of time to train for the Victoria half, started following the Runner’s World schedule again. 6 one weekend, 8 the next, then 9, then 11 and then the half.
What is interesting is that some times I would feel pain in a knee but I had actually forgotten which knee had problems. I think it was all psychological. I did half pain in my ankle after the 11 mile run in Phoenix, but this would turn out to be nothing to prevent me from running.
After the 11 mile run, I was totally lazy. I ran twice the week after, a 6 mile run that weekend and then only once the week before the half in London, a short 3 miler through Hyde Park. And I drank and ate A LOT. And slept badly. One night, only getting 3.5 hours of sleep.
On Friday, I flew home in the afternoon, getting in at 9pm in Seattle. We had to pack to catch the 7am ferry to Victoria the next morning. The next day we walked around Victoria, took a nap, grabbed a few beers with a friend and ate a nice meal at Cafe Brio including wine and a mixed drink (though only one of each).
The race started at 7:30 am and as soon as I started running I knew it was going to suck. My legs felt like the wine beer I had drank the night before had turned to cement. Everything was stiff. I felt heavy.
When K and I run together, we’re pretty consistent 10 minute milers, but because my legs are longer, I naturally have a longer stride than her and I felt that I could run a slightly faster pace than her without any more effort. After a mile or so, she told me to leave her if I wanted to run faster. My body did not WANT to run faster, but I felt I could push myself. I left K and started off on my own.
I read other’s reports of running and they say this mile felt good, this mile bad, this one horrible. I can say that no a single mile felt good. They ranged from hard to horrible. It felt so strange because I felt good running the 11 miles two weeks before. It all sucked, but I pushed on. I wanted to finish this thing in 2 hours. Who knows when I’ll run something this long again. Might as well accomplish my goal and never have to do it again.
Despite my legs being so heavy, the rest of my body was OK. I didn’t feel sick or anything. I wasn’t used to running any hills and even the little ones in Victoria were tough for me. I wanted to walk so many times .But despite all that, I did feel like I was running a pretty good pace. At mile 6 there was a water stand. I grabbed a water cup from the table and realized it was empty. So I tried to pivot on my left foot so I could reach for another, full cup and it just gave way. The wet road came rushing up to meet my hip and hand.
I quickly got up, almost yelled at the volunteers for ‘tricking’ me with that empty cup and started running again. Now my hip and ankle hurt from landing on them. The first thought that crossed my mind was that now I had an excuse to walk. I thought about this for awhile and the pain started to go away. My excuse was fading.
The race went on and on it seemed, especially because everything was in kilometers I had no idea how much longer we had. I kept trying to do the km to miles conversion in my head. “OK. if 10kms is 6.4 miles and I’m at km marker 14, it means I’ve got 4 miles left.” etc. I didn’t really know how much I had left until there was a clear marker saying 4kms left.
The last third does suck more than the first two thirds, but I felt if I just kept running, I’d turn the corner to see the clock reading like 1:50:00 or something. I didn’t have a watch and had no idea how fast I was going or how long I’d taken but I knew K ran just over a 2:00:00 half and I had to be way ahead of her.
I turned that last corner and my heart sank. The clock at the finish read 2:02:45 or something like that (I don’t remember the seconds). The only hope I had was that we didn’t cross the start line until a little bit after that clock started, but honestly I KNEW I was screwed. I ran hard anyway. When I passed the clock it was somewhere near 2:03:50. I was beat. I was REALLY beat. I felt awful, not unlike the first time I ran a 10k. AWFUL.
I turned to look for K and she came up just a minute behind me. WTF? Wasn’t I running so much faster than her? I wasn’t. She was right there. I could’ve run with her the whole time and would’ve had someone to talk to, instead of just listening to my ipod the whole time.
Incidentally, K felt fine after the run. It was all just a walk in the park for her. She was laughing and chatting and wanting to pose for pictures while I was desperately looking for food and gatorade in an attempt to replace all the goodness that had left my body over the last two hours. I could barely stand as my legs were so tired and it seemed like K could just skip away. This is the difference between properly training, I suppose.
In the end, my time was 2:01:08. If only I’d been able to shave 6 seconds off my mile time, I would’ve accomplished my goal. In hindsight though, I did manage to cut my avg time down by 30 seconds a mile and maintain that for longer than I have ever run. I feel good about that, but still, I want to beat that 2:00:00. Maybe next year.
October 9, 2007
It just sort of happened. Kelly and I will be moving to New York in November. We plan to stay in Manhattan and want as many to people to visit as possible. You’ll just have to stay in what will most definitely be a tiny apartment! We’ll be giving up at least 1/2 of our square footage for what we see is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to live in the biggest US city and eat some of the best food in the world. The food really is one of the determining factor here. We have great restaurants in Seattle but NY, well, that’s at a whole other level. We’re very excited to go and we’ve even found a couple of Microsofties to rent out our Seattle condo.
Exact date for the move isn’t yet determined as there are a number of factors going into that decision as well as work timing. No, I’m not leaving my job. I’m relocating. Most of our customers and potential customers are in NY and we’re doing more and more business in Europe. Being in NY gives me better access to all of that.
We’re not leaving Seattle forever either. We love Seattle and we’ll be back at some point.
More info to come. We hope that many of you will take us up on our offer to stay in NY…for free!
3am eternal 