I was Voter #7 this morning. 
Colin out and about in Rittenhouse Square.
April 13, 2012 by ·
Colin is in town for a movie. Joe saw tweets of people in the City spotting him around the Square.
SICKNESS/SICK OF BEING SICK!
April 13, 2012 by ·
I have been sick for the week. We leave on vacation tomorrow. As well as being sick, I have had hardly any sleep.
Hoping to be feeling better tomorrow.
Monday album
April 9, 2012 by ·
I love this album! I fell in love with Lyle Lovett in the late 90′s while listening to XPN. I love his songwriting and his smooth voice. There are some silly songs on this album. That is what especially makes it so phenomenal.
How can you not laugh at a verse “Fat babies have no pride.” ? or “Penguins are so sensitive to my needs.” Just love it!
Listening to NPR
April 6, 2012 by ·
Listening to a conversation about musicians and “speak singing”. Interesting.
Winthorpe and Valentine
March 29, 2011 by ·
I had a chance to pop over to Winthorpe and Valentine for a late lunch the other day. Since my morning meeting ran to 2:30, most of my favorite places around Rittenhouse Square were either closed or in that weird service chasm between lunch and dinner. Trading Places is one of my favorite movies of all time, so I figured any restaurant bold enough to name itself after Louis and Billy Ray is worth a try.
The place is a little hard to find. Enter the hotel via the valet parking entrance on 17th Street, and your only clue to the restaurant’s location is a little sign by the elevator. Take that elevator to the lobby level, and the hotel folks are happy to point you in the right direction. Once you’re inside, the bar looks like the kind of place the Duke Brothers themselves wouldn’t mind spending some time in, if they were still kicking around today. (They’re “back,” you know.) It’s a modernized club lounge, but not too stuffy.
The bar staff took great care of me, despite my weird lunch timing. I shared the bar with a handful of hotel guests, wondering if any locals ever venture upstairs. I chose the Grilled Lancaster County Chicken Sandwich, though I skipped the garlic aioli. It’s actually a panini, but what blew me away was the bacon. I don’t know where they got this bacon, but it took a good sandwich to the next level. It’s stupid good, this bacon, and they used plenty of it. And the fries rivaled the chips I had a few nights earlier at The Dandelion in both taste and texture.
It’s going to be a tough sell to convince friends to meet me inside The Westin for lunch, when the neighborhood’s got so many street level food choices. Still, I can imagine bringing clients here to talk about projects in a more relaxed space than most of Rittenhouse’s lounges. And I may have to swing back soon to see what that bacon does to their Cobb salad.
Westin’s website offers almost no information about Winthorpe and Valentine, so I snapped a quick scan of the lunch menu from the lobby during my visit. Download the Winthorpe and Valentine Lunch Menu from March 2011.
Philly Soft Pretzels
December 20, 2010 by ·
Unlike Wil Wheaton, I never have to apologize to a pretzel for “hating it so much.”
For most of my adult life, breakfast has included a soft pretzel. I think this started during high school, when I would load up at the corner pretzel bakery before my hour-long drive from Darby to Archmere. While working at Penn, my connection point at 30th Street Station meant grabbing a fresh pretzel in between the Regional Rail line and the LUCY shuttle.
When Lori and I first moved back to Philly after spending almost seven years away, I noticed that a whole bunch of Philly Pretzel Factory places had sprouted up all over the place. We noticed them in the suburbs, especially along Germantown Pike. And we spotted them in Center City, too. Having been raised only to trust those pretzels baked and sold around Federal Street, I balked at the idea of a franchise store selling the beloved snack of my youth. Auntie Anne’s had bastardized the soft pretzel into a pastry years before, even to the point of booting the “real” pretzel vendors out of 30th Street Station during my last year of working at Penn.
At a party, I grudgingly tried one. And fell in love.
The thing about old school Philly pretzel bakeries was that they didn’t scale that well. Federal Street was awesome if you could get down there, but they often sold out their daily run to street vendors and convenience stores. Wawa tried to mass produce the pretzel, with varying degrees of success. But the Philly Pretzel Factory just nails it. News reports indicate they launched in Mayfair a little over 10 years ago, and have been growing ever since.
They’ve got real live bakeries all over town, and can handle special orders on short notice. I needed a box of fifty for an impromptu staff meeting. Ten minutes later, they popped out of the oven. Staff meetings just can’t fail if everyone’s got their hands on a warm pretzel. It’s comfort food, and I haven’t had to microwave one since returning to the city.
I’ll justify my occasional morning ritual of a hot pretzel from the Suburban Station kiosk by pointing out that I’ve lost fifteen pounds since moving to Rittenhouse Square. And if it means hitting the treadmill for an extra hour a week, I won’t mind. They’re that good.
Finding a Center City Philadelphia apartment isn’t easy.
November 20, 2010 by ·
You’d think, by now, that we would have this whole apartment hunting thing down to a science.
Turns out, the same kind of information asymmetry that the Freakonomics wrote about in New York happens here in Philadelphia, just on a bigger scale.
Some background: Lori and I have moved (collectively) five times in the past twelve years. Maybe over a dozen in the past twenty. Despite the fact that I write extensively about the mortgage industry, our careers and our wanderlust have kept us out of the real estate market. Turns out, that’s a good thing. When we lived in Florida, we looked at buying a $330,000 townhouse that’s now valued at under $110,000. When we lived in Georgia, we found plenty of affordable homes that would have required me to drive more than ninety minutes each way to work. And Lori got offered a job in Pennsylvania right before we locked in an urban loft in Charlotte, construction of which got cancelled by the recession.
We’ve never been “ready to buy,” to the extent that we don’t want to get frozen into a home we won’t be able to sell in a soft market.
Our initial move back to Philadelphia was pretty fast: just a few weeks from idea to execution. So we turned to Craigslist and mobilized our friends and family. Our hottest lead was a great deal on a rental home near St. Joseph’s University. Easy commute, great neighborhood. It’s just a pity the people we were corresponding with were Nigerian scammers who wanted us to wire them all kinds of money.