Author: Paul

The circus is in town! They’ve set up their tents on an empty lot near the port of Barcelona. They’re here for the month of January. Attendance should be mandatory but we’re way too busy and there is the issue of animal abuse. It’s a complicated world.

If someone wheeled a sound system on to one of the streets in downtown Rochester and sang arias in Italian at the top of his lungs he would probably be arrested. The guy in the trench coat above held this crowd of passersby captive and had a woman kissing him on the cheek and whispering in his ear as we strolled by.

We live in Rochester for reasons that are not entirely cultural. They are perfectly valid reasons and as varied as we are. We like a small city with easy access to the countryside and weather of all extremes. Opera on the street is not on the menu.

Indoor horse shoe courts are grown man’s fantasy. We stopped at a gas station on the way up to Pete and Shelley’s in the Adirondacks a few years ago and we asked to use the bathroom. They told us to go through a building out back and use the bathroom there. It was this amazing site. I think about this at this time of year when we put our horseshoes away. We don’t live in Floyd, New York so I can only dream about what color to paint the shoes this winter.

Xmas card 2007 reprise

We drove out to Eastview Mall for Lord & Taylors “Friends & Family Sale”, whatever that means, with our email coupon. We did the same thing last year, the last time we were here, and we ran into the same two people that we ran into last year, a married woman and her male “friend”. Peggi bought some jeans and I couldn’t find anything. I have better luck at Sears or the Salvation Army’s Thrift Store.

We drove home through Pittsford and then Brighton instead of hopping on the damn expressway and we took a few detours to look at the lights. This house on Knollwood Drive right near Oak Hill Country Club, home of the 1989 US Open, had these life size,”life size” is not right, human sale snowmen, “snowmen” is not right, snow people. One for each member of the happy extended family (click the photo to see the whole thing). Or maybe the whole clan lived here. The house was gigantic.

Trees are so theatrical! And much more so when they’ve lost their leaves. Their exaggerated gestures tell you which way the wind the blows, where the light is, who’s the toughest, how the ground rolls. And I just love this reduced palette of browns and grays.

We have a leaner out back, a widow maker. It’s very big but it’s dead. It’s bark is pealing, the woodpeckers have had at it but it’s oak and worth burning. We were planning on taking it down yesterday so we stopped down at our neighbors for some practical advise before we tried this one. He looked at it for a while and suggested we wait until it falls over or the wind blows it down. He thought it was too dangerous to work under and he was quite certain we would cut it at the base and pull it away with a rope tied to the trailer hitch on our car only to have it slide off the trunk and still be hung up. He’s a lot more practical the us but not as much fun. I’ve been thinking about ways of throwing a rope around the top of the tree somehow and then pull it until the tree breaks below where it’s hung up and then maybe the trunk would just fall over like was going to do when it got hung up. We’re going to sit on this one for a bit.

We often smell deer before we see them and sometimes we’ll hear them before we spot them but usually we just catch a glimpse of them “hightailing” it. They stick their tail in the air and puff it out while prancing away. They know we’re not hunters and that there is no hunting around here so some of them are pretty cocky. This guy stomped his leg at us.