Author: Paul

If I was going to open a business and my name was Dick Ide I would probably change it but he is the number one Honda dealership in Rochester. I had a Harry Ball on my paper route. I wonder what happened to him? Is it just me or does the heat sap your meager allotment of creativity?

We devoted a week’s worth of time and energy to ridding our backyard of wisteria. I posted a picture about ten days back of the mother plant. It had wrapped around an oak tree and grown to the top of it where blossomed each Spring, so high up we couldn’t even appreciate it. And then it would grow those big brown seed pods that would fall, pop open and sprout new plants all over including our neighbor’s yard. That was the real motivator here. The plant is invasive and it had invaded his yard.

We cut the towering plant at the base and then started tearing out the runners (shown above) which were thirty feet long in some cases. They would send down roots every sixteen inches or so and maybe very other time they would send up more shoots as well so they were really tough to pull out of the ground. We are sore all over.

I spent quite a bit of time at Strong Memorial Hospital recently while my father was having an operation. I don’t have a cell phone so I rely on wifi for keeping in touch and they have a free wifi conection there, just the way it should be everywhere. The hospital is huge and the buildings have just been piled on top of one another over the years so you follow color coded signs to get around. They are Rochester’s largest employer now have their own mini-city infrastructure just the way Kodak Park used to.

In the waiting room I sat next to a handicapped person who held his iPhone right up to one of his eyes so he could read it. I mean his eye was pressed against the retina display. He was using Siri to dictate emails to relatives so I heard commands like, “Thank you very much for kind thoughts period.” and “Have a great day exclamation point.”

I used to think wisteria was beautiful, the bubblegum sweet purple flowers that used to burst open near Memorial Day but pop a few weeks earlier now, but not any more. I’m done with it. Our house came with this mother of all wisteria plants climbing up a giant oak tree out back. It appeared to be strangling the tree but it still has green leaves. The real problem is we have hundreds of other baby wisteria plants all over our property and I suspect they are all connected to this mother plant. I started with a hand saw and then got out the chainsaw to finish it off.

I like popping the SDHC card out of my camera. It’s spring loaded and it sometimes flies across the room. I shoot pictures reflexively and I’m often surprised by what’s on my memory card but this one blew me away. It’s a bad photo, a flash shot at dusk and it is out of focus, but it looks like a found photo. The kids’ hair style, their clothes, the instruments, the colors, the setting all look mid-century. It looks like one of those square format pictures from Kodak’s first plastic cameras. I had one of those and this looks like one of my old shots but this was taken last night on East Avenue. To top it off the kids were doing a Miles tune, “Four,” from the fifties.

We staggered our spinach crops but it is all going to town now. It does better in the early Spring and the heat is too much for it so it is all going to seed. We’ve been eating spinach every day for the last month. Had it for breakfast a few days ago. I picked a Wegmans bag full tonight and Peggi made an Indian dish. Cooked the whole bag down to two servings. I rinsed it in the kitchen sink and while the water was running I thought I’d run down in the basement and clean our cat’s dirt box. I must have forgotten to do it yesterday because it was a mess. When the water started coming through the ceiling into the dirt box I remembered I had left it running upstairs.

How long ago was 2001? It feels like the dark ages in digital time. The internet used to be more fun and it held out the promise of even more fun. Maybe it’s just me that has changed. I can always snap out of it.

I came across this link to a digital installation that I did for a Pyramid Art show back in 2001. I had a Mac on a table running Internet Explorer in full screen mode and this series of pages went round and round. It sort of bothered me at the time because the piece had nothing to do with the confines of the gallery and could just as easily have been viewed in the comfort of one’s home. This was the virtual age and the computer just looked clunky sitting there. The last thing you want to do in a gallery is get on a computer.

There’s no Flash involved or anything but I remember struggling to get the various movements to work across platforms. The Pyramid and the show are long gone but this piece is still out the floating around. I’m afraid to look at the code but it still seems to work.