Author: Paul

One of our neighbors made a pact with his daughter to get in the street pool every day until we we close it. It was easy the last few days with the temperatures in the nineties but it only got to sixty today. The water temperature is 73 so it probably feels warm by comparison. I’m living vicariously.

I really like this Mediterranean Shipping Container logo. Ideally the “sc” would be floating on top of the “m” but I’m happy the international committee approved it.

The industrial lot behind Jerome’s on Atlantic Avenue is a pretty interesting place. I hung out there while Mike inspected our car. I grew up a few blocks away and used to walk to Elite Bakery, which was right next door, with my mom. And then in the eighties we recorded a few Personal Effects records with Dwight Glodell in the building that sits right in front of Jeromes. Used to be called “PCI” which stood for some kind of chemical. The place is is full of memories and dreamy junk (see blow-up).

Listen to Margaret Explosion – “In Walks Jack” from “Live at the Little Theater Café”

My mom has been unleashing a flood of memories from her youth, some stories we’ve heard before but many surprises. My father, who is the webmaster of the family tree was talking about some new information he had dug up on Paul Dodd, his father’s brother. Paul was professional baseball player before Rochester had a professional team. That is he would play for money and even took ads out in the paper challenging other teams to a game with a purse attached. He was also a bootlegger, as was my grandfather, so when my father started courting my mom her father (my maternal grandfather) told her she should “stay away from the Dodd’s.” Of course, at some point kids stop listening to their parents and move on with their life.

Even with just a few plants zucchini comes in so fast it is impossible to keep up with and of course all your friends are overloaded with the stuff at the same time so you can’t give it away. If you just let them lay there they’ll get bigger and tougher and full of seeds. We piled ours up in a corner of the garden and I was thinking of offering them to the military to drop on Syria.

I just love it when summer slows down and time seems to stand still.

Our neighbors suggested a baseball game and we couldn’t think of a good reason to not take them up on it so the four of us bought tickets on the first base side and prepared for action. The Wings scored five runs in the first inning. Rick and Monica were still downstairs buying beer. And then the game pretty much settled down. They have so many distractions, “Kiss Cams” and “Gangnam Style Cams,” life size bobble heads, idiotic games, crazy snippets of Gary Glitter or Queen songs and patriotic salutes between each half inning that it is next to impossible to get in the groove of the old fashioned game. Top of the ninth was a big one for the Syracuse Chiefs and Rochester almost lost it.

Ads everywhere, every activity is backed by a sponsor. Foul balls cued a glass break sound effect and an ad for a glass company. The scoreboard was brought to us by Baldness.com.

Well, we were planning to be at today’s Durand Eastman stop of Joe+N’s day tour but we “checked back regularly” just as the website suggested and the the tour stop disappeared.

I spent a good bit of yesterday thinking about the Georgia O’Keeffe show of Lake George Paintings that we missed in Glens Falls. Jeff and Mary Kaye drove there and invited us go along but we had a heating contractor here and had to pass. Had it been an ordinary heating contractor we would have rescheduled but this is hydronics specialist, Wayne Heid, the best in the business, taming the wild copper piping that roams through our house.

The organically shaped hillside behind our house is pretty fluid when you just let it go. The trees get pretty big in sixty years and the vegetation that grows under them just swallows up old stone fences and borders and patios. We dug up all this old Medina stone, borrowed our neighbor’s six foot level and spent the last week building a patio out back.

I don’t usually use my flash. I generally hate the way it looks but it has been getting dark so early lately I needed it to document the backyard patio we’ve been working on for the last week or so. I’m getting pretty obsessed with the project and worked til dark tonight. Peggi had to take a break because she caught her finger between two rocks and it has turned blue. Don Hershey, the architect who designed our house, was a big fan of Medina Stone and used it on the front of his house on South Landing Road.