I just love it when summer slows down and time seems to stand still.
Leave a commentDog Days
Baseball Mash-Up
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.
Leave a commentEarth Art
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.
Leave a commentBuilding Local
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.
1 CommentDislodging
Marion Winik described our friends, Pete and Shelley, as the perfect house guests. Amazing company and an exceptionally light footprint. Over coffee this morning Steve Black outdid Pete and Shelley by suggesting that we do a project. We picked one from our ever shrinking summer job list and spent the afternoon between showers setting patio stones in concrete. Our favorite First Friday stop was Axom Gallery’s show of Gareth Fitzgerald Barry’s sculpture. We finished the night with a small screen showing of “The Source Family.” Everything you imagined a commune to be, sort of interesting but not worth linking to.
I’ve got to thank Rick Simpson for dislodging you know what from my brain ears when he played Lee Michaels’ “You Know What I Mean” on his Gumbo Variations radio show.
1 CommentUs Vs. Garden
We had our first tomato sandwiches today. First with tomatoes from the garden that is. Jalepenos are coming in at a nice pace, the spinach and cilantro are done. Eggplant a ways off. And we have given up trying to keep up with the zucchini. It got the best of us.
Leave a commentBald Spot
We drove out El Rincon in Sodus but they were closed. The website said they were open on Tuesdays but the place was dark and we were starved by the time we got there. Opened by the wife of what they used to call a migrant worker this place in the middle of miles of fruit orchards on the southern shore of Lake Ontario still has the best Mexican food around. Muy Tipico! The ride back did give me the opportunity to photograph this dreamy sign.
Speaking of dreams I awoke from one last night and scratched my head. I thought I felt what I imagined to be a deer tick, all bloated and engorged in my scalp. I didn’t want to wake Peggi so I put a piece of masking tape on the spot so that I would remember to have her take a look at it in the morning. Turned out to be just another mosquito bite but I couldn’t get the masking tape out of my hair so I left it in there. I had to take the car into Jeromes for new brakes and Mike, the mechanic, was showing me the corrosion on the parts he was going to have to remove when he interrupted his presentation to tell me I had a piece of tape in my hair. I told him I knew that but I was having a hard time getting it out. I tried swimming but that didn’t seem to loosen it so I just took a pair of scissors to it.
1 CommentSunburst Yellow
People often comment on my bike saying things like, “Wow, that’s an old one.” Actually it’s not all that old and all sorts of retro bikes are back on the street. What these people might mean is that this thing has been through the ringer. It’s a fat tire, one speed, back pedal brake, city cruiser but I put a sprocket with less teeth than the standard issue on the back wheel so the bike is in like sixth or seventh gear on a ten speed.
I used to ride to work downtown in rain, snow or shine to work. Use to pass Arthur Shawcross on his bike as he was headed to work at G&G Foods on East Main. The bike had a fair amount of rust on it and it was hard to tell what color it was. So I took a wire brush to it and Peggi buffed the rims with some steel wool. Today I painted the frame Rust-oleum Sunburst Yellow. I’m thinking safety after what happened to our friend.
Last time I painted a bike was back in Bloomington where I went to school for a few semesters. I used some brown, lead-based paint that we bought at the dollar store on Kirkwood. I was living in a trailer and mowing lawns for the University. My boss smoked Lucky Strikes and had mouth cancer. His jaw was deformed and he had open sores on his lips. First time I ever saw what cancer looks like.
1 Comment
Greentopia
A thunderstorm passed while we were eating dinner on the porch. It never rained here but it couldn’t have been more than a mile a way. That makes it one of the few days this summer that it hash’t rained. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying it’s green around here. Our tomato plants need more that one stake to keep them out of the mud.
We stopped in to Abilene over the weekend to hear JD McPherson. The Goner’s bass player, Brian Williams, recommended them saying “they are really well thought out,” the exact opposite of Margaret Explosion. They did sound good but the place was too crowded to get a glimpse. It was great to hear sax and piano featured in a timeless R&R setting.
Leave a commentLiving In The Cloud
I’ve always kept scrapbooks. Who doesn’t? And I have a whole shelf full of them that won’t make any sense to anyone when I’m gone. They make sense to me and I’m still here so I put one online. Eventually I will have all my photos on Flickr, my movies on YouTube, my sign collection on Tumblr and my scrapbooks on Issuu. What am I forgetting?
4 CommentsSlow Cook
I feel exactly like this turtle. I want the summer to slow down. Today is the longest day of the year and this is as good as it gets.
Leave a commentBlue Laws
The vegetation is about as green it gets, pea soup green, and it’s not even officially summer but we noticed a few limbs on some of the big trees near our house are still not green. They’re dead so it’s time for a visit from Bruce O’Neil, the tree surgeon. He told me he usually does his estimates on Saturday but this one is his birthday, 65, so he’s stopping by on Sunday morning. We normally would be sitting on the porch in our pjs reading the Times but I plan to be dressed like a lumberjack when he gets here.
Leave a commentJunkers & Junkies
I hadn’t seen our old neighbor in a few months so I gave him a call and suggested we go over to Krieger’s with some scrap metal that I had piled up near our garage. It was all stuff that we took out of our basement when we remodeled last year, an old fireplace grate, the chain-like curtain that went with the fireplace, the metal framework for the drop ceiling, two old cast iron music stands, some leftover conduit and a chunk of wire mesh left from the concrete pour. I was thinking twenty-five bucks at least but I just wanted to get rid of it and most of all I knew how much Sparky like going to Krieger’s.
We still call it Krieger’s even though Metalico has cornered every bit of the junk business around here. They’re located right by the tracks at the very beginning of Portland Avenue in downtown Rochester and the characters who work here are every bit as colorful as the assortment of junkers and junkies that patronize this place. Sparky though is more colorful than them all.
I looked straight in the camera at the cashier counter and received a paper receipt for $10.00 after Metalico’s “Rounding Adjustment” of -$.42. The cashiers handle no cash. The receipt has a bar code on it and you go outside to an open air money machine where you scan the sheet and “Take Cash Quickly.”
Leave a commentJob Jar
If you don’t find me here this summer I’ll probably be chipping away at the job list. We want to reset some patio stones that are stacked up in the back yard and I have bunch small pile of concrete blocks back there left over from last summer’s project and people keep telling me I should build a BBQ grill out them so I’m thinking.
And then I want to fix the drawers under our bed and we want to wash the outside of our windows while its warm. We’ve been talking about extending our so called forever wild plot, a small portion of our lot with a green fence around it to keep the deer out. And it’s time to paint our metal chairs and while I’m at that I could paint the horseshoes with the same Rustoleum colors. It’s getting hard to tell them apart.
1 CommentGo To Guy
Kind of funny that someone would ask the drummer what the time signature was of a song we did last night. Like I would have a clue.
We walk in the woods most days and aren’t very diligent about checking for ticks although we should be. I had one that Peggi picked off last year and yesterday Peggi found one on her arm. Peggi took our tick tweezers down to Jared’s house and he identified it as a nymph deer tick. He pulled it out by the head and we put it in a little bag to bring to Peggi’s doctor today.
We are really lucky to have a neighbor like Jared. His chemical engineering skills coupled with a farmer’s background make him a real “go to” source. How many guys do you know who could point to a spot on the ground behind the street pool property and then drop a tree in slow motion on the spot?
Leave a commentHorchata Cocktail
Monica stopped by early in the morning. I hadn’t even finished my first cup of coffee. She sat down and we chatted for awhile while Peggi attended to last minute details. We discussed the options for the quickest route downtown. There’s been all this traffic on Culver because of the construction on 104 so we decided to take 104 to Clinton. We got off the expressway at Clinton and the bridge was closed so got back on, went over the river and down Lake Avenue. It was jammed so Monica went back across the river and up Saint Paul, past the brewery to the train station. We were ten minutes late for the train to NYC and kind of upset at ourselves for not leaving earlier. But as luck would have the train was ten minutes late and still in the station.
We had tickets to the city but decided to get off in Tarrytown since that was going to be our destination for dinner anyway. We hung around the cute little town four hours, most of the time in a coffee shop, and then took a taxi up into the hills where “Blue Hill at Stone Barn” was located. Our nephew had graduated from Columbia Law School earlier in the day and his brother, a sous chef at NoMad, picked this spot. We started with a few rounds of amuse bouche and a horchata cocktail and then so many small courses I lost count. The birds were singing by the time we had settled in at Duane’s place in Brooklyn.
Leave a commentNo Tomorrow
Before dinner at Jeff and Mary Kaye’s the other night we took a tour of the grounds. Jeff had offered us a redbud tree and we were planning on digging it up ourselves but Jeff already had our tree in a pot. Redbud trees drop seedlings and they are all over their yard. The flowers grow close to the branches in the early Spring and the trees skeletal winter profile becomes outlined in hot pink/red before the leaves come out.
Jeff and Mary Kaye live in the Genesee River valley between the river and the greenway and their soil is as rich as can be. Water in the basement rich. Our little redbud’s were drooping when we got it home but it has bounced back. We’re watering it like there is no tomorrow.
1 CommentDanny Boy
One of my favorite things to do is meeting my parents for dinner at Nick’s Sea Breeze Inn. Nick is always a delight, the food is good, we can usually get a table by the window and look out at the amusement park and the walls are covered with memorabilia. Nick went to high school with Scott LaFaro, the bassist in the Bill Evans Trio so there’s photos of him. Nick worked at club in Geneva, just outside of Rochester. It was on the circuit back in the day so there’s autographed pictures of Duke Ellington and Louie Armstrong and this wacky copy of a Sofia Loren painting.
My mom and I both ordered the manicotti last night and we were talking about the new Wegmans which was having it’s grand opening on Sunday. My dad asked if we wanted to stop in there so we drove up and had to park across the street. The big new parking lot is not big enough! It is pretty amazing that they were able to tear down the old store and half of that city block, build an entirely new store and reopen in three months time. The store looks great, like a European market, with a huge fresh fish department, bakery, and a staggering amount of prepared food from Sushi to macaroni salad. My mom and dad were picking out their Greek yogurt while we watched a toy train circle overhead. Funny, there was a toy train circling overhead at the trendy market cafe we ate at while we were in Barcelona last year.
1 CommentEstate Garage Sale
We were to late to buy figs at the European Cheese Shop last week so made a point to get to the market earlier this week but first Peggi had to go to her yoga class. We stood in line for twenty minutes before scoring two bags. Next mandatory stop is Flour City Bakery where bought their last cranberry oatmeal cookie, a loaf of artisan bread and a giant sticky bun to split in the morning.
It was a beautiful Spring day, perfect for garage sailing, but all I wanted to do was get down to the basement and work on my drawings. We passed this scene on the way downtown and just had to stop on the way back to take a photo, a crazy garage sale featuring this goofy bed, a professional punching bag, a bay carrier and a chrome wheel.
1 CommentSpringtime And A Change In The Weather
So it used to be sort-of-safe to plant your garden around Memorial Day and now it’s closer to Mother’s Day so we waited for it to warm up a bit and then pounced. We planted tomatoes, spinach, eggplant, red peppers, jalapeños, zucchini, parsley, oregano and basil in our neighbor’s garden. He has all the sun and a big fence to keep the deer out. Plus, he’s an expert on everything.
Who the heck booked the Lilac Festival bands? Dreadful. Speaking of dread and warm weather, Kevin Patrick has a perfectly timed reggae post on his site. And the Big O has a James Brown show from ’73.
1 Comment