Category: Dear Diary

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.

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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”

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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?

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