OK, we do have time to read the newspaper in the morning so it’s not that bad. We’re painting the ceiling in the kitchen so we’ve been having our coffee out in our newly painted living room. Kinda nice to have the drop cloth out of there. We finished that yesterday but I missed a few spots with the roller. I have bad luck going back in on a ceiling so I’m trying to decide how to get those spots. I don’t want to do the whole thing again just to cover my tracks.
We went to Home Depot twice today. Once to return an extra bag of tile grout, an electric box, an extra jug of tile sealer and an extra bag of ThinSet and then once again to look at laminate for our new floor in the basement. We were there until they made the closing announcement.
We would have set aside some time for skiing if everything wasn’t melting. Our nephew is coming from LA for the weekend and he was hoping to go cross-country skiing but I had to break it to him that the temps are headed into the fifties.
I wonder if the “Lincoln Logs” will make a comeback as a tie-in to Spielberg’s new movie? I used to love those things. Especially liked putting the red wedge shaped chimney on that Adirondack green roof once I had built a structure.
Peggi had to take her sax in to Carl at Shuffle Music today. Where else would you take your horn if you had knocked it off its stand and it had crashed to the concrete floor at the Little Theater Café?. Jazz Fest promotor, Jon Nugent, was just coming out of the shop as we entered. Carl did a few quick adjustments and asked Peggi to play a little bit. He told her she was too timid and should push more from down below.
It was a beautiful day so we drove out to see my brother, Fran, the best mason in this area, “first call” as they say. He’s been telling us about this log cabin he’s working on out in Gananda, a “master planned community” about a half-hour outside of Rochester. Our friends Barbara and Tom lived out here for a while before selling their place and hopping in a camper to travel the country. Fran apparently had just finished the twenty five foot tall fireplace in the living room because the dry-wallers were going at it and he was nowhere to be found.
We’ve got a little project going in the basement that involves moving a concrete block wall. It is surprising how easy it is to bust out a concrete wall. Like a lot of things in life it’s just one small step at a time. We knocked a sledge hammer (or maul) against the first block until the mortar cracked and then we moved on to the next block. The bottom course had some souvenirs in there, bottle caps from beverages consumed when this place was first a construction site, back in the late forties.
I expected to find Genny caps in there but had never seen the “Ale” cap. I used to like Ma’s Root Beer and I sort of remember their “Imitation Cherry Soda” but we called soda “pop” around here and still do as a matter of fact. Interesting they would use the word “Imitation.” Now days they would just call it “Cherry Soda.” The Royal Crown, Squirt and 7up were all national brands. I don’t remember “Cliquot Club Pale Dry” from Rochester’s Qualtop Beverages and I don’t remember “Park Club Beverages” either.
Tractor Supply Company on 104 near Rochester, New York
My father used to have a small waterfall that ran through a rock garden in his backyard. He tore it out years ago and piled up the rocks under a tree in the corner of his yard. We were telling him about our neighbor’s new pond and waterfall and my father asked if he would want some additional rocks. They were nice looking, from Masters down on Empire Boulevard near the bay. Our neighbor said yes and he offered us his truck to transport the rocks.
We were loading them in the truck and my father offered his wheelbarrow. I pulled it out of its spot in the garage and found the tire flat. I could have done without the wheelbarrow but I wanted to help my father repair his wheelbarrow so I put he wheelbarrow in the truck and drove the short distance to Bob Martin’s house to borrow some air. When I hooked up the pump the valve stem broke off the wheelbarrow tire.
So back at my father’s house my father offers a much smaller flat wheel barrel, something my mom would use for light gardening. It didn’t look strong enough for the job but I noticed it was rusting out so there wasn’t much to lose. I put a few rocks in it and pulled it toward the truck. As I rolled across the patio stones in their yard one of the plastic wheels shattered. So two wheelbarrows down.
I found a tube for the tire at Home Depot and a lawnmower wheel that was the right size for the small wheelbarrow for $32 total. But back at my father’s the tube turned out to be the wrong size for the tire and plastic wheel did not fit the axle so I’m headed back to Home Depot today to return my purchases. My brother suggested I go to the wheelbarrow citadel, Tractor Supply, out on 104 in 315 country. They had the right tube but no replacement for the plastic wheel. Grrr.
Ralph Wager photo from RL Thomas yearbook, Webster, NY 1968
After all the paintings and drawings that I’ve done from mugshots it is startling to study one of someone I once knew. My high school soccer coach was arrested a few days ago in South Carolina on sex crimes with a child in the 1980’s. I never could figure out why he left this area, he had built up such a successful soccer program.
I used to play in summer evening pickup games at the old high school and Ralph was one of the players. We did shirts and skins or sometimes brought an additional white t-shirt to discern the sides. Most of the guys were older than me and Ralph was the oldest so he was somewhat of an instructor. He was a finesse player. Light touch, European style, short pass and possession. He wore a beret and drove a Citroen and was hired by the school in my senior year as varsity soccer coach. We went to the sectionals and lost to Gates. I don’t think I ever saw him again. I talked to another teammate and he said, “I would like to believe this isn’t true but I bet it is.”
Ralph had taken some graduate courses at Indiana University and he suggested I go there. IU had a great soccer team and there was talk of a scholarship. I played one year, was the first freshman to start for IU, and then dropped out. I still love the game. We drove to my parents house this afternoon to watch the US Women’s team beat France. Abby scored on a header and on the way home we drove by her family’s place, Wambach Farms. I’m thinking now we should have honked.
Some varmit has been nibbling at the fresh growth on our acorn squash plants. We were pretty sure it was a groundhog because our neighbor spotted a few fresh holes in the ground below the garden. He had already armed his Have-a-heart trap with some fresh apple slices and asked if we would bring our trap down to augment his arsenal.
I went out back to get the trap and the flaps were down indicating someone had taken my bait, a corn cob from the fresh corn Rick and Monica had given us from their Vermont vacation. I looked in the cage and caught a glimpse of this grey and white thing. I was afraid to get too close because we had been smelling a neighborhood skunk lately while we read on the porch.
I went back down and told my neighbor that our trap was occupied and I thought it might be a skunk. He couldn’t wait to see for himself and interrupted his Rubino’s sub to come up and have a look. A former farm boy, he walked right up to the cage and said, “You caught a baby possum.”
He suggested I take it somewhere and unload it and he offered his pickup. He said, “Just so you know, it is technically illegal to take animals from one place to another so just don’t let him go in front of a cop.” So I drove down to the park entrance, where all the dog people meet, and let the little guy off. As I backed up to turn around in the last house’s driveway I saw a woman in the window watching me and possibly jotting down my neighbor’s license plate number.
Cat on counter at Case’s Garden Store Norton Street in Rochester, New York
It has been so warm this year we could have had our plants in a month ago but we just got around to it today. No excuse or anything, I’m just saying. We usually go to Cases’ on Norton and it was good to see them so busy today. We bought some tomato plants and some Jalapénos (our staples) and basil bit they didn’t have the Italian basil so we bought Lebanese. It has smaller leaves and tastes a little spicier. We sampled some of their lemon basil but that was sort of intense. We bought a small box of eggplant plants and some zucchini and I looked at a oregano plant and don’t remember putting it in our cart but we came home with it. We seem to have red bell peppers at every dinner in one dish or another so we bought twelve of those plants. Now we’ll hope to keep the rabbits, ground hogs and chipmunks at bay.
We stopped by my parent’s place to visit on Mother’s Day and went out for a walk in nearby Ellison Park. We ran into Dee Dee and her dog. She told us she had been here every day for three years now. She said she imagined my parents’ neighborhood as an ideal place to live, so close to the park. Little did she know my parents moved there to be close to the park and then were both chased out by dogs whose owners let them run off leash despite the signs that state “Dogs Must Be On Leash.” We must have seen fifty or so dogs running free. Apparently Parks Director, Larry Staub, does not work on Mothers Day.
A log cabin in the park called Fort Schuyler, a 1938 recreation of the 1721 trading post where Senecas and the French swapped for furs, has the smallest windows I have ever seen on a building, maybe just big enough to shoot an arrow through. That’s one of the windows on the far right of the photo above. I took a flash picture of the pitch black inside and came up with the shot you see when you click on the photo. I had an urge to post a nasty photo after Angel Corpus Christi gave me this shout-out and this blow-up fits the bill.
My brothers and sisters and their families came and went yesterday and eight of us wound up down at Vic & Irv’s for dinner. We tried squeezing in one booth but split up when an adjacent booth opened. My mom and I each had a vanilla shake and split an order of onion rings. Vic & Irv’s changed management over the winter and was closed for a bit but Lynn is still behind the grill and I’m happy to say the food is every bit as good as ever.
Robin egg on the trail in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, NY
I couldn’t get my Nikon to focus on this Robin egg. Of course I was in “Auto” mode so I can’t really complain. The camera does have a manual focus but that would take me ten minutes to figure out. Imagine how difficult it would be for an auto focus mechanism to find a surface on the egg on which to focus.
I occasionally buy the organic eggs at Wegmans. They clearly taste better than the regular Wegman’s eggs but at almost four times the price they are a real luxury item. And I don’t like the little red Wegmans logo stamped on top of each of the brown eggs. The packaging is bad enough but it really bugs me when they put their mark right on the produce.
Tree roots 0n bike paths in Tryon Park, Rochester, NY
We still had some credit left on the gift card that Heather gave us for doing her web site so we stopped into Good Luck for dinner last night. Their red lentil, sweet potato soup is incredible so we ordered that again and then split shiitake mushroom, bok choy and red onion salad with barbecued trout and soy. It was as good as the best tapas we had in Spain but of course we weren’t surrounded by dozens of equally enticing options and there weren’t any giant hams hanging overhead and we weren’t standing at a bar with an assortment of interesting characters.
At some point I realized I had not transferred my wallet from my painting pants to my out-on-the-town pants so not only did I not have the gift card but I didn’t have our credit card either. Peggi felt pretty confident that she could recite our credit card number so we continued eating. I guess the pressure of coming up with the number when it really counts got to her and she transposed two of the groups of four numbers so it didn’t go through and they brought the manager out to our table. Peggi decided to call our neighbors. Rick was off doing his radio show. I had played horseshoes with him earlier in the day and he told us he was going to play a Margaret Explosion song in a juggling themed set with The Incredible String Band and Waylon Jennings. Monica gave us her credit card number and our debts were settled. We were off to Geva for a one woman show about the black experience. Other neighbors who both had the flu gave us their theater tickets. Mark Gage was in the lobby but we didn’t have time to chat. He seems to have slipped into Vapourspace.
White popcorn tree in bloom on March 16 in Durand Eastman Park
I’m not sure what this tree is but it is in an area of the park where they have all sorts of fruit trees. The nearby pink flowering tress are identified as apricot trees so maybe it is in that family. It looks like a Popcorn Tree. Everything is coming on so fast in this summer like weather. We received some mail from the daughter of the former owner of our house. I dreaded opening the envelope thinking it must be a death notice but it was an invitation to his 100th birthday. Imagine how fast time is going for him.
Salamander on trail in early February Rochester, New York
It was fairly cold today, just below freezing but nowhere near typical February weather for this part of the country. The daffodils in our back yard are up, maybe four or five inches. We’ve only skied a few times and are still waiting for a good storm. We spotted this salamander in the middle of a trail and thought he was was dead. I rolled him over with a stick and he started wiggling his vestigial looking legs so I rolled back and he slinked away.
We flew Delta but I’ll bet all airlines share a similar game plan in their race to the bottom. They took our bottled water at the gate and gave us a short lecture for having it in our bag. Bottled is $4.50 at the concession stand on the other side of the gate. There is a charge for the disposable headphones and the monitor on the back of the seat in front of us works fine when they’re showing you ads for Lincoln Continental and Coca Cola but you have to swipe your credit card for movies and special programing. The plane is equipped with WiFi but it costs $12.95 for the flight. We paid $31 for two sandwiches and a drink and they wouldn’t take cash. Tiny bags of salty peanuts are free, just like in bars where they want you buy more drinks, but on our flight the attendant announced “we were traveling with a passenger who is highly allergic to peanuts so in order to ensure that passenger has a safe trip we will not be serving peanuts.”
My nephew is considering a move to New York to continue making his top tier chef inroads. We asked if he could handle real weather and he said it was a concern. LA is unreal. You forget. My sister-in-law said, “If I lived in Seattle or a place like that I would kill myself.” That is SAD or seasonal affect disorder in a nutshell. I’m a minor key kinda guy so I don’t even notice when its cloudy. If fact I found it hard to take photos in LA because there is too damn much sun. You need a polarizing lens to minimize all that glare. My skin gets so dry out here that my feet pop open and wearing a hat and all that sun screen in eighty degree weather is whacky. But I do love LA and I was sad to leave.
Half Price Ice Cream Cones sign in Hammondsport, New York
I took my Nikon P7000, a point and shoot that David Pogue described as “like carrying a brick in your pocket”, out to the UPS Store yesterday to have Nikon repair the lens cover again. It is less than a year old and it spent a full month at the Nikon plant in New Jersey about five months ago when they repaired this problem for the first time. Little black blades spin open to uncover the lens when you push the power button but over time they only open part way and you wind up with Lomo style photos. I have the camera in my pocket at all times and feel naked without it. Maybe I should wait for it to return and put it on eBay.
Our big garage sale was a real eye opener to the underground economy. The dealers who stormed the gates in the two hours before the sale began and the Craigslist “Curb Alert” responders at the end of the sale are the unseen American worker bees. And of course the casual garage sailors are the backbone of economy. My brother-in-law sold our old 8-tracks on eBay.
We were too exhausted after the sale to fully appreciate our neighbor, Rick Simpson’s, performance art. All our neighbors had watched us fuss with the boxes of stuff in our garage for weeks leading up to the sale and little did we know Rick was hatching this plan to bring us back to earth, clown style. He is a professional clown after all so while we manned the tables in Alice and Julio’s driveway Rick filled our empty garage with his stuff, a boat, lawnmower, bicycles and a couple stacks of old tires. When we popped the door that night we were stunned!
I spotted two giant puffballs down in the woods while riding by on my bicycle and mentioned them to Shelley when I got back to the house. I knew she knows her mushrooms. They have been eating mushrooms all summer up in Adirondacks. We hiked down across the creek and over to where I had seen them but they were a little past prime. We spotted five or six different varieties along the way but nothing for dinner. I feel better getting my mushrooms from Wegmans.
Painting of Pasta Villa owners in bar of Pasta Villa in Rochester, NY
How this all fits together, I’m not sure. Maybe it doesn’t. We decided to eat out tonight but we wanted to go somewhere close. There’s Osteria overlooking the lake and Shamrock Jack’s and Churi’s Thai food or in the other direction Monte Alban or the new Puerto Rican spot or Pasta Villa. Stop. The citadel of Italian food in Rochester with the dining room frozen in in 1975 with the Ramon Santiago prints on the wall and mirror trim and marble wallpaper with two loud air conditioners cranking. We’re there. Gnocchi with greens and beans and Chicken Picata, Chianti, Dean Martin music, the painting in the bar of the Guido family owners!
On the way home we got stuck at the intersection on Culver where the owner has a couple of pressure treated picnic tables that he is trying to sell for 175 bucks each. This place is a marvel of whacked out tackiness, an American flag on the pole, a circular driveway with at least three cars in it at all times including a shiny black, Chevy 4-door Silverado pick up truck, died black wood chips in the circle and potted marigolds with an angel statue holding out an empty bowl, a deck on the front of the house with an umbrella table. Is it any wonder they have teenage age son running around with a trench coat and long died black hair in the middle of summer?
I almost forgot I had a blog going here. Just as it should be. With vacation and jazz fest chalked off I reached my hand in the job jar and came up with a good one.
I spend most nights painting in the basement and it is my favorite room of the house. I like the Adirondack siding that came with the walls down there (our cat does too and uses it as a giant scratching post) but I want more white down there at least on the wall I face. So I bought some 4×8 sheets of white panel board from Home Depot and then framed in the wall so I can cover the fireplace opening. The sheets were tough to hang. Peggi and I were wrestling with them when Julio stopped by. He pitched in and had some great ideas for trimming the edges in order to cover our crude cuts.
I went to Home Depot first thing this morning and bought the trim for the top and bottom of my new wall but I didn’t go as far a julio had suggested and trim the sides. But then I changed my mind and decided to add the trim on the side so I went back to Home Depot to buy the last piece. You cut your own lengths over there and then pay by the foot. I came home and carefully cut the wrong angle on the new piece and I didn’t have any to spare so I went back to Home Depot for a third time. This is how it’s gonna be when I retire. I can see it all pretty clearly.
Kurt Feuerherm painting “Two Romans” at Philips Fine Art in Rochester, NY
Duane was in town for a wedding so we hooked up on Friday evening for dinner (Steve Lippicott leftovers) and then headed out to gallery hop. I dropped Duane and Peggi off at Anderson Alley and I headed over to Kurt Feuerherm’s opening at the Philips Gallery on East Ave. Kurt was my painting mentor at Empire State but last I knew he was doing abstract landscapes. This was a nice little show called “Ancient Images: Fayum Inspired Portraits.” I said hi to Kurt and reminded him I was a student of his. I remember Kurt encouraging me to go bigger and more abstract and I did that for while. I just ripped apart a pile of those old paintings last summer but I kept the stretchers. Peter Monacelli was behind the snack table at the opening. Pete taught drawing at MCC and has just retired. He’s a carpenter too and one hell of a drummer. He can make a snare drum with brushes sound like a whole kit. Turns out he went to Empire State as well and Kurt was his mentor. We finished up the evening wandering around the Hungerford building. That place was packed.
We printed the second color on the Margaret Explosion 45 sleeves on Saturday so now we’ll have to schedule a glue party. We’re planning to release it on Wednesday the 18th at our Little gig. We left the house with our earplugs thinking we’d check out SLT at a club on Monroe Avenue but the printing took forever. Actually the printing went pretty fast. It took us a few hours to get the registration right. In the end it was close enough for letterpress.
The temperature barely got in to the fifties today but it felt warm in the woods. Last year Spring came on like gangbusters so everything was in bloom at once and it was over before we knew it. This year it’s taking its time and that’s ok with me. We cut through the park to check on the magnolias. The pink ones are dropping, deep red ones are just starting to open and the yellow ones are still tucked in their fuzzy cocoons. The colors look more dramatic on cloudy days so quit yer complainin’.
I came to class unarmed last night. That is I only had a few small watercolor/drawings to show for the week. And of all nights to be so empty-handed! Our teacher, Fred, was a little late. He’s usually a little late and I’m always early. Punctuality is not one of my traits but painting is different. When he walked in I was only one in class. A lot of people were way late or just took the night off. I showed him the paintings on paper and we talked for quite a while. He liked one quite a bit and complimented me on my brush language but I had painted myself into a corner on another and it provided the perfect opportunity to rethink my process.
Fred characterized my overall approach as conservative, trying to get the proportions of the head right, the eyes the same size and adding an ear because the model has one or two, those sorts of things. He suggested I look for the characteristics I want to paint, in my case it’s always the expression, and paint that. Forget about the ordinary concerns, the mechanics, and go for the art. He offered an analogy I could grasp in the way jazz musicians play. Make a move and improvise on that, compliment it, amplify it, contrast it, provoke it. A dialog full of surprises. Add one mark at a time and keep them all in play like a juggler. He surmised that I get into trouble when paint something without confidence so I would be better off if I didn’t paint that which I am not confident about.
