There were only four people in Peggi’s yoga class last night. Maybe it was the weather or maybe it had something to do with Jeffery, the yoga teacher, going on a cruise for a few weeks. There were seven people in my painting class but that’s everyone who signed up for the winter session. It’s the slow time of year and that’s the way we like it.
We dropped my father off after class and Peggi and I went downtown to Danny’s Ball at Abilene. The Eastman 10, who were arrested for playing in the streets on election night, did a rousing version of “God Bless America” and the packed house went nuts. We had our long sleeve Obama t-shirts on.
I know some people are cat people (like us) and some are dog people (like our neighbors, Rick and Monica) and others are are just not pet people at all (like my parents). And that’s what makes the world go ’round.
This is Stella and she makes my world go “round. We sat by the fire this morning and read the New York Times on our iPod Touch. I love the way some sites are optimized for this thing and I want like rework all our sites for this tiny device.
We don’t have cable tv but my mother-in-law does and she likes Fox News. So it is pretty jarring walking in on programming like this. Sometimes I forget that the world has gone over the top.
We previewed the dinner menu on the flyer by the tv and I set my sites on the “Chicken Parm”. We headed down the halls to the dining room and walked slowly by the residents art that hangs outside the dining room. Peggi’s mom sked what I thought of this painting of asparagus by E. T. Zogby and I said, “I love it”. Peggi’s mom laughed and said , “I figured you would like this”.
Asparagus painting by E. T. Zogby
Peggi’s mom likes art and used to volunteer at the Detroit Institute of the Arts but she is always mystified by modern art and used to try to get me to explain why I like it. The best I could do was say, “It’s fun to look at”. She wrestled with the whole concept whenever we went to an art gallery and usually left frustrated. So I thought it was pretty cute that she knew I would like this painting and she didn’t seem bothered by it anymore. I feel like we are getting somewhere.
Suzanne, the dining room manager, stopped by to say hi and we started chatting. We said something about playing and she flashed on our old band, the Scorgie’s days, and realized why she always thought we looked so familiar. She was friends with Andrea Kohler and eventually married Jeff, the bass player in the Cliches. We always thought she looked pretty familiar too. It’s nice to know I have a connection to get my art work on the walls when I move out here in my senior years.
Playing Nintendo Wii Baseball in my nephew’s basement
The last of the family holiday gatherings was at my sister’s for pizza. I spent some time in the basement with our nieces and nephews and their pet rabbit. I tried my hand at Nintendo’s Wii Baseball and managed to foul one off but I struck out pretty quickly. The ball players are all missing limbs for some reason. The hitters have no arms and the fielders don’t have any legs. I’m guessing this player is a woman. I love her pants.
I showed our nephews our new iPod Touch and they took me to the App Store where I took their reccomendations for free software like Google Earth, Pandora, UrbanSpoon and Flixter. I downloaded two drum machine programs that sound great through the stereo. I might try playing it with Margaret Explosion on New Year’s Eve. My nephews kept trying to sell me on games so I installed Cube Runner. I’m not very good at that either.
The snowmen in our front yard have taken on real personalities with the new snow. I’m seeing Winston Churchill on the right.
I paid extra to have the hard drive that I ordered for my father delivered in two days. That should have been Friday. Tracking info showed it out for delivery but later in the day the page show an “Exception”. If I hovered over the word it said “Emergency conditions beyond UPS Control”. I’m guessing that was the snow we had. UPS doesn’t work weekends even in the holiday season so that would mean today if I’m lucky. You would think they might put it at the front of the line but it’s after four now and no package. The only reason I’m writing about this is the “Exception” claim. Can I use that on deadlines or do you have to be in a union?
I have a bunch of passes to MacWorld at the Moscone Center in SF if anyone wants them.
Peggi buying cabbage at the Public Market in Rochester, NY
I loaded my mother-in-law’s SUN though SAT, MORN, NOON, EVE, BED pill container like we do every weekend but today I felt like I was loading an Advent calender. We used to have those things in our house when we were growing up and most of the little doors would be open by now. This one though has no surprises unless you forget what medicine you’re taking every day and my mother-in-law just may fall into that category.
We started the day at the Public Market downtown. I love this place especially the way it seems to draw equally from all sub cultures of the city. Red peppers were in abundance for some reason and local cabbage, pears, onions, potatoes and apples were everywhere. Christmas trees were fifteen dollars and every sort of nic nac or common junk drawer product was there, fresh off a Chinese container. One of the fish guys tried to talk Peggi into buying an eel by wiggling it at us. “They’re good in soup”, he said. We had read a rave review of Barry from Fair Game Foods’ pastrami sandwiches in City Newspaper so waited in line for one of those and took it to our car where we listened to a cd of Margaret Explosion with Phil Marshall from last week.
It started snowing on the way home and it looked like a shaker scene. We are up to about fifteen inches of the white stuff now. We had arranged to ski with Rick and Monica so we headed right out in to the woods. Rick led the way and took us across the golf course and down a few thrill seeker hills. When we got back home we built a fire and put James Brown’s “Hot Pants lp on.
There are a few things in the running for tonight. Bob Henrie and the Goners are at Abilene and Watkins and the rapiers are doing their Christmas show at the Flipside. We might try to do both.
Lumiere at the Litle Theater Cafe in Rochester, NY
We were kind of tired last night but heroically headed downtown for Lumiere’s last appearance this year. Guitarist Roy Berns fell off a ladder and injured his shoulder. He’s having it operated on and will miss most of next year. The violin player they had fits their gypsy jazz sound perfectly. I still miss Ed the accordion player but no sense crying over split milk. The band sounded great.
We must have had eight inches or up here near the lake. We talked about skiing all day but didn’t get out until four or so. We skiied down to the park and then back through the woods. The path was buried and it was pretty dark so we got lost a few times. We were so turned around we didn’t even know if we were headed in the right direction. We’ll look for our tracks tomorrow and find out where we were.
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas around here. The temperature was somewhere in the low thirties so it was perfect packing and we rolled these two dudes up.
I tried to help my dad by buying a harddrive so he good do a proper backup of his system but the Western Digital drive I bought at Buy.com was defective so I spent a good part of the day getting an RMA number, repacking the thing and running it out to the UPS Store to return it. I took advantage of the trip to buy some new canvases at the Art Store in South Town Plaza. I bought six 20″ by 24″ canvases that were 50 per cent off. I was thinking of doing something other than crime guys but there was an enticing “CrimeStoppers” page in the paper this morning.
Monica had the brilliant idea to invite us to go skating with her and Rick at Manhattan Square Park after work on Friday. We put our long johns on and warmed up our skates by the heater. Peggi hung on to me for the first few laps and then she was on her own. She had a collision with a young kid and they both fell but no one was hurt. The rink here has been renovated and it is now kidney shaped and very pretty. I could have done without the Christmas music but that is a losing battle.
I clomped next door with my skates on to Manhattan Square apartments where Frank Paolo works but the guard told me “Frankie wasn’t in yet”. We drove over to Corn Hill to look for a Mexican restaurant and wound up at an Italian place called Tony D’s. They specialize in coal fired pizza and they let us to place a special order of caramelized onion pizza with no cheese. We sat by the oven and watched three beefy guys do the cooking. They played eighties soul music and got talking about Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings and the whole soul revival thing goin’ on.
“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is a beautiful movie. The lusiously colored, closely cropped, bedridden, framing really looks great on tv. We watched long stretches of it for the second time last night. The French speech therapist’s endless repetition of the alphabet hypnotized me. I felt as I too had “locked-in syndrome” like the lead character, Jean-Dominique Bauby. Julian Schnabel did a great job bringing this (based on a) true story to the screen. Bauby’s memoir, though, is where the magic came from. “My cocoon becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’s court.”
I’m thinking our white cat may have a variation of this “locked-in-syndrome. She spends nearly twenty four hours a day on our bed yet we’re certain that she has a life in there and that it is full enough for her. We can see this in her eyes.
We met with our Merrill Lynch adviser this morning and were left with the distinct impression that capitalism is indeed eating itself. Our portfolio is worth less than what we put in to it and we’re doing “pretty good”. The same guys who have been saying for as long as I have been listening that “business knows best” are begging the government, who can’t balance a checkbook, for help. The receptionist, who used to greet us here, has been laid off because of the restructuring that Bank of America, who now owns Merrill, has started. And the Wall Street Journal I glanced at in ML’s lobby had an article about New York’s Attorney General, Mario Cuomo’s son, shaming Merrill’s CEO into not taking his ten million dollar bonus this year.
“Does the that fact that big business is begging the government for help indicate that things are really worse than they seem now?”, I asked. Our guy agreed that that was the case. We pushed ahead. Are there any buying opportunities out there now that just about everything has tanked? Maybe but even with their commission danging there they had no solid recommendations. “Do you feel that the Dow could drop much further?”. Our guy thought we would see a twenty to twenty five percent drop before things turned around.
We sold a few things at a loss so we could deduct it from our taxable income and called it a day at the races.
Eastman Lake in Durand Eastman Park, late Fall 2008
We walked through the woods and along the eastern shore of Eastman Lake this morning. Up near Lake Ontario we crossed over to Durand Lake and took the path along its western shore to the woods that lead back to our house. I didn’t see a soul the whole time except for my wife. Winter is coming on and the remaining leaves have lost most of their color other than this rich brown.
Winters in Rochester are tough and they toughen us. I’m looking forward to this one. I like the solitude, the warmth of the fireplace, the lighter social calender and the additional time to paint.
There was a squirrel fight going on outside our bedroom window this morning. At least i thought it was squirrels. It woke me up so I got up and didn’t think much about it. Later we saw our neighbor walk up our driveway to look at something in our back yard. We went out and found three large raccoons in a tree. Two were on a perch near the top and one was further down. Every time the third one tried to get on the same perch a nasty fight broke out with lots of loud squealing. Our neighbor said it was too early for mating so who knows what was going on. It was hard to watch. I took a few photos and went back in to work.
The water temperature in the neighborhood pool was down in the fifties so we decided to close the pool this weekend. As current presidents we made the call and emailed our neighbors to be down at the pool at 9:30 this morning. We took the diving board off and put it in the pump house. We threw some Algaecide in the water and put the cover on. We put the chairs and tables in a pile and covered them with a tarp and then drained the pump.
We were basically done and I was ready to go back home at 10:30 and have some breakfast but Jared was itching to get going on a project that we said we would do in the fall. Next thing you know I was swinging a sledgehammer at the sidewalk so we could repair a leak in the hose that ran back to the pipe. We took about ten trips back to the house pick up tools and Peggi, Jared and I drove to Home Depot to pick up some concrete and plastic plumbing parts. We stuck the parts together and had to come to clean up in time be out at Alice and Julio’s for dinner at six.
The party room attached to the bar at the VFW in Fairport last night was flooded with florescent lighting and the acoustics from the hard surfaces made conversation tough but the class of 1968 rose to the challenge. Just like old people, everyone pretty much showed up at once. There was about a third of the class there along with a poster with the faces of the fallen. Three of my best friends from high school were on the board and it felt strange. Everyone knew Charlie Coco and Tim Schapp (in the glasses below) had died of AIDS but a number of people asked me how Dave Mahoney died, Patti Cowie, Dave’s old flame, among them.
Row I – Nancy Barry, Bill DeMar, Dave LaPlante, Richard Poe Row 2 – Bernard Finch, Mary Renz, Tom Kalupski, May Piotrowski, Bill Hargarther, Debby Wiechman, Joe Barrett, Rena Wojack Row 3 – Darlene Hilfiker, Richard LaFrois, Ruth White, Bobby Gray, Barb Mayer,Tom Schneider, Martha Schneider, Albert Williams Row 4 – Andy Finn, Jean Meier, Paul Dodd, Sandy Argus, Bob Brooks, MaryAnn Wojaick, John Abrams, Irene Palermo Row 5 – Marty Schreiber, Tim Schapp, Eileen Amen, Roger Miner, Michael Coffee, Linda Fry, Steve Zelimier, Michael Kubrich Row 6 – Gary Nagel, Dave Wilson, Fred Lorman, Richard Switzer, John Welch, Bob Leiberrnan, Milan Beh, Alfred Williams
Someone brought old class photos and I was knocked out by this one of our fifth grade class at Holy Trinity. My family moved out of the city that year and I joined the class midyear so I didn’t expect to see my photo in here (with tie above). Bill DeMar was in the photo. I heard he is dead too. He figured out how to set the clocks back so the bell never rang at the end of recess. Andy Finn, who has his own talk show, was in the photo and Tim Schapp and Joe Barrett were there even though they were not in attendance at the reunion. Bill Grey, whose father started Bill Grey’s restaurants, was in the photo and John Abraham, a good friend from grade school. He died in a car crash right after high school. Albert Williams was in the photo and in attendance. His twin brother, Alfred, was in the photo but still in Las Vegas. Dave LaPlant was in the photo and he was standing right next to me. He helped me identify the rest of the class. Jean Maier was in the photo and she was there too. And Irene Palermo was on the end of row four. I called her over to show her the photo. We were boyfriend/girlfriend in high school. She told me I looked thin. I took it to mean “too thin”. She looked great.
I was too overwhelmed to take photos and that is not like me. I did get a good one of Nina Gaby and Leeann Birdsall and another of Karen Mahoney and Laurice Densmore. I couldn’t tell if I was overloaded from seeing so many familiar people or emotionally drained from replaying so many scenes from the past. I wasn’t even able to make good conversation. I felt like I was back in high school. Mike Allen took me out to his car to show me something. He was in working bands in high school and he gave me an announcement for an upcoming gig. I checked to see how Peggi was holding up. I was in her place earlier in the year when we went to her reunion outside Detroit. She was talking to Mary Kaye and Shirley Zimmer and was all smiles so I felt better.
We did the twist on the dance floor and we all snaked into the bar. Marianne Gocker was hanging on to my hips. Holly Clark became the Queen of Soul for “Respect”. The class was dancing in a big circle and Jeff Munson and Doug Klick did a WWF interpretation of Wolly Bully in the center of it all. The dj had a pretty good segue with Louie Louie but it wasn’t the Kingsmen version.
The committee took home mums and leftovers from Proiettis. I was still out of it today so we snuck over to Rick and Monica’s hot tub for a soak and then watched Mystery Science Theatre reruns on VHS.
We found this little plastic ball down in one of the creeks that we crossed while hiking in the woods. We kicked it home. Somebody has to rescue these things.
Our neighbor, Jerod, rang the bell this morning because we were a half hour late for our our trip to the Penfield quarry. We needed to pick up more stone for the road repair on our street. We had a decent excuse. We were working at our 4D job. Peggi was on the line with support at company we are working with to host an image bank for the library.
We drove out to the stone quarry and filled up his pick-up truck with crushed stone. They have doubled their price out there and it is now $10 a load. Peggi and I did the shoveling and it took us about a half an hour to fill the truck.
Back at 4D we started work on a brochure with stock photos of women executives that Peggi picked out. And then we headed out to the side of the house to continue painting. The temperature of the water down at the pool was 74 and it felt great after all the manual labor.
Eric Ryan, Jann, Mary Alice in her Cocktail Hour pjs, Peggi and Ann in the HLC halls
I picked some near perfect tomatoes from the garden along with a handful of jalapeño peppers and made salsa to bring to the family gathering at my brother’s house. My sister-in-law told me it was ‘the best batch yet” and that got me singing that Captain Beefheart song. “We don’t have to suffer. We’re the best batch yet.”
There are five ingredients in my salsa – tomatoes, onion, jalapeños, fresh cilantro and lime juice. Each has a very important role and when the tomatoes are local, it really sings. I studied the salsa they served in the Yukatan to discern the proportions. It takes more cilantro than you would imagine.
It seems like half my family was born in August (my parents used the rythym method) so we celebrate all the August birthdays at once. Our niece’s boyfriend, Eric Ryan, brought the crossword puzzle from Newsday and it took the whole family to lick it. My youngest sister knew that Marie Osmond had a hit with “Paper Roses” and my father knew that “Sandy’s owner” was Little Orphan Annie. We could have used Peggi’s mom’s help as she is somewhat of a crossword puzzle ace but she wasn’t feeling well enough to come.
After the picnic, my other sister, her daughter and her boyfriend, and Peggi and I all stopped in to see Peggi’s mom. Peggi’s mom had her pink, “Cocktail Hour” pjs on. We took a short walk around the halls. My niece had broken her leg while walking her dog so she was on crutches and Peggi’s mom uses a walker. Our pace was so slow that Eric Ryan could read aloud from his magazine.
