Category: Life Is A Spell

Our neighbor emailed us that he has an overload of spinach, some of it wintered over and then then three rows that he planted in early March. He has also stated these new plants (above), some more spinach and some lettuce. We went down there with a shopping bag and we easily filled it without making a noticeable dent in the plants. And while we were there we planted two more rows of spinach and some cilantro.

Spinach, for me, will forever be associated with the superhuman strength the it gave Popeye. Our friend Bill needs his spinach now as the battles the cancer they found last week. We plan to make our favorite spinach dish for him, garbanzos con espinacas, and drop it off this afternoon.

from wiki — In every Popeye cartoon, the sailor is invariably put into what seems like a hopeless situation, upon which (usually after a beating), a can of spinach which he apparently regularly carries with him falls out from inside his shirt. Popeye immediately pops the can open and gulp the entire contents of it into his mouth, or sometimes sucks in the spinach through his corncob pipe. Upon swallowing the spinach, Popeye’s physical strength immediately becomes almost superhuman, and he is easily able to save the day (and very often rescue Olive Oyl from a dire situation).

I have always wanted to have my own Sam Jones photo. I’ve admired his work for years and I was thrilled when he asked if he could use my camera to take a picture of his first Mac, a Macintosh Plus with a broken floppy drive.

Sam had taken me down to their basement where the old computer sits near the laundry tubs. I noted that the black and white screen is not any bigger than an iPad. Sam told me he pats it every time he goes down there to do his wash. His father had scanned a batch of Sam’s Polaroids and put a slideshow online years ago but I wasn’t able to find that link so we’ll have to make do with this one shot.

This is where Spring comes from. We found the source. All that moist green stuff comes out of this low lying area in Spring Valley.

There’s hardly ever a line a Wegmans. They like taking your money. Speaking of “like”, the like button in the sidebar of this page stopped working. Not during an upgrades or anything, it just just stopped working out of the blue. But I discovered that when I sign out of fb the counter begins working again and shows the 433 that have clicked. I tried updating the wp page with a plugging-in but it wanted to start counting from zero so I disabled the plug-in. Just like Sparky‘s site I have a broken counter.

Anyway back to the line at Wegman’s. I had enough time to scan the magazine covers at the check out. Men’s Health magazine, “Melt Your Gut.” Women’s Health magazine, “Sculpt A Butt That Defies Gravity.”

With tree blossoms a full month ahead of schedule in this part of the country farmers are concerned that a cold snap could damage this year’s fruit crop. That would be a shame but it hard to find fault with this gorgeous weather. Some people say we’l be punished for this. My father say’s we’ve earned it. Shelley is upset because the nights have not been cold enough for the sap to flow. She has given up on syruping this year.

I’m hoping this will be the year when the lilacs will have come and gone by the time the officially announced celebration begins.

We renewed our passports today. I say “today” but it took us the better part of the week to get the damn things off. You can’t just go downtown and do it face to face with a county employee anymore. We had to print out a form from the government’s site that included a bar code that “must be legible”. Legible bar codes are impossible to do on an inkjet printer so we made a trip to the library for that phase.

Our laser printer bit the dust. If I could figure out how to recycle the damn thing it would be gone but it’s still sitting in the corner next to me. It served us well, a 660 dpi HP LaserJet that we bought to do early desktop publishing work for Lawyers Co-operative Publishing back in the day. The oldest company in Rochester for a while, West Group bought them and then Reuters bought West Group. We used to layout law books, print the pages out and then they would shoot film negs from our print outs. Not very creative but cutting edge production in the dark ages.

You would think in 2012 you would be able to upload a passport photo the same way you put a photo on FaceBook and fill out the passport forms electronically instead of wrestling with all this old technology. We have three inkjet printers, ones that came free with computers. “Free” with outrageously priced toner cartridge replacements. Our Canon S9000 is giving us an “Unknown Error”. Where do you go to figure that one out? So we printed our 2×2 inch passport photos on our our Epson. We’ve really moved beyond printing and hardly do any of it anymore. I can’t understand why anyone would print a photo anymore. They look so much better on a monitor. So we loaded the coated paper upside down and got the other worldly looking photos above.

The chipmunks have left their winter complex under our sidewalk. They’ve pushed back the stones that we that shoved down there last year in an effort to keep our sidewalks from caving in. The squirrels never went anywhere this winter. I just checked my little iPod weather app and it’s warmer here than it is in New York, San Francisco, LA, Madrid, Sevilla and Barcelona. So there.

Listen to Squirrel Watch by Margaret Explosion.

Peggi and I were sitting at our computers when we heard this noise coming from the front room. It sounded like someone had dropped a sheet of aluminum or maybe a branch falling on our roof but it wasn’t windy at all. We were both too engaged to investigate so we quickly forgot about it. Later in the afternoon we went out back and found this little woodpecker on the ground below our window. He was obviously stunned but he could hardly walk or hop. We found a worm for him but he didn’t seem interested. We called Animal Control and they said to call back tomorrow if the bird was still there.

We got fixed on this guy and checked on him several times through the day finally watching him fly to a nearby cherry tree where he stood still on the side of the tree. His head was obviously too sore to peck. He stayed in that spot for hours and was still there when we left for our Magaret Explosion gig. I turned the light on when we returned but there was no sign of him. I’m hoping he’s back in action.

The best part about a good walk is the adventure. Heading off in a new direction or just stopping to take in the surroundings. We watched this hawk for quite a while yesterday. It was overlooking a valley and we were on a hill behind it. The hawk had his eye on a squirrel in a nearby tree and was waiting for that squirrel to make one false move. He decided to spare the squirrel and he took off for his next adventure.

Kodak used to make a “Hawk-Eye” camera and my dad worked at Kodak’s Hawk-Eye division on Driving Park overlooking the river. Most of what he did there involved government surveillance projects. He couldn’t talk about it then but it is all in the public domain now.

The weather has been changing from minute to minute today. Full sun and then snow flurries which accumulate and then melt, bursts of wind, more sun and then snow pellets that disappear on contact. Perfect conditions for a walk to the lake.

Our neighbor has his spinach in already. He sets the pace around here and makes us all look like slackers. He was telling us that his grandmother used to sprinkle the seed on the snow in the Spring. I like that image.

Sam Jones called me the other day to tell me that someone had brought back Hypercard as a game for the iTouch. My dad was an early Mac user and I remember him showing us that program before Peggi and I had our first machine. We did have an Atari that we bought at Leon’s Typewriter on Clinton Avenue but we only used that for music. I’m happy the old stuff is still around but it’s kind of disappointing that some stuff just won’t go away. After the Gene Vincent and Hendrix and Miles and punk did you ever expect Americana to be everywhere? Spring is here. Let’s get it on.