Category: Life Is A Spell

I can’t tell new music from old any more. Is everything coming back at once or is nothing really new? Was that old disco or new disco that the staff in the Little Theater Café were playing last night? When our Netflix queue ran dry last month we asked our friends, Rich and Andrea, for some recommendations. Rich sent his list along with a request for new music recommendations. I’m still listening to sixties’ jazz so I couldn’t possibly oblige but it was nice to be reminded how out of it I am. I do know I like Matt & Kim.

Martin Scorsese’s “Public Speaking” found it’s way in to our queue and I like that.

The soundtrack to Wednesday’s ride home from our gig used to be The Maestro’s show “Dig This” but time does not stand still in college radio land. Last night in the same time slot it was “Femme Fatale” holding court with the queens of R&B. I just “liked” her page.

When I was a kid the ride down Lake Avenue to Charlotte Beach seemed to take an eternity. And that final crest where you got your first look at lake and the tall flag pole was so dramatic. It still seems like a trek even though you’re still within the city limits.

We took Pete and Shelley to see the “Subterranean Surrogates” show at RoCo and then cruised down Lake Avenue to Abbots. They have so many locations now but the Chocolate Almond custard still tastes the best down there.

This morning’s paper had an article about Bay Town Plaza in Webster going under as Walmart plans to super-size their building there. The town is so ridiculously built up it’s depressing. I was going to high school out there when they converted the old three lane (we called the middle lane the “suicide lane”) Empire Boulevard/104 in to the new 104 that plowed through farm fields to carry the burgeoning Xerox’s employees to work. The noisy 104/Irondequoit Bay Bridge was part of the package. We can hear the hum from our house on the other side.

They have been doing work on the Bay Bridge all summer so it’s been in a poor man’s Christo mode. We rode our bikes over there the other day and sat on the bench that overlooks this scene confirming that life is a spell.

When it came time to make signs for the two ends of Alpine Drive, the night before our garage sale, we did a little brainstorming and Alice came up with a killer title, “Best Garage Sale Ever.” We ran with it and in fact it was the best garage sale ever, a perfect day and a chance to see so many friends in one spot.

We found a Lena Horne cd in the cd slot of Peggi’s mom’s stereo and kicked the sale off with an operatic tribute to Peggi’s mom. We met Noah from next door and I gave him this mask while we were setting up. No one was interested in the glass table that belonged to Peggi’s mom so we put it out in the “Free” section near the end of the sale. Evan picked it up and put it in his sale where it sold for six dollars. We sold our entire music collection and were delighted to find happy homes for most of it.

People warned us about the dealers and true to form they were there as we were setting up a full two hours before the sale began. I dreaded the whole affair and it was was an incredible amount of work but turned out to be fun, mostly because Alice and Julio are so much fun.

I put my 1996 series of 24 “Rochester Crime Faces” in the sale. Last time they were out in public was when they hung in the old city jail, the Cell Gallery, in Writers and Books. Ruby Rubenstein, Scott McCarney, Marie Via, Claire Marziotti, Chris Schepp, Judy Levy, Amy Enis, Maureen Outlaw, Sally Wood Winslow and Heather Erwin all bought at least one. I was thrilled that they sold out.

This would be an ideal summer job for an art student, walking around the park with an orange spray, marking potholes that need repair.

Dyson vacuum cleaners have a plastic chamber that collects the dust instead of bag. Ours was empty but it still wouldn’t pick up. We found before that the only way to remedy this situation was to take it all apart and clean the vacuum cleaner parts. Our neighbor, Rick, brought his laptop over because it was making a clicking sound. I asked if he had a backup and he didn’t so I suggested he go to Staples and buy an external drive and run Time Machine before he does anything else. He did that and then took it in to the Apple Store. They told him the fan had become clogged and it needed cleaning.

With all the rain in last few weeks our basement dehumidifier has been running around the clock. I’ve been down there quite a bit going through junk to put in our upcoming yard sale the dehumidified has been as loud as hell. I thought it was on its last lags and risked breaking the plastic cover to get a look at the inside. The coils were completely blocked by dust so scrubbed it with a toothbrush and it works fine now. Our refrigerator came with the house and it has been freezing things that are stored near the back even though it is set to the lowest settings. We were certain that we needed a new thermostat and I priced them and even watched a video on how to install the thing. But before we did that we pulled the refrigerator out from the wall and gave it a good cleaning. Turns out the air intake was blocked and it now runs perfectly.

I’ve been going through my lps and putting boxes together for an upcoming yard sale. It’s a a tough project to make any headway on because I keep getting sidetracked by something I have to listen to one more time. At one point I had Jeanie Pruit’s “Satin Sheets” in thefront of a stack right next to and Prince’s “Lovesexy” and I was stopped dead in my tracks!

The Holloway House in East Bloomfield first opened its doors in 1808 as a tavern and stage coach stop for wagons pushing west. For the last fifty years the Holloway House has been run by the Wayne family. It is well preserved has quite a reputation with old timers. The drive out there, through the rolling hills, is part of the package and the pickled green cabbage in the relish tray, fruit juice/sherbet shrub appetizer and homemade breads and pies seal the deal.

We celebrated my mom’s birthday out there with a fantastic meal and we learned how to keep “New England” and “Manhattan” chowder straight from our server. “It snows in New England (white) and the river is polluted in Manhattan (red).”

Some people like putting things on the calendar and getting all planned out. The only things I put on the calendar are things I would like to forget but can’t like dentist appointments and work related phone meetings.

Peggi and I planned to take a day trip to celebrate our anniversary and we never put a date on the calendar, we just waited for an opening and today was it. The New York Times didn’t show up so we got an early start. We glanced at a map of the Finger Lakes and picked Kueka. We drove down the west side to Hammondsport and and then back up along the east side. We took back roads the whole way and even passed a dirt road called “Back Road.” It’s fun to drive slow, so slow we kept pulling over to let anxious cars go by. We stopped the car in the middle of the road to let these geese pass.

Hammondsport is a well preserved old town with cute little shops full of tourists. We parked near the town square and walked in the opposite direction of the cute little shops. In fact we walked out of town and spent some time in an old cemetery. On the way back to Rochester we drove through Palmyra where Joseph Smith claims to have found his wacky book of Mormon.

It has been hot and sticky for many weeks in western New York, all sun most days and very little rain. And when it did rain the other day these orange mushrooms popped out on a fallen tree in the creek. If they are edible, there’s a few meals down there.

Hot weather takes the life out me. I can’t seem to get anything done and maybe that’s the whole idea.

I hope no one bought this goat at the Public Market. We were hitting it off pretty good while Peggi went to the bathroom n Saturday.

We finished our last of seven rugs yesterday. Rick and Monica’s driveway has never been cleaner. We dried most of them on our roof during this heat wave but the last one was too heavy to get up there so it is up on blocks in our front yard.

I’ve been baiting and arming the Have-A-Heart trap all week with no luck at capturing the raccoons that terrorize our cat. The first few nights I found the trap closed with no bait left in it so I adjusted the sensitivity thinking a light footed animal like a chipmunk ate the bait and then slipped out through the bars of the cage. It was so sensitive that it closed during the night, trapping nothing and leaving bait. I put some watermelon out there last night and this morning I found a robin in the trap so I set it free.

The sign out in front of Walgreens flashed “The Walgreens iPad app is here! I can’t imagine.

Why doesn’t Walgreens have an apostrophe in it? I’m not the one who should be nick-picking grammar so I won’t go there. I’m just asking. I think Wegmans dropped the apostrophe to. They got in to some sort of a scuffle with Walgreens over the use of the “W’ as a logo. Seems like Walgreen’s won but I’m not sure.

I stopped in to pick up a new battery for my watch. It kept losing time and then working fine for days and I got so I just din’t trust it so I bought a new. They have their own microclimate over there at Culver and East Ridge Road. When the wind is blowing in and it’s cold out and you’re on a bike it can be brutal. And today it felt hotter than hell. I asked the clerk if the temperature display was accurate and she said it was.