Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
Not all observations are worth noting.
I always wondered who got polled and now I know. Me. I just got off the phone with someone who polled me on who I was likely to vote for. They wanted to know my opinion, from “Very Favorable” to “Very Unfavorable”, of John McCain. That was easy. It is one week to the election so here is the official Popwars endorsement.
Today started with another robo call from “John at NSBA”. Most of the calls we get on our business line these days come from India and I hang up as soon as I hear the accent but John has a good old fashioned American studio voice. I have never listened to his prerecorded rap but we get this call at 9 o’clock most mornings.
After work we joined Bill and Geri out at Chuckie Cheese’s where they were celebrating their son, Sam’s birthday. Sam was wearing his Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup t-shirt for the occasion. This place is insane and that’s why kids love it. It is a sensory onslaught and the really young kids just run around like maniacs. Older kids pump tokens into the games and machines and the parents sit at tables and overeat. On the way out we overheard the hostess apologizing to the mother of an obese kid for the other kids roughhousing. We watched her give the kid a complimentary bag of blue cotton candy.
We followed a van home that had had a logo Suburban Propane on it. I was thinking that would be a good name for your band.
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The phone rang at 8 this morning and I was awake but my voice wasn’t. I kind of shout/sang “Bring Out The Jazz” at rehearsal last night. It was our second practice for the Personal Effects reunion. It was Bruce O’Neill on the phone to say he was going to be here in a half hour to trim our trees. We barley got any work done today. It was more fun watching Bruce in the trees.
We spent some time talking to his helper, Tom, who had just taken a buyout from a pharmaceutical company where he worked as a salesman. He spent most of his time giving golf lessons to doctors who prescribed his company’s drugs.
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I obsessed over the leak in our skylight for the last three days. It took me that long to pinpoint where the water is getting in. It’s a Velux window and it came with the house. They wrapped the wood frame with metal and had to bend it around the corners. They cut the top part to make the corner and stuck a tiny rubber gasket in there. Water rolls down the edge of the window, on top of the frame and when it hits that corner it builds up and finds its way through the rubber gasket into the window frame. And then rolls down the rafters out on to the ceiling where it turns the plaster mushy. It was a half-assed design held for a while and then gave out. If we get a warm spell I plan to take the window out and re-frame the opening. I’m hoping to find a better solution for the metal cladding than the one Velux came up with.
The deer around here are on a high protein diet gobbling up the acorns that are all over our lawn.
I wrote a piece this afternoon on the Hi-Techs and posted it on the Scorgies site. And I talked to Martin Edic on the phone about doing a song with us at the reunion. That conversation will be our rehearsal.
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I remember riding my bike in the city and some kid saying, “Take a picture. It’ll last longer”. I was ten or so and I must have been starring at him. I thought of that incident today when I was making beans and rice. Peggi said, “That looks nice”, so I took a photo.
It’s really just the recipe right of the can or at least it used to be on the can before Goya reworked the label. It was called “Cuban Rice and Beans”. If I remember it right it calls for sauteing garlic, onions and pepper (I used jalapenos from our garden) in a little bit of olive oil and then adding black beans out of the can along with some oregano, roasted peppers (I used a small jar of these) and a few teaspoons of vinegar. We made Basmati brown rice and served the beans over it. There’s enough left over for tomorrow.
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The weekend zipped by and I never found time to paint so I’m thinking of taking Columbus Day off (just like the mail man) and getting some painting in then. I also want to fix the leak in our skylight if I can. It’s supposed to be warm again. It was almost eighty today but we spent most of the day down at the pool fixing the leak in our our pump.
Personal Effects was asked to play the Scorgies Reunion on Friday, November 21st at the German House in Rochester. We got our first rehearsal in last week and we dug up a bunch of old songs to teach Ken Frank (the newest PE bass player) and relearn ourselves. Most of the songs were fast! I found this slow one to try next week.
Each year Earl Carsorla comes home with his dad for the Jewish holidays and we get together at Maureen’s house to watch his tapes from the last Burning Man thing. I thought it was pretty funny that someone torched the man early last year but Earl and his buddies were kind of upset with that. This seems like the kind of event Dave Mahoney would like, lots of sun, young, healthy hippy type, girls/women and some nudity. I went to Woodstock with Dave and Earl’s footage had me thinking of Dave. I can only handle so much of the Mad Max, covered in sand, voyeurism and then I want go do something but I like hang out in Maureen’s kitchen or check in with my blog in her computer room.
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I’ve been chasing down a tiny little leak in our roof for the last few years. It is somewhere near our skylight and I have dabbed black roof cement everywhere up there. It is headed into the seventies this week so I’m thinking of getting up on the roof this afternoon and going at it again so that the stuff melts and seals this thing. These sorts of projects are more fun than web work these days.
As presidents of the neighborhood pool, we scheduled a pool closing get together for Saturday. Peggi sent out an email blast to the street and so far three households say they can’t make it. Why would anyone want to be president? In our case it is a rotating obligation but what is compelling Obama and McCain to do this? McCain wants to be Commander in Chief and I’m not sure why Obama is in this race but I am routing for him. I’m thinking of leaving painting class early so I can catch the action in tonight’s so called debate.
Who came up with this bogus format anyway? The hall is full of undecided voters and they get to ask the questions. Why should we care what anyone who has not been able to pick between these two yet thinks? I know that sounds kind of elitist. Giuliani threw out huge slabs of red meat to the crowd at the GOP convention. How about they pass out tomatoes and we decide which candidate to throw the stuff at? That’s not elitist.
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Our next door neighbor, Leo, put this wood splitter together. It is a Heathkit like the stereo systems that early hobbyists built. Peggi’s dad was one of those. He put their first amplifier together in the fifties. My college roommate’s father, Harmon Hoy, built one too and his son, Steve, brought it to school with him. One of the first things Steve said to me was, “Mind if I put one of these stereo speakers on your desk?” I had been gearing up to study in college because I never did that in high school and that question and it’s implications pretty much put an end to that effort.
I borrowed the wood splitter this morning to work on the wood we pulled up from behind our neighbors house when a few trees blew over. I only got through a few pieces when a bolt broke on the handle that drives the shaft and wood toward the blade. I bought a new bolt but we will have find someone to weld the piece fitting on the end of the new bolt. I’m thinkin of giving Sparky a call tomorrow.
Peggi made dinner with the grilled vegetables and pasta recipe from this morning’s paper and it was sensational. We have a Netflix double header of “I Walk With A Zombie” and “The Body Snatcher” for after painting.
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We spent the weekend in what some people are now calling New York’s Tech Valley“. The area stretches from Montreal to New York City and there we were equidistant from the two cities in the middle of a dead zone. That means no cell towers, no cable, no wifi and where we were, no land lines for phones.
Getting off the grid is exhilarating. I brought some old newspapers but they are out of reach here as well except for the an old issue of the El Paso Times that came in a box as wrapping for some framing that Shelley had ordered for her stick pictures. I was thinking how how cool it would be to be able to get a subscription to a variety pack of newspapers so that one day you would receive a newspaper from Tennessee and the next day it might be from Los Angeles or El Paso instead of Rochester’s Democrat & Chronicle everyday. I had a paper route for five years and developed a newspaper fix that I have never been able to shake. This may not seem as exciting an idea to most people as it it does to me.
We missed Mike Allen and his brother Lou at Mez this weekend. Mike was the lead singer for a bands in high school and I remember his brother being a great drummer. I was looking forward to hearing them do jazz standards.
On the way back into town we stopped in to say hi to Peggi’s mom. She had the Bills game on and they were losing. She tried calling her friend, Alice, to see if she wanted to join her in the dining room for dinner but she dialed Alice’s phone number on the tv remote and I watched as the channel changed to every station in Alice’s phone number.
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We took a leisurely, leaf peeping drive through the Adirondacks to Pete and Shelley’s place near Crown Point. The color was amazing. We lost track of time. Peggi thought she saw snow but it may have been a white cloud in front of one of the high peaks. We stayed too long at Cabin Fever in Star Lake, talking to Irene Baurschmidt’s husband. He was telling us that he used to do “set up” for the Invictas and he was going to do it again for them at an upcoming gig at RIT.
We were going to hook up with Pete and Shelley and drive down to her opening in Glens Falls but we were about an hour late. They were pulling out when we pulled in and we passed each other and then both turned around and then passed each other the second time. We didn’t even see them the second time and we weren’t sure that they had seen us the first time so drove on trying to catch up with them but we never did. We were right on time for the opening and Pete and Shelley showed up about a half hour later.
Shelley’s work is beautiful and we met a lot of their friends and neighbors that we have only heard about until now. We made dinner out of the little egg salad sandwiches. We were happy to that Glens Falls has a minor resurgence going on with a lot of transplanted New Yorkers settleing down here. On the Northway heading back up to Pete and Shelley place we tuned in Toronto’s “Friday Night Bandstand” on AM 740. This is a real radio show with a dj playing obscure singles and b sides along with the old familiar stuff. We only recognized about every other song or so and we were there in the first place.
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Just like the Soccer Moms and Joe Sixpacks, we were really looking forward to the debate tonight and it sort of disappointed. The bar had been lowered so far that Sarah won by not completely blowing it. And when you think about Dick Cheney, Palin did look pretty vice presidential. I have a pretty good track record of picking the losing limbo dancer and I hope I’m wrong this time.
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How do you go about drawing in a cornfield at this scale? The articles say it took the farmer eight hours to mow his corn field in this Palin pattern but how do they work on this huge scale? Does someone project an image on the field? I might want to do some big crime faces.
Sometimes its easier to find a site with Google even when you know the domain name. And then there are always the diversions. I found the Korean Pop Wars and just added this Popwar “Word Beanie” to my wish list all on the way to my blog.
Monica emailed me from the Memorial Art Gallery today. She needs the Marlene Dumas books back that I borrowed. Excellent timing because “Measuring Your Own Grave”, the Marlene Dumas book from her upcoming MOMA retrospective, just showed up from B&N online.
A bird flew into our kitchen window this morning while I was having coffee. It’s lying upside down on our deck. I have to get out there and give it a proper burial. I promise not to photograph it. I never got around selling my 3 mega pixel Kodak when I bought the 5 megapixel Sony that I had until I bought my new little Nikon so I gave it to Pete and Shelley when they were here last. They sent a photo of a mouse that they caught in a trap. I probably won’t post that either but I wanted to acknowledge receipt of it. It’s nice to know they are using the camera. It all happens with solar power up where they are.
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We had to do a Mapquest search to locate Greece Athena High School. We rarley get over to the west side of the city and we were looking for the Performing Arts Center, the same place where Bush gave his sales pitch for Social Security privatization. The whole town is red but we were trying to forget about politics for the afternoon and enjoy the opera.
The Barber of Seville has some pretty familiar music in it. The barber’s name is Figaro and we can all sing that. I heard a Queen cover in the overture too. I was sitting in the back while Peggi attended to her mom in the bathroom. I was there for most of the first act until an usher came in and told me that my wife was looking for me. As I suspected, we would now be heading back to her mom’s apartment so that she could get cleaned up. They never saw any of the opera. I’m down in the computer room on a Windows machine. We plan to head out again, this time to Mario’s, my mother-in-law’s favorite Italian restaurant.
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Like everyone else, the chipmunks are slowing down this time of year. Whether they are too fat and complacent from the the bountiful summer or just getting sleepy in preparation for winter hibernation, they are piling up at our door. And our cat, Ornette, is responsible for the slaughter. I guess he thinks he is doing a good thing, bringing them up to the door, like he’s doing his share to put bread on the table. At most he puts puncture wounds in their necks and only occasionally will he eat some of the head. I’ve seen some chipmunks get up and take off after this treatment. It’s kinda gross. Today there were three of them. I keep a shovel by the door to scoop them up and then I toss them out back in the woods.
9 CommentsWe had Bruce O’Neil out to look at a few of the trees around our house. We have some big ones and we wanted a professional to let us know if we should be concerned about any the ones that lean in on the open sky above our house. Our friends, Pete and Shelley, had one fall on their place in the Adirondacks. Bruce found a few dead branches that he said he could clean up but no real concerns. There was one caveat “Of course, I can’t do anything about an act of god”.
Bob Mahoney recommended Bruce but the funny thing is he had already done work for Rick and Monica across the street and Jerod down the hill so he felt right at home. Bruce told us he had done some work for Gary Lewis of the Playboys fame and when Bruce told him how much he liked “This Diamond Ring” Gary gave him a dvd of his father, Jerry, and him through the years on various tv shows.
When we finished talking trees I showed Bruce the name tags that I had printed out for my high school reunion tonight. Bruce graduated the year before me and knew a lot of the people in my class, especially the girls.
We went to a pre-reunion gathering last night at Holly Clarke’s father’s place in the city. Holly, up from Brooklyn, was voted best actress in high school. Her brother, Jordan, who graduated in Bruce the tree surgeon’s class, is Billy Lewis on Guiding Light. Holly’s father told us how he picks up women in Wegmans. He fumbles with meat packages and then asks nearby women if they know how to cook it. If he doesn’t see a ring on their finger, he recites poetry. It usually works.
Leave a commentDow down -504.48(-4.42%). That’s no big deal is it? I talked to Steve Hoy, our unofficial financial guy, and he thought some more banks would fall next. I was thinking we were at the bottom. Our official financial guy called from Merrill Lynch to “touch base”. Merrill was bought today by Bank of America so he wasn’t very reassuring. Maybe we should be panicking but I don’t really care enough to panic. I sticking with the “buying opportunity” picture.
I was up the ladder the other day when Bank of America called again “about our account”. How many times do you have to hang up on these guys before they leave you alone? Our home line is on the “Do not call” registry but those laws are apparently meaningless in India. I told this guy, “We don’t have an account with Bank of America and we don’t want one. What are you calling about?” And all he could say was, “Oh, I see what you mean”.
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There must be something a little more exciting than painting a house. The rain they had forecast for today never came so we read about Sarah Palin in the Times and then painted the rest of the day. It was a perfect night for Marge’s, balmy and in the eighties at ten o’clock. Peggi and I each had a Red Stripe and stood out back on the beach.
O.J. never did take the stand in his murder trial so I must have grabbed this newsstand display in the civil trial. It says “Daily News” on it but we were in L.A. I remember spotting it n Westwood. While we were out there we visited the Mezzaluna, Nicole’s Brentwood condo and O.J.’s palace.
O.J was a local sensation when he played for the Buffalo Bills and it’s good to see him back in the news. Can’t think of anyone better to kick around during football season.
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