PopWars

Yesterday the beach was quiet (above). Today it is packed. We can hear the power boats from our house. Every picnic shelter in the park is full. Sound systems are cranked. Skunky weed is in the air. Groups, clustered by nationality, are picnicking along the lake and the beach itself is crowded. We found ourselves saying excuse me as walked along the shore.

It is already past four and Rick hasn’t asked if we’re going to play horseshoes today. I’m thankful for that. I’ve been carving out files for an upcoming cd. We had hoped to put both an lp and a cd out at the same time, each with different songs. The album has been at the pressing plant for five months and I’m just getting going on finalizing the songs for the cd.

We have a World Cup match to watch, Spain vs Switzerland, so we’re staying away from the news. Our red lights are on. I’m wearing my Spanish jersey. Peggi is making Shrimp Adobo and we’re chilling some Rioja.

We upped our garlic game this year. We planted one hundred cloves last October. We picked the scapes in July, roasted a few batches and made pesto with the rest. Today we picked the heads, one hundred of them. I built a rack in the garage, just two long skinny boards tacked to the rafters and the plants are drying upside down over my table saw.

After recommending it for years we rewatched “August, Osage County” and it was just as good as we remembered it being. Fantastic script, amazing cast, it feels real and maybe that’s why no one has thanked us for the recommendation.

Our friend, Pete, asked us to pick up some paper at Rochester Art Supply – Italian Bristol 100 lb., 14 x17″ sheet by Fabiano. While downtown we stopped at Fuego for a Cortado. Over at Pete’s we found him sitting at his drawing table and acting like he had turned the corner after seventy-three days on the sixth floor of Highland Hospital. Our next stop was Brad Fox’s on Royal View Drive. We had taken his stereo amp to Hi-Fi Lounge last year to have a short addressed. It worked for a while but the short came back, one of those intermittent problems that convince you the problem has been addressed when it starts working again. I would not want to be the technician trying to track that down.

The first boathouses lined The Canandaigua City Pier that was built in 1848. By 1888, over eighty small wooden structures lined the pier. In 1903, the pier was enlarged to accommodate train and trolley tracks to service the steamboats transporting farm produce and passengers along the lake. As cozy as they look today the Boathouse Owners’ Association enforces the strict rules prohibiting people from living in them or using them as cottages. We were in Canandaigua to celebrate our anniversary. We walked up and down Main Street before having dinner in the Lake House and after dinner we explored the pier before driving home.

You can see the smoke filled air in the photo above. The Air Quality Index has improved considerably since yesterday but the Canadian fires are still burning so it will probably be back. Our niece and her boyfriend came up from the NYC area and spent the weekend with us. We were sort of afraid our lifestyle would be too low key for them but it turned out that was just what they were looking for. We took walks around Durand Lake and the beach to the north and then the following day, east down Seneca Road to the bay. If they were here for a third day we could have walked west to the river. We swam in the pool, family stopped by, beer cans piled up and they left for the week’s work.

Pete and Emily were out walking before Peggi and I this morning and they sent us this picture of tires that someone had dumped in the park. The two piles had been cleaned up by the time we got there and we spent some time trying to figure out how they got into the park because the yellow gates are locked at dark. We talked to a dog walker and he speculated that they came in early in the morning just after the park workers opened the gate and before all the park goers arrived. That would make them pretty bold on top of really rude.

In January of 1975 Peggi and I left Bloomington and moved to Rochester, where I grew up. We lived in an apartment in Tim Schapp‘s house on Dartmouth Street. Peggi worked in my uncle‘s supermarket when not working as a substitute teacher. She monitored a study hall in my brother Francis’s class. He had lived with us for a summer in Bloomington because my parent’s were having a hard time with him. I got a carpentry job and mowed lawns for a bunch of the neighbors on Dartmouth. I mowed Mr. Cohen’s lawn next door. You can see his house in the picture above.

I took a photo class at UR and wound up with a lot of black and white shots of mundane stuff around the house, like our laundry in the picture above. Interesting to see the entities we were willing to advertise for. These days I wear plain white Fruit of the Loom t-shirts all summer. I get them in six packs from Amazon.