PopWars

The tree service guys passed through our neighborhood after the windstorm and pretty much touched base with their faithful customers. That’s all they had time for, clearing driveways or removing fallen trees from rooftops. The real cleanup and pruning had to wait until now, the second round.

We must have had two hundred trees fall in a half mile radius from our house, mostly huge pines and oaks. The oak that fell behind our neighbor’s house was big enough to supply them with firewood for ten years except they don’t burn wood. We were driving by their place yesterday and the tree surgeons were up in a cherry picker. The neighbors offered us some of the wood and we told them we’d take it but we’d have to get to it later. We were on our way over to Tami’s house. She is one of the aides at the Friendly Home and she had an oak fall in her yard too. We have wood coming out of our ears.

Everybody around here knows Steve Greive. An all around tradesman/handyman, he’s done work for most of the neighbors. He’s a member of the Fish & Game club and a self described “Rack-a-holic.” If he wasn’t getting a knee replaced he would have been combing the woods for deer racks this Spring.

Since a few of our neighbors have Lyme Disease, Steve forwarded an email to all of us about a talk on the subject at Monroe Community College. Peggi and I were the only neighbors who went and I’m glad we did. Since we walk in the woods most days we take the threat seriously. After the presentation by Erinna Chen, author of an upcoming book called “Lyme Light, shown above collecting ticks for research,” we may be looking for alternative walks.

I don’t know if The Penthouse (at One East Avenue) is open tonight but we were up there last Friday. It was First Friday and we walked down here from RoCo. There was snow on the ground and I think we woke the doorman. We spotted a poster for Herb Smith appearing in The Penthouse but the band was just going on break when we got off the elevator on the thirteen floor. Word was Herb was leaving to make a guest appearance with the cast of Wicked at the Auditorium Theater.

We ordered two Southern Tier IPAs and took in the vibe. This used to be Security Trust Bank. We had a safe deposit box here. It was taken over by another bank and then another and it felt the room had been liberated from corporate America. Floor to ceiling windows and spectacular view of downtown. We headed out to the terrace where I took this photo.

Downtown has changed so much in my lifetime. That’s the old Lincoln First building where Tim Schapp used to work. I remember when they tore down the Cavalier Restaurant to build that thing, now The Metropolitan. And the revolving restaurant. Was that the First Federal Building, “Home of the Hard Working Dollar.” My brother worked in the revolving restaurant after it stopped revolving. I think it was called the “Ice Factory.” And of course Sibley’s to the right. I bought my first pot from a guy who worked in the toy department there. This would be a perfect spot for a Margaret Explosion gig.

Jeff had been talking about this for a few weeks. He wanted to measure a big oak tree at the edge of a farmer’s field behind his house and he enlisted our help. We resisted watching YouTube videos on the subject. I gather there is one that suggests you climb the tree, start your stopwatch as you jump, carefully avoid limbs on the way down and stop the watch when you hit the ground. There would be some gravity based calculations that come into play at that point.

We have our own sources. We talked to our neighbor, Jared, about how he would go about measuring a tree. He suggested we use his six foot level and his telescope so we borrowed those. It seemed like his objective was to form a triangle at a distance from the tree and then sight the uppermost limb and determine the angle. From that we could calculate the height. “Simple Pythagorean theory stuff.” But what would we measure the angle with? The tiny transparent protractor I had when I was a kid seemed like it would leave a lot of room for error.

We brought a tape measure out there and we stepped 200 feet back from the tree. We found some old boards nearby and we stuck them in the mud so they formed supports for our level level. We pivoted the end nearest the tree in the air and the measured the distance from the end of the level to the top of the board. We never used the telescope or came up with the angle but we had measurements for two sides of the right angle and from those we planned to extrapolate to the 200 foot length. The equation would give us the height of the tree.

I didn’t get the best grades in high school but I did get 100% on the Geometry Regents. Back at Jeff’s we did the equations on paper while Jeff made soup. Peggi did the calculations, even the square roots, with her phone. The numbers were in the millions “of inches.” The tree is 98 feet tall.

It was so warm and sunny we dismissed the high wind warnings that were forecast in our morning paper and went out for a walk. The lake looked especially dramatic and it was probably because of the dark clouds to the west. We had just crossed Lakeshore Boulevard on our way home when it started pouring.

I stopped up to see my mom and found her at a table in the far corner of the dining room. She likes her privacy. She was working on a cup of coffee and smiled when she saw me. She said, “I was wondering if I was going to see you two today.” I was alone. Peggi was home doing my mom’s taxes in preparation for a meeting with our tax guy.

My mom’s menu calls for “Aspiration Precaution” so her liquids are nectar thick, including her coffee. It looked like she had eaten about half of her dessert already, I heard one of the aides call it “Lemon Mousse,” and she hadn’t touched her soup or whatever it was under the lid on her plate. She is as thin as a rail but she looked very pretty and I told her so. She thanked me and asked where Martha (her deceased sister) was. I told her I didn’t know. She said I should comb my hair and I told her I didn’t have a comb. She asked what was under the lid. It looked like something had been plopped on her plate with an ice cream scoop. I looked at the little printout on her tray and it said “Pureed San BBQ Chicken.” After not eating for weeks my mom seems to have regained some of her appetite.

We went down to her room after lunch and she said “This isn’t my room.” I said, “Yes it is” and I pointed to the pictures on her window sill. She studied the pictures for a bit and then asked me to put a third one on the long bed table. She wanted it in the middle and then had me move the big one to the end of the row of three pictures. She was always rearranging things in our home and she still has that bug.

I handed her the picture of my father and her on their wedding day and I told her how beautiful she looked. I pointed to my dad and said, “You found a good husband.” My mom looked at the photo for a bit and said, “Yes, I did.” “But then I lost him.”

When we plugged our tv back in after the power outage there was popping sound and the outlet went dead. I thought I had popped a circuit but the breaker was not tripped. A number of other outlets were also out so we hired a master electrician named Kenny. He fixed that problem fairly quickly but we noticed something strange. The power stayed on in the kitchen when we shut off its breaker. It was being “back-fed” as they say. One of the lines to the stove was also feeding the outlets. Kenny called us over and had us open a compartment under the oven. We had never noticed it. There was an old broiler pan inside and a cardboard carton of Pitted Prunes.

Kenny was afraid to touch it and he asked me to get it out. I grabbed a long stick and pulled it toward the front of the stove. Kenny suggested we take it outside before opening it so we all went out front. The first thing we saw were the E_Z Wider papers and we all laughed. It was the previous owner’s stash. He was a Kodak guy so the weed stored in film canisters and there were matches from the Convention Center and the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel along with a lighter. There was a used screen for a pipe and a plastic straw for the white stuff.

I can’t let winter end without posting this shot from last week. The parts were right out in the open in the park. Probably the work of a coyote. It may seem like a fairyland out there but nature can be brutal. We took a hike through Spring Valley, the undeveloped part of the park and there were so many trees down from the eighty mile an hour winds we couldn’t follow our regular path. We surprised a large gathering of turkeys while bushwhacking and almost didn’t make it out because the creek was so swollen our usual stepping stones were underwater.

Got this email from Wayne Kusy and I’m trying to place him. “I recently started going through my old album collect to see what I could sell on eBay, and I found your old Personal Effects poster. I expect to find the album soon. I am Wayne from Heavy Mental. I am glad to see you are all still playing, and still in Rochester!”

I did a google search and I’m trying to decide if he is the Wayne Kusy from the “Toothpick Museum” or this one. Maybe one in the same.