Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
This Is Like Really Mundane
We watched a Frank Lloyd Wright documentary last night and my favorite scene was the black and white footage of a Mike (cigarette smoking) Wallace interview where Frank’s says, “I put a capital ‘N’ on Nature. That’s my idea of God.” I would second that but skip the cap. It is absolutely beautiful in the woods today!
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I love this expressive snowman. It is either singing an aria or asking “Is That All There Is?” which just happens to be my favorite song of all time. In fact if anyone ids taking notes I would like it to be played at my funeral, along with George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and Eric Dolphy’s “Serene.” Everyone’s talking about the “Hurricane Blizzard” with “Heart Attack (heavy) Snow” so if I die out there in the driveway my affairs will be in order. I used Nolo’s “Willmaker” to to do the office business and I’m still trying to decide where my ashes should go.
Peggi’s mom is still going strong and with the help of an aid she was able to come out to see Margaret Explosion last night. We have been invited to dinner at our neighbor’s house tonight. We should be able to make it back up the hill even if we do get some old fashioned winter weather.
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Either this hawk was following us in the woods or we were following it. We got out early and the skiing was great. We have had more skiable days this year than any I can remember.
A guy stopped in Jerome’s this afternoon to pick up his car and he told Ted a story about hunting on a hundred acres of land that a lawyer friend of his owns in the southern tier. The lawyer had built four blinds up in the trees for deer hunting and the little shacks were so airtight that you could hunt in your t-shirt. And if you got bored waiting for the deer to wander by he had piles of magazines in there. He didn’t say what kind of magazines. This guy said the next time he goes down there he might bring his computer and look for a wifi connection.
They have wireless over at Jerome’s but Ted can’t remember the password so I was sort of left in the dark while they replaced the sway bar fittings on our Honda. Ted just tried calling Frontier to see if they could tell him what his password is but he got interrupted by a delivery guy and then a customer calling to find out if they had determined what was wrong with his car. Ted takes all these problems in stride and stays as cheerful as Barack Obama. One of the mechanics came into the office and told Ted that one of the parts they ordered for our car had a grease fitting and the other didn’t so Ted got on the phone and tried to get a matched pair with or without. He preferred the grease fitting but he couldn’t get one today.
An older couple came in to drop off one of their cars and they called Ted “Teddy”. A young couple walked in next. Each person that walks in sets off bell as they cross the threshold of the waiting room. They were picking up a Mazda for the guy’s father. Jerome’s had rebuilt the engine and Ted told the kid he wanted him to check the oil every time he get gas for the next 1500 miles and then bring it back for an oil change. The kid told Ted he was majoring in “New Media Design” at RIT. When we were alone I asked him what “New Media” meant and he said , Basically making things look cool on the web. I spend a lot of time doing Flash.” Mike, the guy that was doing the work on our car stuck his head in to say that Albany was getting twenty inches of snow and 150,000 people were already without power.” He seemed kind of excited about this. In the paper this morning one of the local weathermen was quoted as saying “This is going to be a monster of a storm”. There are probably kids going to college to learn how to hype the weather.
As I was paying my bill Ted said try •••••••••••••. It worked and I got online. Hint: It has something to do with a vintage car.
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I love this quote from J. D. Salinger. “Most stuff that is genuine is better left unsaid.”
There was a lot left unsaid in the movie we saw last night at the Dyden Theater. The lead character walked down the street in the opening scene and Peggi and I both leaned toward one another and said, “Brad” (a friend of ours). The movie was made in Uruguay but could have been set anywhere in the world. The heavy metal tinged love story was universal. The main character was a store detective like our niece. They watch shoppers and employees on video cameras that can zoom and focus on a nose picker (according to our niece). There was very little dialog in the movie but we got the picture.
We came across this tiny little snowman today on one of our favorite ski trails. I stopped to take a photo and a snowboarder whizzed by me. We could use some snow. Our neighbor told us 49 states in the union had snow. We’ve got some,enough for skiing, but I’d like to see the three feet they have in Pennsylvania.
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We usually have a January thaw but fifty degrees is ridiculous. That glacier above, what’s left from the snow I shoveled off our roof, used to be the size of a truck. I have our iTouch set to check temps in five locations, Madrid, New York, San Francisco, Rochester and Paradox (up in the Adirondacks). Today Madrid was the coldest at 39 and New York the warmest at 55. I had to “restore” my iTouch because since my nephew put all these apps on it I kept getting a message that said I wasn’t authorized to update. I found that I could get my purchased apps back by pretending to buy them again and then clicking “Yes” when it it says “You have already bought these. Do you want to download them again for free”.
Our charge card gives us points that we can use at big box stores and we were thing about picking up one of the Apple Tablets when they get announced. We could use it as a reader I presume and I’m looking forward to drawing on it. We are sort of early adaptors and I know that comes with some risk. I say “sort of” because we still don’t have a cell phone (“refuseniks”) but we did buy the first iPod and we still have it in our car. We bought one of the first home computers, an Atari 1040 and we bought the first Walkman cassette player. It was made of metal and it had two headphone jacks on it. Peggi and I kept getting tangled up in the thing. And we’d each decide to go around different sides of a utility pole and get the headphones ripped out.
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After meeting with our financial adviser we had dinner at Peggi’s mom’s apartment in the Bistro. This is my favorite restaurant in the city. Is not open to the public but I suppose you could eat here if you said you were thinking about checking in to the Senior Living facility. We had a delicious portabella mushroom dish and peppermint tea for dessert. The table next to us ordered the flaming banana dish and we all cheered when Tracy torched them.
The Bistro’s walls are decorated with framed posters of black and white French café photos and they set a perfect mood of civilized escape. We had just watched a 2003 film on Henri Cartier Bresson last night called “An Impassioned Eye.” He is my favorite photographer by a long shot. His photos are full of life and perfectly composed. They feel sculptural to me. They read at a glance and from a distance as well. He spoils you. He is a master.
Back in Peggi’s mom’s apartment I took control of the remote an we hopped back and forth from the English Premier League’s Everton vs. Arsenal game to America’s Funniest Home Videos. Did you know Paul Dodd is “England’s Number One Soccer Yob?
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Delta Sonic is in tough competition with the new Fastrac that open next door to its Main Street location. But it’s even tougher to figure out which station has the cheaper gas. Delta Sonic’s low price is available only with a car wash and Fastrac’s low price is only available if you use their card. The “Spotless Restrooms” at Delta Sonic hardly seem possible.
I plan to add this photo to the “Signs” section that I have been quietly building on Popwars. I have a “Signs” collection on the Refrigerator but that site became unwieldily so I am slowly rebuilding it on PopWars where I am using php to update the navigation and MySql to populate the pages. I wrestle with every stage of this thing and then get interrupted by paying work so it may be a few years before launch.
John Gilmore rode downtown with us last night for the Margaret Explosion gig. He was telling us how he stuck his own handmade sign on the outside of the building he worked in at Kodak Park. It read, “This Space Reserved For (his ID badge number)”. So had his own private parking spot in a crowded lot. He quoted an oft used but new to us corporate saying, “Better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.”
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These guys bailed me out by installing a new hard drive in my iMac. I suppose I could have figured out how to install a new drive and maybe even put in a bigger one but you have to take the glass screen off and the procedure looks pretty messy. Besides I had six months left on a three year AppleCare (like ObamaCare for computers) program that I had never used so this was all paid for. When I booted the machine it went through the welcome in many languages routine with the hip hop music and then asked if I wanted to restore from a Time Machine back-up. I did and it all came back, the desktop photo (wallpaper) that I took from the balcony of the Getty in LA, my docs and apps as they were, and even the stuff that was in my trash. My father just called and said he corrupted a large “Pages” file. I told him to go into Time Machine and bring it back from the dead. Peggi made Duane’s Faux Duck recipe for dinner, Mun-Cha’i-Ya (Peking Vegetarian Roast Duck in a can), and now we’re back in the saddle.
I found a copy of Monday’s New York Times in our mailbox this morning along with the local paper. That set me back awhile. It was a half price come on for daily delivery and it sounds pretty civilized but what about work? Speaking of avoiding work, we skied through the woods and then along the ridge on the west side of Eastman Lake in Durand. We stopped a bunch to look around and I felt that snow euphoria come over me. You know how you feel perfectly comfortable, probably near numb, when it’s only 15 degrees or so and you just want to lie down in the snow? We used to do this as kids in a snow fort or a big bank and I did it up in the mountains once and lost the car keys so those days are over. But I dig the dreamy sensation.
We’ve been checking out the snowshoe people, watching how they just walk right up the side of a steep hill they want to and how their big footprints just dart off the trail in all directions. Snowshoes are in are future. Won’t have to worry about going out of control on our skis and doing one of those violent smack downs. I think we might need special shoes to strap the snowshoes on so this might get complicated. Maybe next year.
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The spinning color wheel that has been haunting me for the last week was an indication of hard drive failure. At least I think it was the hard drive. It got so all I got was a snowy screen. I was concerned that the the system was corrupt and that maybe my Time Machine backups would also be compromised but Marco at the Apple Store assured me that I would be able to do a full restore when I get my iMac back. I should have just looked at the Time Machine folder on my back up drive and I wouldn’t have lost sleep last night because all the files are there. I hadn’t really poked around in there because I pictured it all compressed and unreadable.
When Marco lifted my iMac out the box he spotted the small black and white photo of Peggi, sitting behind her Farfisa and in front of a Vox amp, that I had stuck on top of the Apple logo at the bottom of my screen. He said he was a musician too. He played with friends while going to school in Ithaca but hadn’t hooked up with anyone to play with since moving here. The Apple store was mobbed and they were running about twenty five minutes late at the Genius Bar. The place was packed and I felt like I was in China with all the busy workers running around in blue t-shirts swiping credit cards in their PDAs for the well heeled shoppers. A kid was holding a seminar in the middle of the showroom. Six middle aged students sat on stools at table with their iPhones and laptops. They were learning how to sync the two.
We stopped at Talbot’s on the way home and Peggi returned the sweater she got from my mom for Christmas. Peggi always says my mom has great taste in clothes but this sweater didn’t fit her body type. She found a suitable replacement and picked up an extra top. I found a comfortable chair to sit down in and I noticed that I was wearing the shirt that my mom gave me this year. They had no WiFi in the store but they were playing great music, all black pop, two Michael Jackson tunes and a great cover of “Some Kind of Wonderful”, a song by the 1960’s Rochester band, Soul Brothers Six, later covered by Grand Funk Railroad.
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I carry a camera with me most of the time. Well, all of the time, actually, except when I’m swimming or sleeping. And so I come home with a lot of photos but I throw most of them out and keep the good ones. I have a big photo library. I keep minis on my iPod and I’m thinking about going “pro” at Flikr so I can see them full screen at other locations.
My father, on the other hand, goes out to shoot photos, mostly birds and moss and barns. He brings home 200 photos at a time and he keeps them all. I thought I was bad but he has manage to fill his computer’s hard disc to the breaking point. I had him sort his hard drive by file size and 90% of it is in his iPhoto library.
So I ordered an external hard drive (one Terabyte for $79 from Buy.com) and found this link on Apple’s site that explains how you tell iPhoto where the library is once you move it out of the “Pictures” folder. You can’t do this in the “Preferences” like you do in iTunes when your music is on an external drive. You basically have to confuse iPhotos by moving the Library and then starting the app with “Option” key down so you can tell it where the photos are.
There is something spooky about that “iPhoto Library” folder. Unlike other folders, you can’t open this one. And yet there are 180 gigs worth of photos in there. I do like the application though. the way it keeps your photos in the original camera format and yet you can adjust the color, crop, straighten, add tags, publish to Flickr etc. The slide shows look great. I would much rather look at a photo on a monitor than print it out. It amazes me that Kodak is still in business.
New Years day is supposed to be near 40 degrees and rainy but the skiing conditions right now are excellent. We skied into the park, around the ponds and up the lake. I took a few photos. I’ll put one up here when I get back home.
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The band was hoppin’ on Wednesday night at the Little and we made the double bonus. We sold six cds and won some new fans. Mike Allen took me out to his car at break time to play some new arrangements of songs he plans to perform. He had recorded keyboard and tone generator bass lines. They were snippets but the essential parts of the songs and here he was singing live over those instrumental parts while in the drivers seat, head back and eyes closed. He did a jazzy version of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’ and merged it with a blues tune so the lyric veered into a guy catching his woman (Mommy) making it with another guy. I was knocked out.
John Gilmore made a copy of the Dylan Christmas album for us. I’m afraid Bob has gone soft in the head because the playing and arrangements are so stock they put a spotlight on the Bard’s croak. His “Who Stole the Kishka” version of “Must Be Santa” is the only decent track. I read a review of “The Jazz Loft Project” somewhere and ordered it for Christmas. I dove into it this morning and love it. In the mood, I was playing a Charlie Parker lp that Roy Sowers loaned us and Peggi’s mom asked, “Is this Christmas music?” Peggi said “Yes” without flinching.
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Winter is just getting started and yet the days will get longer and the sun will start to move higher in the sky tomorrow. The “pagan” solstice is reason enough to celebrate but then the early Christians had to glom on their agenda and now it seems like the whole US economy is depending on the Santa Claus crap. Although they deserve it the Catholics resent the Christmas toy invasion. I offer my favorite Christmas story as proof. My first grade teacher, a nun at Saint John’s on Humboldt Street, asked for a show of hands on “How many kids still believe in Santa Claus?”
Dancing to Bobbie Henry and the Goners at their Christmas show on Saturday night at Abilene was a perfect holiday celebration. That would have been enough but gluttony calls. Better loosen your seat belt.
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I kind of miss doing half assed reviews of Italian Restaurants the way we did for the Refrigerator. I use the past tense “did” because that project became overwhelming. It was a hobby that spun out of control. To update it or add content is a nightmare. So many of the primary pages were done in the days before CSS an it is just begging to to MySQL or at least have php includes so I can update and add to the navigation as we continue to build without ripping apart thousands of pages. I have reworked it in my mind. I just need a little time to tidy it up.
But that isn’t even the real reason I stopped. Peggi is controlling her cholesterol with diet but to do so we have pretty much cut out cheese and butter which brings me to Henry B’s in downtown Rochester. The four salads in the “Insalata” all have mozzarella, Caesar dressing with parmesan reggiano, goat cheese, toasted pine nuts and Gorgonzola cheese.
We asked the manager which of the entrees didn’t include cheese or butter and recommended the “Pasta e Pollo” (Chunks of roasted chicken breast in a shitake mushroom and Marsala sauce. Tossed with rigatoni and finished with Parmesan Reggiano. “It only has a slight amount of butter” and parm. It was pretty amazing. We started with their flash fried “Calamari Fritti” which was tender, meaty and not as spectacular as Mario’s grilled calamari. We ordered a second pasta dish, “Gnocchi alla Mamma” (Homemade gnocchi tossed with tomato basil sauce and Parmesan Reggiano) that was delicious but there wasn’t enough sauce. And the “tomato basil sauce” looked and tasted creamy. Enough! This dish packed a wallop. We were with Peggi’s mom and only she had room for dessert. The portions are HUGE and we brought home enough for two addition meals.
I asked our server whether the three photos on the wall at the end of the room were all the same because I desperately wanted to find some difference in them because one didn’t bear the the decorator’s touch of repetition. They are all the new owner’s grandfather and they were all exactly the same. So this dude is competing with Henry B (on the door in photo above) who I gather was the original owner’s grandfather. And what’s with the painful smooth jazz with drum machine music? We heard the satellite station dj and we heard him back announce a David Sanborn track. My dentist has better music than that. We reviewed the former location and incarnation of this place few years back. I remember l liking it quite a bit.
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We’ve been walking our neighbors dog while his owner recuperates from a bout a pneumonia. A few of our neighbor’s jaw’s dropped when they saw us stroll by with this guy. Some folks are dog people and some are not. Having been bit a couple of times, I fall somewhere in between and we sort of know which neighbors don’t care for them.
There must be a trick to getting the leash (rope) to stay on top of the dog but we haven’t figured that out yet. It keeps falling under the dog and then he steps on it while he walks and then pees on it when he lifts his leg (every other tree). Leo has named all his dogs Tasha. There were three before we moved here and there have been four since. This time Tasha is a boy and we keep saying “she” and then correcting ourselves. It gets tedious. Now I know how Johnny Cash felt. the new Tashas have all been part of Lollypop Farms” “Seniors For Seniors” program. Some are in rough shape themselves and they don’t last long. And then there was the one that bit me on the ass and then turned on Leo. He was taken back.
We visited Leo when he was in the nursing home and he told us he thought he had “passed the physical therapy test and he was going home”. He was sitting up, waiting for the doctor to stop by and sign the release, when we walked in. While we talked a nurse called us out in the hall to tell us that he had packed his clothes at least five times and they had to keep unpacking them and hanging them back up. He is a tough customer and it’s good to see him getting his strength back.
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It was a trip to come home to this photo from Kathy Palokoff’s iPhone and this email from Frank Paolo.
“So there I was all day telling myself positive sentences about seeing your launch tonight. I actually got it together, showered/shaved, found some ‘not too dirty clothes’ (they passed the sniff test), and got on the bus at 6:15. I confidently (pretending) walked down the street where Daisy Dukes is and NO ABELIENE – no one ever heard of it. Not in Moes, the Little – nobody in the whole East End. I slouched and stumbled back to my digs disappointed I couldn’t be there and give you a cheer. BUT I tried – I REALLY tried. One of these days I will again try to get good at life.
paolo.”
Funny that Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad (about three names too many) had a cd release party tonight for “Live Up” while we had ours for “Live Dive”. Maybe we can trade cds. I like that band. Thanks to all you that climbed the stairs at Abilene tonight. Thanks to the honorary Margo members, Jack Schaeffer and Phil Marshall for sitting in. Thanks to Bob Martin for the movies.
In the chill out room, after the show, the iTunes shuffle dj stacked Television (with Richard Hell still in the band), MX-80’s “Follow That Car”, Nod’s “I Get Around” and Wire’s “I Am The Fly”. Wow.
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How many leaves do you have to see before you realize how much beauty is packed into each one, in color and form, change, movement and purpose? And how about just the slap-it-on-the-scanner two dimensional shape! I remember pressing leaves between sheets of wax paper when I was a kid. I wonder what happened to those old files. Can’t help but think of Matisse every time I see these white oak leaves.
We stopped out at the Mercer Gallery at MCC to see Jim Mott’s show. His tiny paintings, most smaller than ten inches at their longest, are beautiful in person but especially so when they aren’t behind glass. They look really good online too and you can order prints for Christmas gifts.
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Cars will never gain look as good as used to. It’s impossible. Forget about it. The weather has been so nice around here that many of the vintage cars and motorcycles are still on the road.
Peggi and I were still in our pjs, reading the morning paper, when we spotted a doe prancing across our front lawn. A big buck was right behind her. We counted eight points. He was drooling and and fixated on the doe he was pursuing. The doe looked about a year old like maybe one of this year’s crop and she was staying ahead of the buck but not exactly sprinting to get away. I grabbed my camera and we went outside in our slippers to watch. The doe went around our neighbor’s garden and was just standing there when the buck decided to leap the five foot fence and dart across the garden. We lost track of them both and can only imagine what happened.
I stopped in Staples to pick up some toner for our Canon S9000. It takes the BCI series and you need six cartridges. The six pack was $90 and individual cartridges were $15.99. Like George Eastman, they give the machine away and make their money on the peripherals. The store was eerily quiet and it crossed my mind that they might be going the way of Blockbuster as people take their business online. We had a $25 Staples coupon on the kitchen counter and I checked it before I left but it had expired on October 31st. It was only good online anyway. Stables even competes with themselves. While I was waiting to pay for $147 worth of toner the guy behind me said, “You have the same printer that I do. I love that printer. I buy the ink online though. You’ll save a bundle.”
Kevin Patrick posted a mono version of Lou Reed’s, “Walk On The Wild Side” this morning. You might want to give that a spin.
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We take our favorite walking path a lot less often since Bulldozer Man drove through the park with his workers and heavy equipment. That path is now a road so we’ve been heading out in new directions and running into some interesting animals. We came across this alligator log this morning.
And a few weeks back we came head to head with a dog on a path in Durand. The dog wasn’t backing down and Peggi was about to turn around and go back. It kept coming toward us, growling and barking. I figured an owner was probably nearby so I yelled out, “Call your dog”. Nobody did but the dog turned and left us alone. A little further down the path we ran into the owner with the dog now on a leash. The owner said, “Don’t worry. This dog won’t bite you”. And then he let the dog come toward us while still on the leash and he told us to look into the dogs eyes. He said, “You can tell if a dog is going to hurt you by looking into their eyes.” Please.
Today we had confrontation with Jagger who lives near the park. He and his owners were outside and just like before the dog came running toward us. The owners call, “Jagger, Jagger” but Jagger keeps coming toward us. We hold our hands in the air because we have seen what dogs’ teeth can do to your hands and we wait for the owner to grab ahold of the dog. Then they say, “Don’t worry. He won’t hurt you”. But today they upped the ante and said, “he doesn’t do this to everybody”. He’s really very friendly. I said “OK. It’s our fault.”
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I usually say “no said “ok” today went for the surround X-ray today because the equipment was brand new and the hygienist told me it was about as much radiation as I would get outdoors if it was sunny. In fact the whole office is brand new. My dentist had to move because a company bought the building he was in so they could put up a Walgreens. The town voted down the Walgreens but my dentist had already moved. His new place has TVs everywhere and a coffee machine that makes one cup at at time of the brew of your choice. I chose “Black Magic”. It was so good I had another one on the way out. Did I tell you my dentist’s name is Rocco and his son named his Italian restaurant after him? We ate there and I had Chicken Cacciatore as good as Charlie Coco’s mother used to make.
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Our neighbor was was asking us if we had ever taken the trail that runs along the river on the Saint Paul Boulevard side. We said we had taken the trail on the other side but we didn’t know there was one on the east side. We parked at the north end of the zoo and headed through the woods down to the river. This is near where serial killer, Arthur Shawcross did his thing and the trail is a little forlorn but it is beautiful. We didn’t make it down to the lake but we had some stunning views of the river valley. It still looks pretty much the way it must have to the native Americans.
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