Category: Dear Diary

We celebrated the solstice in our front yard around a fire with a few friends. Kathy told us about some elephant ear kale that she has been looking at in the miniature neighborhood behind the miniature golf course. That became our destination for today’s walk.

We saw a man sledding with his daughter in what was left of the snow on the hill near the old zoo. And then what we were guessing was a man and his grandson out on the golf course following the stream that runs through it. He was carrying a pole with a little basket on the end of it and a plastic bag. We watched him pull a ball out of the water. We stopped to look at a tree near Tamarack Swamp, one that was hanging onto all of its leaves. There was a tag on the tree identifying it as Quercus Bicolor Swamp White Oak.

We found the kale plants, still thriving in snow and an empty lot nearby where someone is building a new house. The sign out front had a sweet looking picture of the new home, two bedrooms, one bath $139,000.

We watched Real Madrid defeat Eibar last night and slide into second place in the 20 team La Liga, just behind our other favorite team Atlético Madrid. The matches have all been played without crowds but in Eibar, a city of just 27,000 in the Basque Country, two tall apartment buildings tower over the stadium with small groups of fans crowded onto the balconies.

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It is kind of a kick to be in the A Section of the New York Times. We found ourselves in the print edition this morning, in the front row (or pew) of this Harold Budd concert at Big Ears in Knoxville, Tennessee 2019. The photo is black and white in today’s paper and cropped as it is above. The online version of the story, Harold Budd’s obituary, has a bigger version of the photo in color.

We hardly knew anything about Mr. Budd but loved his set. We were there to see/hear Joan LaBarbara, Larry Grenadier, Bill Frisell, Meredith Monk, Carla Bley, Jack DeJohnette with Ravi Coltrane, Mary Halvorson and the amazing Art Ensemble of Chicago.

Hope you found a chance to see the Philip Guston movie. We watched it last night and loved it.

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I carried the metal frame of this table home from one of our walks. Not that it was heavier than a load of groceries but it was a little awkward to walk with. The metal was rusty and had previously been painted an army green color. I brought some Ornette Coleman cds out to the garage, where our only CD player is, sanded the frame and painted it Rustoleum black.

Back in 2005 we helped our friends, Pete and Shelley, build their new house in the Adirondacks. It was an opportunity to use the few skills I developed at my first job after school. I fell in love with the rough-cut White Pine wood Pete and Shelley were using and I asked them if they could get us some from the sawmill. They brought us a car load and I have found all sorts of uses for it over the years. I picked out three boards from my stack that were all approximately the same width and cut them to length for the table table top. I tied the boards together with three cross pieces on the bottom side.

Our arugula finally took a hit with last night’s temperatures. It was limp but still green and may bounce back with the upcoming 40 degree days. We picked a big bunch for dinner. Our pandemic garden has been amazing. We are still eating the tomatoes and peppers that we picked before the frost and let ripen in the window. We brought home the last of the romaine and spinach and the the Swiss chard, cilantro and kale and are still standing tall but we’ll finished them off in the next week. In four more months we’ll have seeds coming up for next year.

Aman’s, where we have been doing most of our pandemic shopping, gets their apples from nearby Williamson. We’ve been stuck on Honeycrisp for years. I’m announcing a shift of allegiance. We have switched to Snap Dragons. Meatier, crisper. They make you feel alive.

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2020 has been a bountiful year for collecting wood. So much so that when offered oak from a tree our neighbors had trimmed we politely refused. Upper 30s, lower 40s is perfect weather for splitting wood. The temperature is headed up near 50 tomorrow so we’ll take a break and go for a long walk.

Even with an hydraulic wood splitter it is back breaking work. As they say, the wood warms you three times. When you move it, when you split it and when you burn it. My favorite part is stacking, building corners and balancing one piece on top of another so the whole stack stays standing. It’s like a giant art project, a bit like performance art.

Maybe a month ago Frank De Blase told us he was doing  a piece for City newspaper on bands of yesterday and he sent sent us a few questions. ” “When was the Hi-Techs/Personal effects formed?” “What do you remember about your first gig” etc. Of course there is no City newspaper anymore. Not since Covid and all the restaurants and bars where people picked up the weekly have closed. But there is a website. And then last week Spevak sent some similar questions. I guess he’s doing a piece for WXXI. (Didn’t XXI buy City?) “How do you explain going from the New Wave of Personal Effects to the ambient jazz of Margaret Explosion? When you close your eyes while listening to Margaret Explosion, what do you see? What’s the most unusual gig Margaret Explosion has played? We’ll see if this one materializes.

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We bought an inflatable mattress back in March from REI. It is intended to be our guest bed but we have not had any guests. We inflated it last night for the first time because we were considering sleeping in the basement during the high winds. The winds died down before bed but there were plenty of limbs down this morning when we took our walk. We cleared branches from the the street and our paths in the wood. We finished at the garden where we found two huge pine tree branches stretched out across fence.

Peggi plans to make a Caesar’s Salad tonight with the Romaine we brought back from the garden. We did an early and late planting. We’ve still not had a frost so while she was picking that I picked a fresh batch of cilantro, some beets and an orange tomato. I roasted three of our red peppers and we had them on toast with Manchego cheese.

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The bucks are out of their minds this time of year. They act like bulls in a Spanish arena. We came across one in the woods this morning and I swear it considered charging us. They are driven by their hormones and their nose. I clapped to scare it off. We spotted another on our way home, an 8 pointer.

When we got to the golf course there was someone on the green with a leaf blower. I assumed it was the park staff but the guy put the blower down and putted. Down at the lake we crossed paths with few friends. My cousin’s husband stopped to tell us how much they are enjoying the paintings they picked up at my brother’s house, ones my my father left behind. And Chris Schepp pulled over to say, “Hey.”

Rick and I are pretty evenly matched but I lost the last three horseshoe sessions. We play two out of three and I had yet to win in November. I won the first game tonight, Rick took the second and even though we started a half hour earlier, at 3:30, it was dark by the time we were tied 17-17. I tipped our yellow chair over behind the stake so we could see the stake and we continued on. 18-18 and then I threw a ringer to finish it off, possibly the last match of the year.

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Almost hard to take in all this good news. With the election results, the Bills victory and then the vaccine announcement, our neighborhood (pod) is giddy. We celebrated with bonfires at both ends of the street. The weather too has been outperforming with over a week of near record temperatures.

We didn’t see the Bills game but we’re keenly aware of game time just by observing our neighbors’ habits. We watched one of our backlogged La Liga matches and Madrid Atlético beat Cadiz 4-o with Luis Suarez getting a goal and the amazing João Félix scoring twice. Atlético moves the ball with marvelous finesse while their coach, “El Cholo,” wills the play with animated spasms.

We met friends at Embark Craft Ciderworks in Williamson yesterday. We we’re halfway there when I realized I had forgotten my mask. We sat in the sun on the grounds of the 100 year old Lagoner Farms orchards. We shared a cheese plate and conversation and came home with a bushel of apples.

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My friend, since fifth grade, Joe Barrett, was in a Doublemint gum commercial. It ran for years and paid a pretty penny.

Walking the sandy beach at Durand in November is an absolute treat. Isolation during this pandemic has only deepened our appreciation of our surroundings. On a day like this with temperatures in the seventies we walked the length, turned around and walked it back. We doubled our pleasure.

Our favorite La Liga clubs all took a break this week to compete in the Champions League. Barcelona beat Dynamo Kyiv 2-1, Real Madrid beat Inter Milan 3-2 and Atlético, our new favorite team, tied Locomotiv Moskva 1-1. That last match, somewhat shockingly, was played in Moscow with a live crowd. The matches, one watched each day, were particularly rich when followed by election coverage.

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Today was a good day for looking up. With temperatures in the seventies and the sky a pure blue it was easy to forget about politics for a few brief minutes. As I took this photo a woman on Wisner came out of her house to ask if she could help me. I always say “no” in these situations but Peggi decided to defuse the situation by explaining that I was not taking a photo of her house and she pointed to this plane.

We hooked up with Kathy on Peart Avenue and walked with her down to the lake, over the bridge into Webster. At Durand Boulevard two eagles flew just over our heads. We talked mostly about the election and when we passed a woman that Kathy knew we chatted with her about the election. On the way back we spotted our neighbors out in their yard and we chatted with them about the election. Back home we read on the porch for bit and our neighbor, Jared stopped by to chat with us through the screen. Without exception everyone was depressed to learn that a larger turnout only meant more people were equally divided. But things are ever so slightly looking up.

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We headed down to the beach just after I took this shot and found quite a few people walking along it. We have had it almost to ourselves and we’ve become spoiled. It’s easy enough to socially distance down there but I forgot my mask again.

We harvested all our baby Bok choi and Peggi made a sesame ginger salad with it. We put three big bags in the refrigerator and then read that it is in the cabbage family so it would easily have survived our upcoming frost. Tomorrow we plan to pick a row of carrots, the rest of our peppers and the tomatoes that are still on the vine. We’ll let the kale, lettuce, arugula, beets and spinach duke it out with the frost.

Still having a hard time getting anything done. So many projects laying around in various states. The days fly by but time stands still. Even if you don’t get the damn thing, we are all affected.

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We lifted the lid on the firewood we have been storing for years and took a load out to our friends’, Jeff and Mary Kaye’s. We surprised them and helped them load it into their out building. We found this Amanita mushroom right by our feet when we got out of the car. It looks like it could contain the secret of the universe.

Jeff and Mary Kaye suspected the nearby, dead pin oak had made this spot magical. Their friend, Jerry from the former 2 Vine, had already taken a cluster of the mushrooms to one of his restaurants.

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I’d like to think this fish died of old age. Even that though is not so pretty from what I have seen. But fish do die of natural causes and this guy washed up along the beach at Durand. Even natural causes are grizzly.

We took the newspaper, a bag of peanuts, our books and our devices down to the pool this afternoon. The sun was out and the temps were in the mid seventies. We started by skimming the leaves off the cover and then rolled that back, brushed the bottom and then skimmed newly fallen leaves from the pool surface.

In the pool we marveled at the gorgeous colors of the sassafras tree, one of the first to change around here, just after the sugar maples. The sporadic clouds were zipping across the blue sky and I was thinking about making a time lapse movie. The brought down more leaves and both Peggi and swam from one leaf to the next, scooping up red oak, tulip tree more sassafras leaves. We did this for twenty minutes or so and then got out and skimmed some more before putting the cover on.

“They’re living in a dream, and I’m preparing
to be a ghost.” – Louise Glück

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Our doctor offered flu shots in his parking lot this weekend so we signed up. He’s up on the hill at Linden Oaks. We rolled down the window, rolled up our sleeves and a nurse in a mask poked us. We’re good to go.

We left the car up there and walked under the railroad tracks in to Penfield on Linden Avenue. There’s a few modern tech buildings over there and then Forest Lawn Manufactured Home Community, a dreamy mobil home park where even the stop signs are miniaturized. We made sure to walk up and down every street, Mainview Drive, Bittersweet Drive, Elderberry Circle, Miami Drive and Easy Street.

I find these tiny homes really attractive. Maybe its because I lived in a trailer for a few years in Bloomington. And I have fond memories of that easy going time.

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My neighbor and I have played horseshoes every other day since April. He just texted to say he would have to cancel today because he suspects he has a torn ligament in his foot. I hope that is not it for the season. Peggi and I spent a good bit of the last two afternoons down at the pool but the weather changed. Today we skimmed leaves off the solar cover. There were some dark spots on the green basil. We have both purple and green. And the bottom half of our tomato plants show signs of brown. But for now the bounty is as much as my t-shirt can hold.

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This BelAir, parked in front of the shuttered Sea Breeze Amusement Park, certainly caught my eye this morning. Maybe its because we’ve been so imersed in Perry Mason re-runs. We started with season 1 but found they really hit their stride in Season 2. The mid-century modern sets are showpieces and cars like these make grand entrances throughout the show. Wurlitzer music was coming out of the carousal building but the merry-go-round was not spinning.

Down at the lake we were surprised to see how much progress the town has made on the project to raise the grade between the lake and the bay. A train of dump trucks is piling stone and dirt along the shore, the boat launch is closed, the parking lot has been excavated and there is a fence around the whole thing. All this in the one week since we were here last.

While we were watching a bulldozer establish the new grade we spotted a sign on the lake side that read “Yoga Today.” we determined the sign was in front of Alayna and Reo’s house and then Martha O’Conner came down the steps followed by Alayna. Peggi and I had both forgotten our masks today so had a conversation at a distance.

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Our house came with a big fireplace, a wide opening surrounded by a wall of long, thin Roman bricks from floor to cathedral ceiling. We narrowed the opening by constructing a divider wall out of fire brick and put a wood burning insert in one side. We store firewood in the other. I bought some extra bricks because I like them so much. I used some of them out back to make a base for our chiminea. I modeled the base after Carl Andre’s piece at MoMA and did the same with this one out front. Peggi came up with the layout here. The metal rack came from our old fireplace. It looks like something the baby Jesus would lie in in a nativity set.

We found the little yellow basket on one of our walks and we’ve been using it, upside down, as a table for the a distanced second party, usually Rick when we play horseshoes. We ordered two metal outdoor side tables from Walmart and expect delivery of those tomorrow. Peggi and I had the first fire here and then we had Jeff and Mary Kaye over for a rip roaring fire. This will read like a nightmare to our friends out west. There was a beautiful warm night just a few days ago and we spent that under Kathy’s candlelit pergola overlooking the bay. That may be the last of those so if want to have a social life it will involve burning things.

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I’m loving these last few days of summer. In spite of Covid it has been one of the best. For the weather, for kicking back, for taking the time to smell the roses. Maybe all that was because of and not in spite of Covid. And I’m looking forward to cooler temperatures and the energy and motivation that goes along with that.

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We stopped down at the pool before heading out on our walk this morning. Peggi checks the chemistry while I brush the yellow, pool boy style, if I see any. Helena called us from across the street. She appeared to still be in her pajamas and she asked if we could bring some wood to the gathering tonight in their backyard. It struck us all as hilarious considering these two giant white oaks were taken down in her yard just a few days ago. They kept plenty of the wood and even split about half but it is not properly seasoned yet so we delivered a small load for the fire pit.

Peggi made the first batch of sauce this year with a t-shirt full of tomatoes that we brought back from the garden. I thinned our carrots again and we threw them in along with a big batch of basil and some jalapeños. .

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My father, who still had a “Kerry/Edwards” sticker on the bottom of his watercolor board when he passed, would be so happy that Biden was chosen as the Democratic nominee. Biden was always his favorite, his type of guy, his type of politician.

I joked that we’d be at my brother’s Covid Corn Roast in our Hazmat suits but that wasn’t necessary. He’s a mason and he had scaffolding set up as tables in his backyard so we could all sit the recommended distance apart. My brother and his wife came up from New Jersey so all seven of the siblings were there.

We surely would have talked politics if our parents were there but we didn’t. I’m really not sure where everyone stands. My sister-in-law loved “The Apprentice” and I really don’t know how she feels about this reality show. I’ve heard some family members badmouth Cuomo, Obama and even Nancy Pelosi. One sister-in-law told us she would be afraid of a Covid vaccine because she doesn’t trust the government. I assume it would have been safe to kick the Trumpster around but we didn’t.

Quite a few of our family members work in or for schools and the plans for a safe return are worrisome. They all were dreading the experiment.

We brought home sweet onions and corn from Schriener’s Farm Stand near my brother’s place. I guess I went to grade school with the guy that owns the place and they recognized me as a Dodd even with my mask. We cooked the corn tonight and recapped

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