Everything But Clean The Floors

Paul Dodd paintings for show at the Little Cafe
Paul Dodd paintings for show at the Little Cafe

Not these mugs again. This is just a little show at a little gallery. In fact it’s called the “Little Cafe”. But it has taken me most of the week to get ready for it. I made some small changes to one of the paintings a few minutes ago and I’m supposed to meet Peter Monticelli there tomorrow morning at eight to hang the show. I never see eight AM. This requires setting the alarm.

I counted the lights when we played at the Little last week and I’m bringing one piece for each light. Five will go on front wall behind where the band sets up. I settled the order tonight by spreading them out in our living room. I had a different five lined up here until Peggi put her two cents in. She was right. I might shuffle a few more around again when I get there.

I emailed the Democrat & Chronicle, City News and the Irondequoit Press about the show and Linda Quinlan from the Irondequoit Press called to ask if she could do an interview. She stopped by and we looked at the paintings. She was really sweet. She said she “did everything but clean the floors” for the paper. We gave her some Yogi Tea. We don’t read the fortunes anymore. I doubt those Yogi Tea people are real yogis.

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Apparition

Durand Eastman golf course in the late afternoon
Durand Eastman golf course in the late afternoon

The golf course usually feels like a jarring intrusion when it appears at the end of the trail in the woods near our house. Maybe it has something to do with the memory of being clocked by a golf ball as we crossed this hole a couple of years ago. Sometimes, though, the manicurred golf course appears like an apparition and it just knocks me out – without the ball to the head thing.

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Jumbo Shrimp

Jumbo Shrimp at Shamrock Jack's in Rochester, NY
Jumbo Shrimp at Shamrock Jack’s in Rochester, NY

Gary from New Math stopped by this afternoon with two carloads of friends that were in from out of town for the Scorgie’s thing. Duane Sherwood pulled in the driveway right behind them. We looked at photos from last night and laughed. Duane helped me get my camera set up to photograph some paintings with the Lowel lights that he gave me. We thought we’d eat at LDR but they closed at eight so we went down to Shamrock Jack’s. Peggi, Duane and I each ordered the fish fry.

Our waitress was wearing a yellow “Champion Drinker” t-shirt that she said all the staff wear on the days that Notre Dame plays. A guitar and drums duo scalled “Jumbo Shrimp” started playing in the front room. They each had plastic beer holders on their stands and they were having a great time at their job. They did a Marvin Gaye tune and “My Girl” and a bunch of stuff we didn’t recognize.

Peggi guessed the guy on the right was “Jumbo” and the guy on the left was “Shrimp”. The drummer played a cocktail set standing up and the guitarist sang and played acoustic guitar. The drummer sang back ups without a mic. They sounded like like the White Stripes on a cruise ship were the perfect capper to our rock and roll weekend.

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Baby Steps

Fall colored vines in Spring Valley
Fall colored vines in Spring Valley

Another beautiful day in Western New York and I spent most of it in the basement, painting. Time flies down there. Sometimes my paintings go fast like one in a day but my average must be somewhere near one every ten days or so because I just counted my recent stack and I have done about 40 in the last year or so, all 18”  by 24″ assuming the width comes before the height. I should know these things.

I did one yesterday that crashed on me. I should say “I crashed it”. It was nice, loose, expressive, colorful and fun but the chin looked awkward. I tried carving out the chin and in the process of trying to fix it I killed it. Not just the chin, the whole thing. I spun out of control, chasing bad spots that formerly looked fine until I managed to take the life out of the whole painting. Why would someone do that to their own painting? I set it aside and started another one today and I’m trying to drive carefully this time.

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Thank You Clarencee

Our house being built in 1948
Our house being built in 1948

Clarence Meyer came to visit this morning. He planned on coming last week but he had some sort of issue with his heart and spent the weekend in the hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Clarence rode up here with his daughter and son-in-law and they pulled into our neighbor, Leo’s, driveway. Clarence will be 97 in a few weeks and he and Leo were neighbor’s from the forties to the eighties. Clarence lived in our house. He built our house in fact.

We had me him once before but were really excited to see him. We watched as he walked up our driveway and we went out to meet him. First thing he said was,”the house looks good”. Leo must have told him that we painted it this summer because it is pretty much the same color. And then he asked, “What’s going on with this area?, as he pointed to our pile of blue stone near the front door. We explained that that was our next project.

Inside we showed him what we had done since the last time he was here and he showed us some pictures he took when he was building the house. Peggi ran in the other room and scanned them. Clarence told us he made the floors with trees from our property and he pointed to some of the trees that he planted. And he said he and his wife pushed the architect, Don Hershey, to put a cathedral ceiling in the living room. Clarence even liked my paintings. Most peope look at them and turn away. Clarenece looked at the dark Crimestopper paintings on the way and said, “I really like your work”. Clarence is our hero.

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Road To Nowhere

Road to Nowhere - Irondequoit NY
Road to Nowhere – Irondequoit NY

It was beautiful weather this weekend for checking up on a multimillion dollar project that the Town of Irondequoit has undertaken. We walked down Hoffman Road to the Spring Valley area where about ten homes are. A creek call ONT-112 flows through this area and it overflows occaisionally. Some people around here think this area was always a wetland and the homeowners here should not expect the State to spend our money to protect their property. Other (some long time) residents say this area is used to be dry enough fo neighborhood gardens in the lowland.

But according to the press release posted on Senator Schumer’s website, the Town blew it when they approved the construction of a near-by housing development 15 years ago. That project allowed about a hundred houses to be built on a hillside with an inadequate drainage system. The runoff from this development overflows ONT-112 so the town proposed a mitigation project that called for realigning the stream, elevating roads, adding culverts and erosion barriers. After ten years of negotiations the project got Army Corps approval and taxpayer funding and is now in full swing. And the press release says “it needed it to be rushed due to New York State requirements that work on the project be completed by October 1, 2008 due to trout spawning in the stream.” It’s October 20th and we didn’t see any troat down there.

I did a post on this subject a while back called, “I’m Against It” and Pat Meredith from the Public Works Department asked me to contact him for all the facts. I may do that but for now it is more fun to speculate without the facts.

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I’m Against It

That Ramone’s song comes to mind all the time but life is too short to complain about everything.

I would guess about fifty Town of Irondequoit dump trucks have come up out of Hoffman Road in the last few days all loaded with rich, dark top soil. Because we are so close to Lake Ontario the soil here is usually orange and sandy so we had to go down in the holler to check it out. It looks like they are just helping themselves to the centuries old deposits of wet fertile soil at the bottom of the valley that runs out of the Sewillo Road development and into Spring Valley.

We hike through this area and I thought the property belonged to Durand Eastman Park but I guess not. It is wet and marshy but I don’t know if it is an official wetland. The town has cleared a hockey rink sized plot with a bulldozer and loaded all that earth in their trucks. As deep as they have gone, it is still dark top soil. Whatever the project is, I’m against it.

If you go down there to check it out you might have to hold your nose as drive by the Town of Irondequiot Cemetery where Hoffman begins. They put so much fertilizer on this property you would think they’re trying to raise these people from the dead. When it rains tomorrow all that chemical will roll downhill toward the lake. Does the town really pay those dudes to walk around each grave stone with weedwhackers while they they smoke cigarettes? What are they going to do when everyone has fogotten who all those people were?

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We All Scream For Ice Cream

Tumil at Durand Eastman Beach performing with Joe plus N
Tumil at Durand Eastman Beach performing with Joe plus N

We rode our bikes down to Durand Eastman beach this afternoon to catch Joe Tunis as Joe+N at his fifth of six stops on his ninth annual day tour. He is seen here performing with his band Tumul. Cameron (on the left with the Miami Vice t-shirt) has real hair. Joe does too but his is short. The wig came out about a third of the way through their set. That’s Chris Reeg from the Blood and Bone Orchestra on the ground with the camera. The two bikes in this shot are ours. Cameron said he likes hiding behind stuff. The amps are battery operated. Joe from Nod was there. He told us he’s eating at Pasta Villa tonight. Bathers were just behind the bushes and there was a kid yelling for ice cream. His pleas were picked up on and sampled and looped.

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Irondequoit Melon

I managed to ride my bike home from Wegmans this morning with a pretty big watermelon under my arm. I made a fruit salad and we slugged it out in 4D’s office. Skipped the pool today and tried to make some progress on a few web sites. We talked about driving down to NYC this weekend and then we considered heading up to the mountains but we didn’t make any big decisions. Peggi made pesto for dinner and we got back to work.

We were planning on hearing Frank De Blase’s talk at the George Eastman House tonight. “Peel and Squeal Appeal” Va va voom! Beach bunnies, bathing beauties, hotrod honeys—Frank De Blase goes beyond the norm to photograph the female form but work comes first.

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I Want What The Bosians Have

Stone wall behind 145
Stone wall behind 145

The whole time we were working on the stone wall out back I kept looking at the other end of our yard  where, according to the neighbors, some Bosnians rebuilt the stone wall before we moved in. I can’t imagine how they did this but it puts our efforts to shame.

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Tropical New York

We’ve had over four inches of rain this week and that’s about all anyone around here can talk about. At least that is case with our neighbors. We haven’t left the hood in a while. We took a walk down Hoffman to see how “the fool on the hill” made out with all the rain. He was out in the road at the bottom of his driveway shoveling mud. Why the town ever gave that guy the green light to build on that steep slope is still a mystery.

It’s not not like it has been raining all the time, it has all come in these incredible tropical like downpours accompanied with thunder and lightning. We’ve lost power twice. We woke up to thunder this morning around three and shut the computers down ourselves before they got spiked.

Have you checked out Martin Edic’s global warming blog? There might be something to this.

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Suburban Hair

Suburban Hair at the corner of Culver and East Ridge Road in its final days
Suburban Hair at the corner of Culver and East Ridge Road in its final days

Irondequoit moved a 180 year old cobblestone building from it’s original location on East Ridge Road near Culver to the grounds of the town hall. Leo, our 91 year old neighbor and his lady friend, Bette, watched the move and they were both quoted in this morning’s paper. Leo remembers watching men shoe horses in the old Blacksmith Shop after school. Bette’s father ran a service station there in the thirties. Bette still lives nearby in the house she was born in.

Maureen called us to see if we might want to join her while she watched them take down the power lines and traffic signals along the route. We were too beat. We sat on the porch and read the weekend’s newspapers. And the whole thing just makes me sad.

The building was too close to the road and the Winter salt was coroading the foundation. It coud be because that portion of the road is now five lanes wide. It might also have something to do with the value of that lot to a Walgreen’s or Wegman’s competitor. It seems like only yesterday that Suburban Hair was standing where Walgreens is. Maybe the town hall can “charge the people a dollar and half just to see” it in the new location.

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The Whole World Is A Junk Heap

We woke up at 5:30 to what sounded like fireworks out back. The cats who sleep at the foot of our bed had their heads pointing in the direction of the road down below us. The sun was not quite up and I couldn’t see any trees in the road in front of our property so I went back to bed. I hadn’t fallen back to sleep when I heard sirens. So I got up again and noticed a car with its headlights on stopped near our neighbor’s property. I opened the garage and got my chainsaw out and headed down the hill. I was standing under our sagging power lines when the firemen showed up. One of them had a magic wand like thing that he waved at the downed lines that were stretched across the road under this huge branch. “These are live,” he said, “get out of here. We’re calling RG&E”. So I headed up the hill and went back to sleep.

We had just sat down with some coffee when our neighbor came to the door. He thought we should grab the wood that RG&E had stacked up down there but his pick up truck was full of scrap metal pipes from the repair job we did on one of the of our drains. (We didn’t find this out until we moved in but we own our short street and so we pitch in to keep it up.) We headed off to Krieger’s, the junk yard on Portland, to recycle the scrap. But first we stopped at our big footprint neighbors where we picked up the steel tubing from their old trampoline.

Krieger’s (now renamed Metalico) was a trip. If I was half awake I would have had my camera with me. It looked like the final scene from Road Warrriors where the whole world was a junk heap. People were lined up at the scales in overloaded pickup trucks with refrigerators and bycylcles and anything metal. A guy in a bright green suit held a magnet up to the stuff in our truck and then waved us on. We stopped in the office on the way out and waited in line with the sorts of people that do this thing for a living. We watched some junkies unloading their car trunk with a microwave and all sorts of appliances. We got forty seven dollars cash for our load and we didn’t get a flat tire in there.

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Showstopper

My parents stopped by and we sat out on the deck overlooking our unfinished stone fence project. I served them warm slices of the tortilla espanola that Peggi had just finished making. I helped peel the potatoes. We made two batches. One was destined for Jeff and Margaret Spevak’s post jazz fest party last night. The Spevaks served Sangria and tapas and our tortilla was a hit. Jeff played cds from the artists who appeared at the festival.

We use Gerry Brinkman’s (from the old Rochester Club and now chef at Hotel Wellesley, on the. St. Lawrence Seaway) tortilla espanola recipe. It’s really a simple recipe but it is sort of tricky to make. Ideally you need a hinged frying pan because it is made on a stove top and you have to turn it over and cook the other side before the potatoes, onions and egg have set up. We have such a frying pan. We bought ours online at La Tienda just before Peggi stopped eating eggs to combat her high cholesterol.

My parents had just been to an Historic Brighton luncheon where a speaker talked about the lost city of Tryon, an old Indian settlement on the mouth of Irondequoit Bay near where we live. Early settlers met the Indians here and traded guns for furs and that sort of thing. We sere sitting right under the wasp nest and I kept a watch on it without making parents aware of the thing. That would have been a showstopper. When they left I brought the hose in the front door, opened the back door to the deck and blew the nest away. Peggi videoed it. It was pretty anticlimactic.

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I’ve Been Experienced. Now What?

MX80 on iTunes juke box
MX80 on iTunes juke box

As I’ve noted here before, we do quite a bit of shopping in the produce section at Wegmans so I saunter around over there like I’ve been experienced. I reach to the back of the racks to get the bags of baby spinach and arugula with the date furthest out. I dutifully weigh the vegetables and enter the 4 digit produce code.  I shake the basil, parsley and cilantro before weighing it because I suspect Wegmans douses them with water to contribute to the weight you pay for. I notice the peaches, pears and apples are all way below room temperature when they are put out on the racks. They have been suspended at just the right temperature to keep them from ripening while they travel or sit in a warehouse. And then they ripen at an accelerated pace so timing is everything.

Peggi likes her bananas on the green side and I like them ripe so I try to buy two bunches. Pineapples, curiously, are sold per unit rather than by the pound so I try to guess which one is the heaviest and then take my top two picks to the scale. Some are denser so size isn’t everything. And how do they get six pound pineapples up here from Costa Rica and only charge $3.99 for them? They sometimes shoot up to $4.99 but they always seem to come back down. I put some asparagus back today because the scale said $4.69 for a small bunch. Guess it’s not in season anymore.

Strawberries are in season and the local ones are red all the way through and delicious but they are $3.99 a pound. I still bought three. Driscoll Strawberries from California which never seem to go out of season are on special for $1.50. They are red on the outside only. Makes me wonder whether they are red when Californians buy them locally.

MX-80’s “Mr. Watson” is up on our digital juke box and I’m trying to picture “the Mona Lisa on the head of a pin”. Peggi has a new sax coming today to try out. She bought the one she has now in 1978 and it sort of out of tune with itself. We’re waiting for the man.

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Into Oblivion

Bee hive on the back of the house
Bee hive on the back of the house

When I first spotted this hive it was much smaller and I checked it a number of times and but never found any bees near it so I let it go. Now when we step out on the deck one usually dive bombs us as a warning shot and then they leave us alone. The hive has grown to about twice the size and there are wasps coming and going all day. They run around this thing in a clockwise direction while others fly inside for a few seconds and then they take off. Who knows what goes on inside this thing. I know I have to deal with it before it gets out of control so I’ve been thinking about mounting the garden hose machine gun style onto something and turning it on from a distance and blasting this thing into oblivion.

We had ground bees last summer in the front and we let them go until someone told us that could die if they got stung so had to deal with it. I pounded there holes with a sledge hammer, hosed the heck out of the whole area and they just kept coming back. They dug new holes and must have hooked up with underground community because they would not be run off. They were there until the ground froze.

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Summer Project

Enjoying the summer will be a project. And then there are all those summer projects. First on my list list is looking at Cubism. Fred Lipp’s orders. More like a question really. “Ever look at much Cubism?”

I started last night with the Cezanne piece and continued my investigation tonight by looking at my recent paintings with my first impressions of Cubism in mind. I was struck by how obvious it is that I am still learning to draw. That’s what I saw first. And my paintings are really drawings. And then I saw a lot of room for expression. I’m still not sure what Cubism is. I’m guessing a more imaginative way of seeing and translating is probably an important part of learning to draw. So I am still on course.

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How Do You Do Mr. Lincoln?

We finished a rush job for a guy who kept making changes after accepting our proposal-acceptance form. We hadn’t even made some of the changes when a new email would come in telling us to ignore the last one and do something else instead. The job went way over budget and the guy wanted to make further changes after he gave us the check so I took it right over to the bank. Our branch is right across from the Wegmans on Hudson so I stopped in there to pick up a New York Times.

As I parked the car, I noticed an old man walking between the cars with his groceries. He looked sort of lost. I snagged the paper and came back out and and the guy was still standing there. He had four bags of groceries at his feet and he was clutching a five dollar bill in his hand. He asked if I was driving and I said, “Yeah”. He told me he lived in Seneca Towers on St. Paul. He had a hard time climbing in our Element and I kidded him about it. He told me his nickname was “Hercules” and he was 94 years old and then he launched into a few stories. He worked for the old Rochester Hotel. I grew up here and have no idea where that was. He started as a bus boy and then became a waiter and then a bartender. “The bar only served men in those days”.

He had a hard time hearing me and told me, “My daughter said, ‘Pop, you need a hearing aid’ and he said, ‘What?’ “. He laughed at his own joke. He met a guy at he hotel who was a hobo and they made plans one summer to hop a train. He told me you hop a train at the beginning of a car so when the momentum swings you back you don’t get flung off. They weren’t even to Syracuse when he got a cinder in his eye. They got off there and a pharmacist flushed it out for him. They wound up in Brookline, Massachusetts and bummed around for a while before he realized that kind of life was not for him.

I pulled up in front of Seneca Towers and he tried to give me that five dollar bill again. I said no and shook his hand. He told me one more story. When he was in grade school, a Lieutenant who had served in the Union Army during the Civil War came to speak to their class. He told the kids he had met Lincoln and had shook his hand. So before he left, he shook hands with all of the kids and told them that they could tell their friends that they had shook hands with someone who had shook hands with someone who had shook hands with Abraham Lincoln.

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Big Ball

Peggi with big green ball.
Peggi with big green ball.

Hoffman Road dead ends down at the park. It gets real low and wetland like at the end. There’s a creek that flows under the road and when it rains real hard it flows over the road. All sorts of stuff floats down the creek and gets stuck trying to get through the big pipe. We found a day plastic day glo sword a few weeks ago and big green ball the other day. We kicked it all the way home.

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Mr. Budweiser. We Have Your Number.

Snowman remains in April.
Snowman remains in April.


That’s the head of the snowman from yesterday’s entry on the left.

Apple was up six today. Somebody sees some light at the end of this tunnel but we’re still worried. We’re considering making extra house payments with the cash on hand instead of playing the horses. That way “if the market does go to heck in a hand basket”, as our ML guy likes to say, we’ll be protected from the rain.

I’ve been experimenting with hummus recipes that I’ve found online. I thought it was spelled “humas” at first and apparently a few other people did too. I made a batch of “humas” with jalapeños that was quite good. I’ve made four different kinds in last few weeks. I had a hummus, onion and spinach sandwich for dinner. I don’t like it when the first hit tastes like tahini. Three of these recipes have called for too much tahini vs. the chick peas. And the garlic gets overpowering fast. I like lime juice in there. Today I made the mistake of dumping all the gooey ingredients into the food processor without first putting the blade in there first so I had scoop it all back out. I’ll have my own recipe tweaked with a few more trials.

Note to the dude that drives down the dead end, Hoffman Road, and throws his 20 ounce Budweiser cans out the window: We have your number. Most of the snow disappeared today in the near 70 degree temperature and we found ten tall Bud cans along the side of the road. We are talking of making Burma Shave-like signs and sticking them in the ground down there. First one would read, “Mr. Budweiser”. Second one would probably get us arrested if we said what we thought.

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