Tag: Pete and Shelley

We spent the weekend in what some people are now calling New York’s Tech Valley“. The area stretches from Montreal to New York City and there we were equidistant from the two cities in the middle of a dead zone. That means no cell towers, no cable, no wifi and where we were, no land lines for phones.

Getting off the grid is exhilarating. I brought some old newspapers but they are out of reach here as well except for the an old issue of the El Paso Times that came in a box as wrapping for some framing that Shelley had ordered for her stick pictures. I was thinking how how cool it would be to be able to get a subscription to a variety pack of newspapers so that one day you would receive a newspaper from Tennessee and the next day it might be from Los Angeles or El Paso instead of Rochester’s Democrat & Chronicle everyday. I had a paper route for five years and developed a newspaper fix that I have never been able to shake. This may not seem as exciting an idea to most people as it it does to me.

We missed Mike Allen and his brother Lou at Mez this weekend. Mike was the lead singer for a bands in high school and I remember his brother being a great drummer. I was looking forward to hearing them do jazz standards.

On the way back into town we stopped in to say hi to Peggi’s mom. She had the Bills game on and they were losing. She tried calling her friend, Alice, to see if she wanted to join her in the dining room for dinner but she dialed Alice’s phone number on the tv remote and I watched as the channel changed to every station in Alice’s phone number.

We are headed up to the Adirondacks for a few days to visit our friends Pete and Shelley. We have a habit of going up there every year around this time to hang out and celebrate Peggi’s birthday. We usually hike or ski and this year Shelley told us to bring our skates. They have a marsh out behind their new home. We are hoping for snow. They don’t have a phone up there so we’re taking our chances. The winter here in Rochester has been sort of sad. January was seven degrees above normal on average and we have only been skiing once since Christmas.

There have quite a few letters to the editor of our local paper about the so called dead zone on the Northway, or Route 87, the highway that connects New york City and Montreal. There is a stretch where there are no cell towers and a few stranded drivers, trapped in a storm, have died there in the last few years. So some people have been demanding that the state build towers. Pete and Shelley did not move here to be connected. They are off the grid, the power grid, the water grid and the phone grid.

Happy Birthday Peggi! I will not be entering posts here for a few days.