My favorite constellation has almost always been Orion the Hunter–and I only hedge on this just a bit, because maybe there was a point when I was in first grade and just starting to learn about constellations that I preferred the Big Dipper or some such thing.
Orion is a winter constellation, and it always starts showing up in my sky around the mid-point of autumn–that is to say, it shows up at a time when I can see it around that time. It’s possible that Orion rises first at midnight or something…I don’t really know. All I do know is that the other morning I left for work and it was early enough that the stars were still visible. I glanced southward…and there was the Hunter.
And here he is, in all his glory!
By the way, I hope that once in a while you take time to stop and reflect on the fact that most of us now carry around a device on a mundane basis that is capable of astrophotography. That’s kind of amazing, isn’t it?
It’s Monday! And as promised, The Wife and I are back from our too-brief (aren’t they all?) weekend getaway. After the general shit-show that was Summer 2022 for us, we really needed a nice getaway. And that’s exactly what we had. The focus was the Ithaca Apple Festival, with a few stops here and there along the way.
I really love Ithaca. It’s by far my favorite place in New York State thus far in my life.
I always plan on taking a lot more photos in Ithaca than I do! It’s weird, really. I just get caught up in people-watching and looking at all the wonderful stuff that I don’t get my phone or my camera out much.
Now, Taughannock Falls? That’s where I take a bunch of pictures. Here are a few from this year.
Lots of raptors on the wing at the falls. I assume these are turkey vultures, which are amazing to watch in themselves in places with high cliffs, like here and at Letchworth.A lovely couple! Hopefully next year we can walk the ravine trail below and finally see the falls from below. The Wife’s surgically-repaired ankle isn’t quite up to that yet, but we’ll get there!
We stop at Taughannock Falls every year. It just doesn’t seem right to visit Ithaca without stopping here. There’s something about all the streams and water and waterfalls and rocky gorges and deep verdant forests in this region that add up to it being my spiritual home.
Starting now, of course, there’s also a bittersweet quality to this place. We brought Cane here several times, while on our winter winery trip. I’d like to think that he had some hand in making this year’s visit almost perfect, with the beginnings of the autumnal crisp in the air and the perfect golden light.
We also stopped at a winery that had a great view! The wines weren’t to our taste, but the view sure was. (Nothing wrong with their wine; they specialize in dry wines, and we generally prefer the other end of that spectrum, being more into fruity and vibrant and sometimes outright sweet.)
Part of the magic of the Finger Lakes is that from atop the ridges you can see for miles and miles, and in many spots you can’t see the deep lake that lies between you and there.
On Sunday we set out for home, with a couple stops along the way, including the Barnes&Noble in Pittsford. This is the most beautiful B&N that I have ever seen:
What a store! An employee asked me at one point if I needed help finding anything, and I laughed and replied, “No, I need help NOT finding things!” Good thing I only go to this store once a year, really.
Of course, we ate very well on this little trip. We always plan our meals, partly because when we’re traveling we want to eat well, but also because The Wife is celiac which always requires some extra planning. Luckily we’ve found a bunch of places all throughout the region that have gluten-free offerings…though sadly, one of our favorites, is closing for good in a few weeks. Ithaca’s Waffle Frolic has been a beloved stop of ours for almost as long as we’ve been going to Ithaca at all, but the owners have decided to move on. We’ll find other options, but a special shout-out to all the times we stopped there for fried chicken and waffles! I remember when I first heard of that combo and thought it was the weirdest thing ever, until we tried it at Waffle Frolic and…suddenly, we got it.
I think this winter I’m going to have to figure out my own version of it.
I won’t subject you to pictures of all the food we had, but just a couple things:
That’s a Cuban sandwich from the Broadway Deli right here in Lancaster, NY. We love to start our road-trips east with a stop here for lunch, before we exit the 716. They have a wonderful sandwich menu, and yet somehow they’re never mentioned in local “Best Sandwich in Buffalo” rankings! They’ve got my vote, though.
We also love getting breakfast on Sunday morning at a place in Pittsford called Simply Crepes. (There are several locations around Greater Rochester, by the way.) They have a terrific menu, lots of GF options, and…well, if you’re looking for hearty-and-filling-and-not-exactly-healthy in your breakfast (and you absolutely should look for those things in a breakfast, maybe not all the time, but once in a while), you should look no farther. Here is my “Crepe Madame”, a crepe loaded with cheese and ham and smothered with white sauce and topped with a fried egg and served with two pools of bacon jam:
Ate this around 10am. I was not hungry again until dinner.
I really love places like Simply Crepes. There’s something about local breakfast joints (they’re not just a breakfast joint, to be fair), the kind of place where you go on a cold fall morning to cup your hands around the coffee mug before the food comes. It’s the kind of place that fills up first with kind-of bleary-eyed people mostly clad in soft flannels and their hair in messy buns, the kind of crowd that you can watch wake up as they drink their coffee and eat their breakfasts. The mood shifts later on, once the post-church “Sunday Best” people start showing up. The new mood then isn’t bad, per se, but it’s more formal and less patient.
Simply Crepes, Pittsford, NY.
Simply Crepes is located in Schoen Place in Pittsford, which is an old industry and trade center right on the Erie Canal. I imagine barges laden with goods used to arrive here, or empty barges arrived to be laden with goods; there’s a grain elevator down the street that has been converted to office space. The area has a terrific vibe that I think Buffalo is trying to capture with its inner harbor area.
Coffee in glass mugs.
I think that my favorite New York region, after the Finger Lakes and Buffalo Niagara, is the Erie Canal corridor and the old rail corridor that runs sometimes alongside the Canal and at other times ten to twenty miles south of it. All those old towns along the Canal and the once great railroads have such wonderful age and character to them, with a sense of weathered history connecting all of it. You can see plainly that in a lot of these towns the boom-times are long over, but you can also see that the people still there are working hard to keep their towns stubbornly alive. Yes, there are a lot of empty buildings in states of decay, but there are also lots of said old buildings with obvious work going on and “Coming Soon!” signs in the windows, announcing new businesses. There are a lot of people who are unwilling to give up on New York, and I salute them, each and every one.
Let’s see, what else? I got a little writing done this weekend, in the hotel room. Not much, but a little. As long as the words keep trickling, it’s fine.
Also, it was a great weekend for my new fashion concept of the last year or two, the “Renfest Cottagecore” thing I’ve been working on.
There were a lot of people in Ithaca wearing overalls, so I can honestly say that they’re finally back! Their banishment during the 2000s and quite a bit of the 10s made for a “lonely soldier assigned to a solitary remote outpost” feel for me during a lot of that period. I hope they stick around now that they’ve recovered from their banishment during that mostly-ugly era of form-fitting, show-every-curve period of fashion that was really pretty unpleasant.
At the bookstore. Maybe a future author pic!
The Universe actually gave me some direct confirmation of my fashion concept yesterday: an employee at Trader Joe’s complimented my shirt, and then, half an hour later, an employee at Barnes&Noble said, “I love your overalls!”
It’s the little things, isn’t it?
Anyway, we’re home now. I’m not back to work for a few days–I always make my autumn vacation a good long one–but we’re home. Back to a bit of normal life, some of which we actually missed. Which things would those be? Well….
This means that I have spent one year alive for every point scored by the Buffalo Bills in the AFC Championship Game following the 1990 season. (They beat the Raiders 51-3.)
I have one year in for each point scored by both teams combined in Super Bowl XLVIII (Seattle 43, Denver 8).
My age is the uniform number of Dick Butkus, Randy Johnson, Ichiro Suzuki, Bernie Williams, and former Buffalo Bills guard Jim Ritcher, who played 16 years in the NFL and was on all four Buffalo Super Bowl teams.
I am as old as Roger Moore was when he filmed Moonraker, and Martin Sheen when JFK, for which Sheen recorded the opening narration, came out.
I’m the age of Hector Berlioz when his great oratorio L’enfance du Christ was premiered.
I’m the age of Steven Spielberg the year his The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Amistad were released.
And I’m two years shy of the age Kathryn Joosten was when, following her divorce, she decided to chuck it all and try acting.
I have completed three sets of 17 years.
I have lived longer than the age of eight US Presidents at the time they took office. (T. Roosevelt, JFK, Clinton, Grant, Obama, Pierce, Garfield, Polk.)
I am now half as old as Ambassador Sarek is in the Original Series Star Trek episode “Journey to Babel”.
Fifty-one sounds like a lot, so why do I feel like I’m still just getting started?
“Why love, if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore: only the life I have lived…The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.” –CS Lewis (Sir Anthony Hopkins), Shadowlands
I’ve been thinking about that quote, and that movie, a lot today.
My friend Jason Bennion, who really should be a writer (and whose edits always make my books better), offered this on Facebook the other day. (He lives in Salt Lake City, so his experience of summer is quite different from mine.)
It always takes me by surprise.
One-hundred-degree days for weeks at a stretch and nights that aren’t much cooler. And then a cluster of rain storms and suddenly something has changed. The days are still hot but they’ve softened somehow, like a campfire you’ve stopped adding fuel to. And the nighttime… well, it’s just different now. And somewhere deep in the back of my head, there’s an ancient nudge trying to tell me it’s time to break out the leather jacket and long pants, time to get back to school, even though I’ve been done with that routine for 30 years.
Fall is coming, and one more of my allotted summers has slipped away..
.
Not one of Jason’s evening skies in late summer, but I think I can feel what he’s getting at….
Our summers often pivot on two fairs: the Sterling Renaissance Festival, and the Erie County Fair, which we attended on Friday the 12th. (I would have posted about it sooner, but then that dumbassed virus showed up and put its feet on the furniture and drank from coasterless glasses and got crumbs over everything and was basically just a big asshole.) While The Wife was unable to attend Sterling because of her recent foot surgery, she was able to attend the County Fair, by virtue of a day-long scooter rental.
This year we were graced with probably the most perfect weather for the Fair we’ve ever had: it was clear with low humidity, there was a light breeze all day, and the high temperature was 72 or so. It was simply a perfect day for going to the Fair.
We had a mostly great day, though The Wife petered out quickly by the end (it was her first major long outing since before her foot surgery in June). There are some notable things from years past that aren’t there anymore, which does happen every year but seems more sadly common moving forward. The biggest thing I missed this year was the giant model railroad exhibit that used to always be set up in the Grange Building; hopefully that manages to return next year. Also, the lovely old building that used to house the woodcarving exhibits is entirely gone, having been demolished for safety reasons, which is a shame. The Fair is still a huge amount of fun and can easily kill and entire day, but it did feel–this year and last–a bit more wide-open, which is to say, a bit more empty. I’m hoping for rebounds in the future, but…who knows.
After reading lots of online complaining about prices, I have to report that while prices were up, they did not seem wildly up to me. I spent roughly what I usually spend in terms of food, plus a little. But I never got the sticker shock that I had at the Sterling Renfest when I saw that the turkey legs that were once $9 are now $16. They also rolled parking and admission into a single price, which eliminates the need for money handlers at the parking entrances and makes getting into the park that much quicker, but folks are complaining about that online too, for reasons I can’t fathom.
Here are some photos from our day at The Fair. I have more available in a Flickr album, if you like this sort of thing.
Proper Fair attire.
Wide view of one of the main junctions at the Fair. No, I did not eat at Mr. Sticky’s. Sticky buns and cinnamon rolls are wonderful, but I can’t eat such heavy stuff at The Fair.
I always love the ole firefighting equipment.
This guy won SECOND place for woodcarving! I’d have given it first, which went to a duck decoy. (Yes, it was a VERY well-done duck. I just love this dude better!)
Beautiful chess board! I like how this carver took inspiration from, but did not reproduce, the classic Staunton pieces.
Always a favorite thing: the quilts.
Mural on the Grandstand exterior.
We don’t eat NEARLY as much at The Fair as we used to. Ribbon fries, though, are ESSENTIAL.
Dinner is always Chiavetta’s. I make some mean Chiavetta’s in my backyard, but the pros just somehow always seem to get it done just right.
Sheep. (I am not convinced that sheeps and goats aren’t somehow the same beasties, just at different points in their lives. I mean, I know they’re not, but some part of me remains pretty sure they are.)
The Fair is most beautiful at the end of the day and into early evening. We left shortly after taking this. Hopefully next year we can manage a little later stay….
