Gone this day, 2005.
I will always wonder what kind of person he might have been.
Goodbye, snow!
A week after our epic snowstorm ended, much of it is finally gone! Of course, we got so much that much of it remains, but what’s left is slowly going away, and I expect we’ll be snowless again within a few days–possibly by the end of the week. After the snow finally stopped falling last Saturday (or was it Sunday?), we saw a quick warm-up where every day has been in the upper 40s, and today we had some heavy rain as well, which only helped melt the stuff away.
Also, the town got in on the act, sending front-loaders and dump trucks around to literally scoop the snowbanks lining the streets back several feet; the sum total of this is that my street–which was one lane for the first few days after the storm, and was later one-and-a-half lanes–is now two lanes again.
Here you see one of the dump trucks, escorting the snow to…somewhere. I don’t care where, actually. It just isn’t here.
If the prevailing weather holds up, we’ll all be wondering if we’re going to have a white Christmas, huh?
Share This Post
Thankfulness in 2022
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
Twenty-twenty-two has not been the easiest year I can remember…but here we are, still gathering. As I write this, I’m on my Second Cup Of Coffee, we have the Macy’s Parade on teevee (it’s WAY better in person, we’re kind of wistful that we’re not in NYC for it as we were seven years ago, and it occurs to me that it took eleven days in Hawaii to knock our five days in NYC in 2015 out of first place on our “Favorite Vacations” list), and later on, we’ll get a feast going.
There’s always something bittersweet about Thanksgiving, and I suppose it’s just the nature of life and the march of time that this quality grows each time out. The fact that we won’t be sharing turkey with Cane this year hits particularly hard…but there’s still a lot to be thankful for, a lot to honor.
Happy Thanksgiving, indeed.
Here’s a poem, Thanksgiving, by Ella Wheeler Wilcox:
We walk on starry fields of white
And do not see the daisies;
For blessings common in our sight
We rarely offer praises.
We sigh for some supreme delight
To crown our lives with splendor,
And quite ignore our daily store
Of pleasures sweet and tender.Our cares are bold and push their way
Upon our thought and feeling.
They hand about us all the day,
Our time from pleasure stealing.
So unobtrusive many a joy
We pass by and forget it,
But worry strives to own our lives,
And conquers if we let it.There’s not a day in all the year
But holds some hidden pleasure,
And looking back, joys oft appear
To brim the past’s wide measure.
But blessings are like friends, I hold,
Who love and labor near us.
We ought to raise our notes of praise
While living hearts can hear us.Full many a blessing wears the guise
Of worry or of trouble;
Far-seeing is the soul, and wise,
Who knows the mask is double.
But he who has the faith and strength
To thank his God for sorrow
Has found a joy without alloy
To gladden every morrow.We ought to make the moments notes
Of happy, glad Thanksgiving;
The hours and days a silent phrase
Of music we are living.
And so the theme should swell and grow
As weeks and months pass o’er us,
And rise sublime at this good time,
A grand Thanksgiving chorus.
Share This Post
Updates….
First: As of this writing (I’m writing this Tuesday evening, even though the post isn’t going live until Wednesday), we’ve done the major portion of shoveling ourselves out in the important ways. All doors are cleared and accessible; the mailboxes are accessible (by foot, there’s no way the mailperson is driving up to our mailbox any time soon); all the cars are out. Wow, this was quite an event.
This weekend we’re supposed to have rainy days in the mid-40s, so that will certainly help.
Second: There’s a new social media thing called “Hive” that I’m trying. I believe it’s mobile-only, but if you’re on there, look me up!
Third: Meh, there is no third. Just those.
Later, y’all!
Share This Post
Seventy-seven
Oof.
I don’t measure our snow, because…meh, I don’t need numbers. You reach a point where they’re not helpful…but here’s a sobering bit of numerical reflection. I just Googled Orchard Park’s average annual snowfall, and apparently it’s 114 inches, according to one site.
So, in the space of about 36 hours, we have received two-thirds of what we average for the entire year, in terms of snow.
Oof, indeed.
Luckily, we’re in good shape! I took the storm seriously as the forecasts started coming in. I loaded up on food and coffee and, yes, booze. We have power* and a comfortable house. We’re supposed to get another few inches overnight tonight as the weakening snow bands shift south again, and then this whole thing will be over sometime tomorrow. We’re forecast above freezing for the next bunch of days. Everything will be fine…eventually.
And that, combined with this from our County Executive, makes me think about something else:
There are problems in many streets and major roadways around here because people who insisted on attempting to drive someplace inevitably got stuck. Obviously this screws up all manner of important operations: plows, trucks moving the snow (when there’s this much, you really can’t just plow it to the side, it has to be trucked and dumped someplace), and the emergency vehicles that have to respond to calls. It’s not just people in regular cars; in advance of the storm, Governor Hochul closed major local expressways to commercial traffic, so now we have truckers getting stuck on major local boulevards as they attempt circumventing closed thruways. All of that can be partially chalked up to capitalism in some degree; we just can’t let business shut down for a day or two, can we?
But looking at County Executive Poloncarz’s tweet, I note his wording: “Please hunker down for a bit longer.”
This storm started in earnest around 8pm on Thursday night. It’s now Saturday morning as I write this, so we’ve been hunkered down for…not even two days yet.
So, my question is: Why do we as a society get cabin fever this quickly now? Is it “car culture” baked into our brains in 2022, where we get antsy to go out after just a few hours at home? Have we allowed our lives to become fast-paced to so great a degree that the very idea of spending a few days in our homes is somehow alien to us? I am by no means immune to this. I keep thinking, Wow, I really gotta suit up and get our cars dug out! I gotta get out there! And then I remind myself, Why? There’s no place that we have to be. We’re not even allowed to drive right now anyway. We have everything we need, right here, and we can go days without running into a NEED that has to be addressed. We’re good. Just take turns shoveling for a few minutes at a time, and meanwhile, just sit and be warm. Why own a personal library, if not in part for days like this!
So yeah, we really do need to do better as a society at living–really, actually living–in our own homes. We need to make our homes into less of a “base of operations” for our lives and more into actual homes. A home should not be a place where we find ourselves not wanting to be after just a short while. At least, that’s not what it seems to me a home should be.
* Oh, I didn’t mention that we lost power for about five hours yesterday morning! That sucked. Apparently a transformer at our local substation blew. Luckily, the NYSEG folks were almost dead accurate in their estimated restoration time: they forecasted power to come back on about 1pm, and it did, at 12:53pm. Nice. Our backup sump pump kept up just fine (though some work is needed in that department; more on that another time). It was fine, really…but a power outage on top of being in the middle of an epic snowstorm was more use of my brain-cycles than I really wanted to expend yesterday. When I finally crashed last night, around 10pm after my bedtime reading of about a page and a half, I crashed hard. Anyway, life marches on!
Share This Post
Fifty-four
At last report, a trained weather-spotter in our town reported snowfall of 54 inches to one of the local news stations.
This is what it looked like out my front door this morning:
That was nearly twelve hours ago. It has been snowing continuously since, dumping multiple inches an hour. We’re not due for any relief for another five or six hours, apparently.
I’ve never seen anything like this. Not even “Snowvember”, the big event that socked us for a week back in 2014, was like this. Or maybe it was…but Snowvember unfolded over two or three days. This is like that entire event, packed into a single day. I have made no attempt at shoveling out front; all of my shoveling has been in back, to give Carla a place for relief and so I can get at the furnace vents and keep them clear. And even that feels like a losing battle, because I’ve run out of places to throw new snow.
But I’ll have to go out again, at least once more this evening.
After Sunday we have a week of temps in the high 30s and low 40s, so we’ll be able to melt some of this off. But for now…I’m rarely one to indulge thoughts of moving to places where it doesn’t snow. As natural hindrances (not sure I’d call it a ‘disaster’) go, I’ll still take snow over wildfires, earthquakes, tornadoes, extreme heat, hurricanes, the likelihood of entire regions getting reclaimed by the sea as levels rise, and living in the company of many folks who vote for Ron DeSantis. But right now, all I want is for the snow to stop.
Just…stop.
I can take two days to dig, but only if it stops!
Share This Post
Ambient Noise!
Do you like using ambient sound generators at all? These have been around for years–I remember gizmos you could buy that made “running water” sounds that you could play softly overnight, and as these got more sophisticated you had choices: You could have a “babbling brook”, or “waves on the shore”, or “rainfall”, and the like, all in the same gizmo.
Now, of course, all of this is digital and you can do it anywhere, just with your computer or even your phone. It’s even better if you have a bluetooth speaker with decent sound. For the last few weeks at work I’ve been using the engine sound of the starship Enterprise-D, which gives my work room a pleasant rumble underneath everything else going on. Another benefit is that when playing a six- or twelve-hour long sound video, your speaker stays on. The bluetooth speaker I have at work has a time-out that’s really short, and if it plays nothing in that time frame, it shuts off. That’s kind of annoying. Playing the ambient sound doesn’t hinder my playing music; I just open YouTube in a second tab and play away. I might have to dial down the volume on the Enterprise, but that’s fine.
There are a lot of ambient sound videos on YouTube beyond the Enterprise. Here’s one I started using today, because it suits my mood this time of year: Ancient Library Room. This one has a crackling fireplace, it’s raining outside with occasional thunder, and you can even occasionally hear someone writing with a scratchy pen or quill. I like this one. I might pair it sometime at home with some pine-scented incense I have someplace.
And there are so many more! Like water? There are streams of varying roughness. There are ocean sounds, and you can make your workplace sound like a coffee shop, if you want. I love this stuff and it does help me focus a little, if mainly by shutting down some of the other persistent sonic interruptions and helping to ground my brain a bit.
Share This Post
The Hunter rises!
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?
Share This Post
The sky, over about an hour
I had to leave for work early today, and the stars were still visible through wisps of cloud.
Then, once I got to work and we were starting on the project that required my presence a bit early, I noticed the sunrise forming up behind The Store.
Buffalo has some gorgeous sunrises and wonderful skies.
Share This Post
“Well, I’m back,” he said.
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 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.
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.)
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:
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:
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 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.
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.
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….
“Well, I’m back,” indeed!