The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Last week my Brother-in-Law visited us, and one of the things we did was go to the Botanical Gardens, which is always a terrific time, as well as a great place to practice photography! I organized my edited shots from that day into this Flickr album, but here are my favorites from that day:
I have a lot more photos from last weekend that I haven’t even edited yet! If you’re looking for a hobby that will eat some time, photography’s the one, folks.
The answer: “This type of widescreen photograph can be created in Lightroom by stitching together multiple photographs from a single vantage point.”
“What is a panorama?”
Last Sunday I was at Chestnut Ridge park on a wonderfully clear day, and thus I was able to take a series of shots of the entire Buffalo-Niagara region, with visibility all the way to Niagara Falls, ON and beyond, and I was further able to experiment with creating a panorama in Lightroom. And here it is:
I know, that’s…tiny, as presented here. For the full-size enlargeable version, go here. I’m very happy with how this turned out! For one thing, I never realized that the OLV Basilica in Lackawanna can be seen clearly from up there.
In Buffalo, the eclipse was simultaneously an astonishingly powerful and deeply disappointing experience. Clouds were in the forecast all along, but for the last several days, local meteorologists were constantly offering up reasons for optimism…which turned to “Sorry, we’re not clearing out until after totality, bummer, but it’ll still get dark and stuff.”
I know these folks don’t control the weather, but for all the technology and scientific expertise they have, it sometimes seems that their ability to offer up any kind of reliable forecast has been whittled down to timeframes measured in hours, or even minutes. I know some people around here were lucky enough to get enough of a view of totality to get a photo or two, but I wasn’t that lucky; all I caught of totality was a brief glimpse, maybe half a second.
Those four minutes or so of darkness, though? They were amazing. Truly, astonishingly amazing. For every cynic out there who has been saying things like “It’s just like at night, what’s the big deal,” I can’t say it any other way than to simply say, “It’s not just like night.” There was something qualitatively different about those four minutes…in how quickly they plunged over us, in how the flocks of gulls in the parking lot across the street went mad, in how everything in my circadian-rhythm loving body was screaming, “This isn’t right.” I can see how eclipses were terrifying moments for humans, for millennia, before we learned what they are and how to predict them and thus rendered them a thing of wonder.
There were other feelings, too. I couldn’t help thinking of Mom and how she would have loved to make it to today. She loved the sky and celestial happenings. I remember going to see if we could spot Halley’s Comet back in 1986, and she loved the Perseid meteor shower. She would often send me emails: “Go outside tonight and look at the moon because Venus and Mars are going to be right by it.” She would have been amazed by today, even if she would have been really annoyed by, as she would almost certainly have phrased it, “all these goddamned clouds”.
I’ve had this post in my head for years, and heck, it’s time to get it outta my head and into here. (Why haven’t I written it? No real reason.)
Anyway, a few miles from Casa Jaquandor is a big shopping plaza called Quaker Crossing. Here it is, via Google Earth:
Looks like any other big suburban plaza, right? And sure, because let’s be honest, suburban shopping plazas are always terrible. But this one is somehow especially terrible. Usually these plazas are terrible because they are relentlessly optimized for cars and are almost anti-pedestrian to the point they feel almost punitive if you’re trying to walk, but this one is somehow terrible for both cars and pedestrians.
OK, let’s get the pedestrian shittiness out of the way first, because it’s easy. Note the gargantuan parking lots, each of them in the middle of their clusters of stores and businesses, with large driveways bounding them. This means that if you plan to shop at multiple businesses at Quaker Crossing, you are extremely discouraged from parking in one place and walking to each business. Those large buildings across the top (north) contain a Target, a Dick’s Sporting Goods, a Kohl’s, a Premiere liquor and wine store, and a Regal Cinemas. Over in the east cluster, you have a large furniture store, a large pet store, and a bunch of smaller stores. The two clusters are separated by a four-lane driveway right up the middle, and this whole plaza sprawls out over a huge parcel, so if you need to go to both Kohl’s and the pet store, there’s no way you’re walking from one to the other. This plaza has virtually no walking infrastructure.
So there you are at Quaker Crossing and you have no choice: you’re driving to the place and then from one side of the plaza to the other. This experience is awful, too.
Here I need a marked-up diagram to illustrate the awfulness:
We start with the red circle, before we even enter the Quaker Crossing plaza. That’s the exit ramp from southbound US219, heading onto westbound Milestrip Road. This used to be a single-lane ramp that yields onto Milestrip, which is four lanes from here to its terminus at NY 5, a few miles west; that’s fine. They added a second lane at the foot of the ramp to merge into the new third lane on Milestrip when the plaza was built, to accommodate people who are coming off 219 for the purpose of entering Quaker Crossing. Again, fine!
But they put a traffic light at the end of the ramp!
So now, instead of a simple yield-and-merge situation, there’s a damned stop light to content with. Why they did this, I have no idea; I have literally seen zero other stop lights at the feet of exit ramps that are designed for merging. Now, if the ramp’s terminus was angled perpendicular to Milestrip, I would get it. But this light makes the entire exchange counterintuitive, and on busy days actually makes things a mess, because there are times when you have to start aggressively braking as soon as you exit 219S. This is nonsense. That light is stupid.
Then there’s the yellow circle, which is the main entrance to Quaker Crossing. This actually isn’t super-bad. It’s a standard 4-way intersection with lights and turn-arrows. Also, if you look closer, just west of the main entrance to Quaker Crossing is a second entrance, just one lane, basically an exit ramp from Milestrip into the western end of the plaza. We use this a lot if we’re going to the theater or to Red Robin, both of which are the westernmost businesses here. Back to the main entrance, though: it’s four lanes itself, since most people entering the plaza have to be able to turn into the left (western) portion of the plaza, or the right (eastern) portion. That makes sense…but one problem here is that for accessing Quaker Crossing via Milestrip, this is the only exit point. That means that just about everybody leaving Quaker Crossing will have to come to this one intersection. Is that horrible? Not entirely…and there is a back way out, which goes to Lake Avenue, but if you’re not going that way, that’s not a big help. Still, the exit isn’t the worst thing in the world…until you factor in the blue circle.
That’s the main intersection from which people leave the short entrance road to either turn left or right to go to wherever they mean to go in Quaker Crossing, or where people have to come if they’re leaving. The problem here is twofold: First, it’s quite close to Milestrip, so there is no time for traffic to funnel out from the main entrance on busy days; second, there are no signals there to manage the traffic. So you have four lanes each way, with turn lanes, and you have busy side driveways with people coming and going, and all of this is dependent on motorists doing right-of-way correctly. This is one of the most nerve-wracking intersections I know of, and I’m honestly surprised I don’t hear of more fender-benders there than I do.
What should they have done? My contention is that they shouldn’t have built that intersection at all. All traffic should go all the way to the northernmost point on that road, and then have people turn, maybe even using a roundabout to guide and filter the traffic through the plaza. That initial intersection is almost always a mess, and it didn’t have to be.
Now, that aqua-colored line? That’s the main driveway through the western side of Quaker Crossing. It, too, is terribly designed; curves a-plenty, entrances to side lots seemingly every hundred feet, and stop signs galore that stop traffic one way but not the other. Why didn’t they design the entire plaza with all the businesses centralized and a single driveway running around the perimeter, like a ring road? Or cluster all the businesses into one large walkable plaza? I have no idea. But this entire place is really a negative miracle of modern architectural design and planning: a giant retail plaza that is terrible to drive and impossible to walk. I honestly do not know how they pulled that off, but pull it off, they did.
Photos from a short walk at the Orchard Park Railroad Depot yesterday. The Depot, you may remember, has been lovingly restored after years of neglect after the trains stopped running, and the tracks are now a rail trail.
These weren’t the only photos I took! I actually took a bunch, but of those only these were the real keepers; some others were actually practice photos I really don’t intend to do much with. I was using a new ND filter that stops a ton of light, and I used it to practice a bit of shutter-speed work as well as a couple of shots of the sun, just to get used to using it before the Total Eclipse of the Heart–er, Sun happens on April 8.
Later this week, they’re saying we may get snow. I mean, fine, winter’s not technically over yet, but today, as I write this, is St. Patrick’s Day, which is generally my personal cut-off point beyond which I am pretty sick of snow. Though this year hasn’t produced nearly enough snow for me to be sick of, so…I guess we’ll see how I feel.
Last weekend was a good time to be out and about in Buffalo. We visited the new Buffalo AKG Art Museum, which is the renamed, updated, and expanded Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The Albright-Knox was always a favorite place of ours, and the museum got some good news back in the 2010’s at some point: a wealthy benefactor named Jeffrey Gundlach gave the museum a big pile of money, which led to the museum’s expansion. A whole new building was erected, new art was collected (the museum’s primary mission is modern art), and last year the newly re-done Buffalo AKG Art Museum was finally re-opened. (The COVID pandemic had a predictable effect on the project, that is to say, delaying it a few years.)
As one of her Christmas gifts, I bought The Wife a membership (for both of us, actually), and this past weekend we finally made it to the Buffalo AKG. And yes, it is amazing. It was always a wonderful museum, but the new addition and reorganization of the galleries makes it feel like something from a different city entirely.
The next morning–Sunday morning–I ventured down to Canalside in Buffalo, mainly choosing that destination because the weather had been warm and rainy all weekend, so my usual hiking haunts were likely to be unpleasantly muddy.
If you’re at all familiar with what’s been going on in the Buffalo Niagara region lately, you probably already know why I took an unplanned hiatus from blogging this week: Lake Erie decided this was a good time to remind people in this area of its presence.
Cue…the lake-effect snowstorm.
And then…the next lake-effect snowstorm.
As storms go, this one was not as bad as some of the more famous ones we’ve suffered lately…but that’s like saying “I dropped a brick on two of my toes, which isn’t as bad as when I dropped one on my entire foot.”
Plus, for several days I was literally home completely alone, except for Carla and the two cats (Remy and Rosa). This is because The Wife and The Daughter had to take Hobbes (the greyhound) to a specialty vet in Pittsburgh. (No, I haven’t written about this yet, I don’t think. I’ll get to it. He’s OK, but it’s a process.)
So there was lots of shoveling at home, and then I’d get to work, where, as The Store’s resident facilities coordinator, I…got to shovel more. I don’t write much about my day job here, but this photo is representative of the day I had on Thursday (after missing Wednesday completely due to a driving ban and The Store being closed):
And that was just one of the many shoveling tasks I had to do. This is not a complaint: it’s the job I signed up for, and this was an unusual event, even if the rest of the world thinks that this is just what Buffalo Niagara is like every year from October 15 to June 1. For all my complaining, whining, and shouting at the clouds that I did this week, I would still take this over worrying about earthquakes and annual wildfires. I would still take this over having to plywood up my house’s doors and windows in advance of the approaching hurricane. I would still take this over enduring rolling blackouts in very cold months and in very hot ones because my state’s electrical grid is basically a bunch of extension cords patched together and nobody is fixing it because my state keeps electing governors who want to punish brown people, trans people, and women before doing anything productive like modernizing the state’s infrastructure. (Yes, I am calling out Texas.)
(By the way, I did have help in getting all of this done! This was not a case of “Wow, we got several feet of snow, off you go, dude! Let us know when you’re done!” And yes, liberal use of a snowblower was involved.)
So, things were hectic and demanding this week, and in a way that left me with very little mental energy for posting here. Or edditing. Or writing at all. Or doing photography, beyond the occasional cellphone pic of “Holy shit, look at all the snow.”
Because seriously…Holy shit, look at all the snow!
As I write this, we are nearing the second 24 hours of this winter’s first big lake-effect snow event. (Or we might be actually into the second 24 hours, as I’m not entirely sure when the snow began falling yesterday.) We got a bit of a break overnight when the snow band moved north, but this morning it moved right back south again and despite assurances from the Local Weather Folk that the snow bands would be “oscillating” a lot (this apparently being their new Word of the Day), from where I sit right now, I’m not seeing a whole damn lot of “oscillating”. I see a whole damn lot of the band sitting stationary right where it is.
It’s weird how the Local Weather Folk (some of whom get kinda pissy if you try asking them for specifics) never seem to get their models wrong in a way that does not translate to the Buffalo Southtowns getting the shit kicked out of them.
But anyway, that’s just the way it is. The snow is supposed to shift north tonight and then again to us tomorrow, but it will weaken as it does. Unfortunately this snow event is not going to be followed by a nice warm-up that will melt some of it off; instead we’re going into a deep-freeze for a few days, so much of this is going to stay right where it is.
Meanwhile, there was supposed to be an NFL playoff game in town today as the Bills are hosting the Steelers. After much hemming and hawing, the game was postponed to tomorrow afternoon around 4pm (right during my after-work commute, so, yay!), which is clearly the right call as the last thing we need right now is thousands of Bills fans clogging the snow-choked roadways, especially with last winter’s disastrous Christmas blizzard still in the memory banks. Nobody wants a repeat of finding dead people still in their cars, so the County Executive, after consultation with locals and with the governor, announced a full county-wide driving ban until further notice.
The effect, judging by reactions on social media, seems to me yet another data point in how car-centric a society we’ve become, because since the driving ban was announced, every post of the County Executives has been followed by comments by the dozen, all with the exact same whine:
“But when can we DRIIIIIIIVE???”
Seriously, the degree to which people in this society simply can’t fathom not getting in their cars and driving someplace is reaching absurd levels. Sure, maybe some of these people have jobs to get to, but many workplaces closed as this storm approached, and most retail locations have shut down as well, so the question naturally arises, “Just where do all you think you just have to drive today?” I posed a variation on that question and some guy huffed at me along the lines of “Some of us want to get out and be productive.” Doing what? Unless you’re operating a plow, the likelihood is that you’re just going to be getting in the way of people who are productive. I’d bet real cash money that “being productive” for this guy meant just…drivin’ around, doin’ errands, pickin’ shit up. I’d bet real cash money that not one “productive” thing he wanted to do couldn’t, you know, wait a freaking day.
“When can we DRIIIIIIIIVE???”
The question seems related to a similar one that arises any time a new construction project is announced pretty much anywhere, but especially in downtown Buffalo: “Where will we PARRRRRRRK???” Because the automobile is the most important thing in society, and any curtailing of our use of our precious automobiles is one of the most grievous affronts upon our sacred freedoms that exists. So now we live in a time when the very idea of “Hey, weather’s bad and the roads are treacherous, maybe just stay home for a day or two” is turned into a cause against which we must take up arms and mount the barricades.
In fact, “When can we DRIIIIIIIIIVE???” isn’t just about car culture, is it? It’s also about the very idea of belonging to a civilization where individual desires aren’t the only thing that matters. In a way it goes back to the meme that’s been circulating for several years now, particular since COVID and masking: “I really don’t know how to make you care about other people.”
We sure have come a long way from the old Buffalo Mayor Jimmy Griffin who famously told citizens during a blizzard to just grab a six-pack and wait it out at home.
December has not been a good month for photography. The weather has been incredibly reliable this month: on any day when I have time to get outside someplace and walk about and take photos, the weather has been absolute garbage. And unfortunately, as much as I love my Lumix FZ1000ii, my biggest knock on it is that it has no weather-sealing.
But on Christmas Eve I did finally get out to Knox Farm even though it was misty and damp. Here are a few results:
I was at Knox Farm State Park the other day, and a theme that emerged in that day’s photography was “Fallen Giants”. I took a lot of photos of fallen trees and decaying stumps. I’m of the view that trees don’t stop being beautiful for not being in the ground anymore. The beauty of the woods lingers.
Shots:
