Sundays at Chestnut Ridge

Posted on June 20, 2022 by ksedinger

Twice in recent weeks I have taken The Dee-oh-gee to Chestnut Ridge on our Sunday adventure-nature walks. Late spring and early summer are great times to go to this particular park, when things haven’t really started to heat up or dry out just yet.

From the top of the sledding hill, you have a wonderful view–if it’s clear–of Buffalo and Niagara Falls, ON in the distance.

Notable here is the Buffalo Skyway, visible at center to the left of downtown, and the white roof of the Ralph Wilson Field House, which is the practice facility for the Buffalo Bills.

(You can see the full-size version here.)

I’ve walked past this spot many, many times–and only yesterday did I notice this old utility pole.

Cue John Denver: “Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy…!”

I love when sunlight breaks through the canopy, fifty to a hundred feet up, to light up lower trees like this four-foot sapling.

I don’t know if there’s a more evocative sight than a trail winding through the forest.

Two adventurers!

These are from a few weeks ago:

Sun-dappled leaves.

An old well-house. These structures, built by the Works Progress Administration, dot the park.

Brand-new graffiti. I’m glad for Faith and Shane, though I wonder what role cheese has to play in their romance.

A pine dotted with the year’s new growth.

Sunlight, from source to terminus.

One of many streams. This one usually dries up by mid-July.

Cones weighing down the top of this great pine.

The bib pocket on your overalls is a great place for a wildflower or two!

Adventurers, again. A greyhound is a fantastic fashion accessory. (The shirt is from Oahu!)

 

Posted in On Buffalo and The 716, On Dogs and Dog Life, Photographic Documentation | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Lessons from Fictional Fathers

Posted on June 19, 2022 by ksedinger
  1. It doesn’t matter if you were the worst father in Galactic history! You can still redeem all of that by throwing the evil Emperor down a reactor shaft before he can kill your son and destroy the Rebellion.
  2. Maybe you grew up estranged, but if the last thing your son said to you before walking out was to cast aspersions on your personal sports hero, a mysterious cosmic force might mess with his head in order to allow you to reconcile. (First it will make him do weird stuff like build a baseball diamond in the middle of a cornfield.)
  3. It’s OK to be a shadowy presence cutting an impressive figure on a distant hill, just as long as you’re ready to step up and take over when your kid’s mother is shot by a hunter.
  4. If a comet’s about to obliterate the world and there’s no hope for you, go wait on the seashore where you took your kid when she was young. She’ll come join you, before the end.
  5. But! If you’re one of the folks ON a comet that’s about to strike the earth, sacrifice yourself to blow it up! She’ll never forget you.
  6. Give your kid privacy and independence! Let him go out and have adventures in the wilderness while you work at your academic pursuits! Later in life, he just might show up to help you find the Holy Grail.
  7. Downplay when you are doing dangerous shit that would freak your kid out, like when you go to hunt a great white shark. Tell him you’re “going fishing”.
  8. Let your kid join Starfleet. His associates will be people of good character.
  9. When your youngest comes home all excited because he met a forest god who’s basically a giant teddy bear and she took a nap on him, take that seriously! Not every kid gets to meet a Totoro.
  10. Maybe the kid isn’t your actual son, but you’re the one who raises him, even though he doesn’t realize it for a long time. That other guy might have been his father, but he wasn’t the kid’s daddy.
  11. It’s not cool to be so open about having a preference between your two daughters. It’s also not cool to pit them against one another in combat. Eventually, both of them might team up with others to stop your jewelry-centric evil plan.
  12. Your kid may one day end up with that poor student you spent all of high school bullying as his teacher, and he may even end up depending on your poor victim to help in defeating the greatest evil wizard of all time, so…maybe don’t be a bully in high school.
  13. Drawing up your will? And you can’t decide which of your two sons should inherit the controlling shares of the oil company you founded? Maybe don’t set up a year-long contest between the two of them to see which deserves it. That shit will cause all kinds of grief for your family.
  14. Defer to your wife on your son’s middle name, if you’ve already decided his first. That means going with “Tiberius” if that’s what she wants.
  15. Look, it happens: Your eldest of three moves out early on, and you live with your other two for many years after. But when your youngest, your daughter, gets married, it’s kind of weird to talk about “your two beautiful children.”
  16. Seems kind of odd to insist on having a big den all to yourself when your house only has two bedrooms to accommodate the three sons you’re bringing to the marriage and the three daughters she is bringing.
  17. That plan your son has cooked up to impress a girl by learning to be a rock drummer in the space of five weeks? Go with it. Your kid’s dealing with some shit, and it just might work. (You’re dealing with some shit too, you know.)
  18. It’s OK if your son has a whole ton of hobbies that you don’t understand, like growing roses and cooking Jewish food, and that he doesn’t really understand you all that well. He’ll get the important stuff (like grilling with propane).
  19. Be creative with your catchphrases. Don’t just threaten to kick your son’s ass. Say things like “Your ass just hung out a Vacancy sign, and my foot’s lookin’ for a room!”
  20. Even as you try to hew out a simple life in your house on the prairie (which is surrounded by hills, strangely enough), you can absolutely have your perfect white teeth and your head of thick curly hair. (Oh, and maybe reconsider having your entire house be essentially one room. I assume you’ll want to occasionally “get friendly” with your wife, and consider that your daughters are trying to sleep in a loft about seven feet above your heads, to judge by the ladder they use to get up there.)
  21. Just because your son turned evil and wants to kill you is no reason to fly off and be a space loser.
  22. So your son’s best friend is a stuffed tiger. Find ways to encourage his imagination! (And stop telling him that everything in the world that sucks “builds character”.)
  23. After a traumatic event, move with your son to Seattle. But maybe get some therapy or something before he calls a radio talk show to discuss your problems.
  24. I know it’s tempting to go with the aliens! They planted the psychological visions in your head! It’s not your fault everyone thinks you’re crazy! But…maybe don’t abandon your family to go with the aliens.
  25. If your son comes of age and wishes to go off to Paris to find his fate and fortune with the King’s Musketeers, let him do so, with the blessing of a kiss–but also give him a horse and a sword.

Of course, some of these lessons are unlikely to be specifically applicable to the situations in which one might reasonably expect to find oneself, but you never do know, do you?

 

 

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But I’m a Henry V fan….

Posted on June 17, 2022 by ksedinger

Interested in the Plantagenets or the Stuarts? Keep checking telephone poles, folks.

 

Posted in On Things I Find Funny | Tagged | 1 Comment

Something for Thursday

Posted on June 16, 2022 by ksedinger

I didn’t have a chance to come up with a “Conversation Song” this week, so in the meantime–though I would never suggest that she’s a mere placeholder–here is Audrey Hepburn.

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Gettin’ jiggy

Posted on June 15, 2022 by ksedinger

So one of my bosses asked me if I could cut a buffalo out of a piece of wood with a jigsaw.

I said, “I dunno, I can give it a shot!” I then gave a bit of caution, because I’m not very experienced with the jigsaw. It’s not a tool I use in my daily life very often; the most I’ve used a jigsaw for is cutting plexiglass (and it’s not great at that stuff, or at least I haven’t figured out my technique, but that’s a topic for another time). I had to warn my boss that there was a good chance my resulting wooden buffalo would end up looking more like Josh Allen’s infamous potato-buffalo:

One of the offices at work had an old buffalo insignia on display (from a promotional sign we used once). I traced that onto a piece of plywood and started cutting.

And you know what? I might have a new skill!

A coworker painted them (I made two), one red, one blue. Here’s the final result, in blue.

As the experts on The Repair Shop might say, “Brilliant! I’m quite happy with that.”

 

Posted in On Tools of Various Trades | Tagged | 1 Comment

Tone Poem Tuesday

Posted on June 14, 2022 by ksedinger

Maurice Ravel is a particularly fascinating composer, once one manages to get past the monument to terminal ennui that is Bolero. Here we have one his earlier works, the Rapsodie espagnol, in which a young Ravel turns his impressionistic eye on the sounds and impressions of Spain. Ravel composed the Rapsodie in 1907, and through its pages you can certainly hear Romanticism receding into memory and Modernism knocking on the door; this is 20th century music through and through, even if it maintains its grounding in the land of tonality. The work is in four movements, each one evocative of an exotic Iberia, so close and yet, thanks to the mountains, not quite so close as all that. Meditative song lives alongside exuberant dance here, and the entire piece ends in a riot of color.

Here is the Rapsodie espagnol by Maurice Ravel.

 

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Filtration

Posted on June 13, 2022 by ksedinger

For lack of a better idea for a post, here’s a selfie from last week, followed by the results of applying several filters through an app called Prisma.

Here’s the original:

Looking very cottagecore!

This was taken at Knox Farm State Park in East Aurora. You can see the leash in my left hand: I was walking Cane that day. This was taken by a really big and particularly beautiful maple tree that’s one of my favorite spots in that park–oh fine, here’s the tree.

I think of this as “Bilbo’s Party Tree”, if you’ve read The Lord of the Rings.

Here are some of the filtered versions of the photo above:

It’s cool how each filter preserved the Hickory-stripe pattern on my overalls. I’m hard pressed to pick a favorite here!

 

 

Posted in On Bib Overalls, Photographic Documentation | Tagged , | 1 Comment

The Soundtrack of Our Lives

Posted on June 12, 2022 by ksedinger

It’s become a common enough experience in my life that I notice it: something notable happens regarding a particular musical artist whose stardom arrived during my younger years (sadly, it’s often a death, but not always), and as discussion about that particular artist revs up, a phrase gets used a lot: “the soundtrack of our lives”. This is used to describe either the ubiquity of that artist’s music, or the degree to which that artist’s work shaped the music we heard on a daily basis.

What I’ve also noticed is how frequently the artist in question was not a major part of my youthful music life.

An example: Netflix’s hit show Stranger Things is now in its fourth season, which was released a few weeks ago. One episode features a song by Kate Bush in a major way (the song actually figures into the plot, as well as making a major appearance on the soundtrack). The song is “Running Up That Hill”. As people watched through the episodes, social media started to explode with people my age (or maybe a bit younger, or maybe a bit older) reacting with delight at the re-emergence of that song into collective musical consciousness, thirty-seven years after its release. Kate Bush and “Running Up That Hill” were part of “the soundtrack of our lives”.

Only…for me, it wasn’t. I can honestly say that my first full hearing of that song might well have come just a few days before we watched the Stranger Things episode, because I looked it up online out of curiosity. (It’s a good song, by the way.)

This morning, I read a new post by John Scalzi, who has been writing a series of posts exploring specific songs and what they have meant to him at various points in his life. This particular post is talking about a Madonna song (a song with which I am not familiar, while I’m quite familiar with Madonna in general), but at the outset, Scalzi says this:

For nearly all Gen-Xers, there are three artists who can reasonably be said to have been universal experiences, i.e., they were in the soundtrack to your life whether you went out of your way to listen to them or not: Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna. They were everywhere, the musical air that one breathed, there in the malls, in the schools, on MTV and radio. Even if you dove deep into heavy metal, goth or rap to escape their presence, sooner or later they were there, leaving you flabbergasted that, somehow, they found you.

This interests me because for me it’s only two-thirds right. Jackson? Sure. Madonna? Again, absolutely. But Prince?

For me, no. Not really. Prince was never a big part of my musical soundscape, intended or not; the only song of his I could have identified off the top of my head for years was “Let’s Go Crazy”. Prince was never a universal part of my musical life. I was aware of his existence, I knew he had fans, and…that’s about it. I never explored him much while he was alive because his music simply did not present itself to me in anything like the same ubiquitous way that Michael Jackson or Madonna did.

I don’t note this to pick on Mr. Scalzi’s point, because I suspect that far more people would agree with his summation than with mine. But it always fascinates me to consider the degree to which my movements in the cultural landscape have always been my own, and that while there were a lot of intersections between my landscape and the wider one, there are always large gaps. This leads to voids in conversations that I find awkward at times, as people enthusiastically discuss music with which I am almost completely unfamiliar. Or I find myself unaffected on those sad instances when prominent figures die, and I just don’t have that connection.

Why did I miss out on Prince? Kate Bush? All manner of other stuff? I can guarantee none of it was because of snobbery or distaste for “pop” music. I would hope that my years of musical writings on this site would make that clear! I did watch a lot of MTV in the 80s, but I also headed off to my room to listen to music on my own, and this was almost exclusively (almost, not quite, but almost) classical. This continued into my college years, with the additions of New Age and Celtic; I tried being a jazz listener for a time as well. If anything, my college years were an even bigger retreat from the “pop culture” world for me; if it was popular between 1989 and 1993, I very likely did not know about it. And it went on a bit into the 90s, leading me to mostly miss out entirely on grunge. Nirvana? Stone Temple Pilots? Smashing Pumpkins? All names to me. All talented. All major touchstones in recent music history. And all artists whose music passed me by. And I didn’t do much catching up after college, because in the late 90s and into the 2000s I went deeper into classical as well as into film music, which is one of the tiniest of musical niches.

I’ve never been able to work out just how I feel about all this. I do feel at times like I missed out, and many times I’ve found real enrichment and enjoyment when I take time to explore music now that I missed the first time around. Music is wonderful like that: you can come to it any time, much like books and movies–all art, actually. We focus too much on the new, don’t we? But at the same time, there is always a feeling of something I’ve missed, some shared context that I won’t be able to engage no matter how much I come to love a particular piece or song or work.

And others won’t have my context…lying in bed in the dark with a cassette in my Walkman after I’ve turned the lights out, but in my case it’s not Prince or Kate Bush but rather Berlioz or Wagner…in any event, my life had a different soundtrack than a lot of other people, and there are times I feel a real disconnect from others because of that.

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Life Developments of the Automotive Kind

Posted on June 11, 2022 by ksedinger

[A few weeks ago….]

ME: Hi, I was wondering if you can get my 2012 Kia Soul in for service? It needs an oil change and the ‘Check Engine’ light just came on.

MY MECHANIC: Sure, I can get ‘er in tomorrow!

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This car has a long history of the Check Engine light coming on for a day or two and then going off again for six months. This time, not so much.]

[The next day….]

ME: (on phone, around noon; our mechanic is a “drop it off in the morning and then he calls us when he’s got something to report unless we call him first” kind of guy) Hey, just checking in on my Kia Soul?

MECHANIC: Oh, hi. [I’m already sensing bad news] So the oil change is done, but the Check Engine light log referred us to an oxygen sensor. When I checked that out, I found that the flange for the catalytic convertor is rotting out…[my brain doesn’t process much of what follows because we all know what it means when the mechanic refers to your catalytic convertor in ANY context]…estimated repair cost of $2100.

ME: Huh.

[end of scene]

Some years ago I started up a dedicated savings slush fund just for car repairs, after one large repair on a previous vehicle cleaned out my entire personal savings account. This practice has proved wise over the last few years: having the money already set aside to cover stuff like a brake job or a faulty sensor will save you so much emotional and mental anguish, I can’t overstate it. My Kia Soul, though, as noted, was a 2012 model, so I’ve been aware for a while that its time of replacement was coming up sooner rather than later. I’ve also been fortunate the last two years to have no major repairs crop up, so I was able to convert some of the Auto Repair Fund to a Future Vehicle Down Payment Fund. My hopes were to make it to 2024 before starting to look around seriously for the next vehicle, but as you can see by the Dramatic Rendering above, the Car Repair Gods had other plans.

The Wife had to buy a new car herself two years ago, and she liked the sales rep at the local dealership she dealt with a great deal, so she contacted him. And that dealership is literally at the end of our street. So, appointments were made and test drives were done and long story short, yada yada yada, exeunt the 2012 Kia Soul which was originally my mother’s car. Enter my new 2019 Buick Encore!

Mr. Sulu, set a course for adventure!

Two previous cars of mine were Buicks, both of which I liked enormously, so I was predisposed to like this one. We did our test drive due diligence, though we only got to test out two vehicles (the other being a Chevy Trax). I did some online research, and this particular vehicle was a gem in the waiting, having only had a single owner and only 14000 miles on it. Not bad, considering! I’m quite happy with what I got.

But man, is this a bad time to be forced into the car purchase racket, folks.

I’m sure we’ve all heard about inventory problems and supply-chain issues, but the long and short of it is this: new cars are simply not out there in any appreciable volume, to the point where new cars are literally being made to order, with really long lead times. I know a guy at work who ordered his new pickup truck last August; he finally got his new truck a month ago. My sales rep told me of a guy who ordered a new truck of his own, just a standard bells-and-whistles Chevy pickup, with a lead time of a year. All this puts enormous pressure on the used car market, driving inventories down and prices up.

While I did get a good deal with which I am quite happy, I was very much constrained by low inventory and, therefore, fewer options. I put the question out to Facebook when this all started, and I got a lot of recommendations for good cars in response; few of those were available in my price range at all. (And while I do like buying used, because let’s be honest, you can easily replicate the New Car Smell and these days a three-years-or-less used car might as well be new anyway if the previous owner wasn’t a shit and your dealer isn’t a shyster.) I feel strongly that I was lucky to get a car I’m happy with this quickly.

(Now, I had some time; my Kia Soul wasn’t undrivable. But its issues meant that it would not pass its next New York State Inspection unless the catalytic convertor and the exhaust system were replaced, and my inspection was up in July. If the inspection had had until September, then I would have had more time to play with, alas.)

I asked my sales rep if he saw any light at the end of this tunnel any time soon, and he bluntly said, “No, I think it’s gonna be this way for a long time to come. If you think you’re going to need a car, you either need to order it early, or accept being at the mercy of existing inventory when the time comes.” Ouch.

My attitude on cars, shared by The Wife, has always been to drive them until ongoing maintenance costs make little sense. This particular repair need gave me pause, because I could have had the Kia fixed! I could have afforded it, quite painlessly. I could have bought another few years in that car. Maybe. But you never know, do you? The last brake job I had done on that car was four years ago, so that would almost certainly be coming up soon–and quite possibly before I had a chance to save up for that.

And all of that would have depleted my ability to make the down payment on the next car.

So, yes, I thought about just having the Kia fixed. But in the end–and this was a decision quickly made–it just didn’t make financial sense for me to put over $2000 into a ten-year-old car.

That Kia Soul was a good car. We had a lot of good times in that car…or, we drove to a lot of good times in that car. The Soul was never a car that I would have chosen for myself had I been buying new; it was just a bit small for my tastes. But it was reliable and comfortable (for me, anyway; The Wife had other opinions) and The Dee-oh-gee liked it a lot. Here’s hoping the new Encore serves as well. There’s a solid chance–maybe just this side of unlikely, but still within possibility–that this vehicle sees me through to retirement. We’ll see.

(What would I have purchased had inventory and money not been factors? Either a Subaru Outback or a Crosstrek. I’ve long been a Subaru fan.)

(Oh, and not long ago I considered a ‘Reverse Camera’ a gimmick. Now? I love it!)

(Kudos to my sales guy for always being willing to listen to “Yeah, I don’t like this.” He openly said, several times, “Look, you gotta like your car!” And another time, “I am not the kind of guy who wants to put you in a car you don’t like because I get a sale.” That meant a lot. One model Trax he showed me didn’t come with cruise control; I said before I got in the car, “Yeah, I need cruise.” He said, “OK, this car’s out, then.” I don’t use cruise control all the time, but I want it there for when we’re doing long stints on the monument to ennui that is the New York State Thruway. I am surprised to learn that you can still buy cars without cruise control! I have to admit that by this point, I consider cruise control and air conditioning standard to the point that they’re just assumed. Like, I don’t know, wheels.)

(Are you self-conscious about your signature? Buy a car. You’ll get over that shit real quick. Holy shit, that was a lot of signing!)

 

Posted in Life | Tagged | 3 Comments

Judy Garland at 100

Posted on June 10, 2022 by ksedinger

Sheila and Roger have Judy Garland posts up, and I could hardly fail to do the same. Garland was born 100 years ago today, and how much poorer our world would be without that voice, that marvelous alto of hers–full-throated, just this side of operatic, so marvelously resonant, her way of hitting a pitch just under and then sliding into it like a resolution all her own, and of course that perfect shimmering vibrato she used to equally perfect effect in song after song after song throughout her too-brief life.

Judy Garland was one of the greatest things about being human in the 20th century and beyond.

 

Posted in Born On This Date, music | Tagged | 1 Comment