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.”

 

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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!

 

 

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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!)

 

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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.

 

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Something for Thursday

Posted on June 9, 2022 by ksedinger

Busy week in progress (more on that to come), but I can still get a song posted! This one might not quite be a “Conversation song”–while the singer is addressing their words to someone, it might be a kind of “open letter” sort of thing, a song meant not to converse but to express a one-way thought.

But perhaps it is a kind of conversation, but not the one that happens in “real time”, as in, two people talking to one another over coffee or whatever. Instead it’s the kind of conversation that takes place between the generations, the ongoing conversation that shapes the young as they hear the wisdom of the old.

Here is Cat Stevens, with “Father and Son”.

 

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Posted on June 7, 2022 by ksedinger

Just getting this in under the wire, here’s a bit of film music: Lee Holdridge’s wonderful love theme from Splash, the Tom Hanks-and-Darryl Hannah “boy meets girl who’s really a mermaid” movie from the early 80s. This is one of the more wonderful love themes from a period that produced a lot of them.

As I write this, Splash is free on YouTube…and no, I have not been dipping into it and reminding myself that Darryl Hannah was one of my celebrity crushes back in the day….

 

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And now, a backyard train layout.

Posted on June 7, 2022 by ksedinger

Here’s something nifty!

 

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Four days in the Finger Lakes

Posted on June 6, 2022 by ksedinger

Floor inlay map, Finger Lakes Welcome Center, Geneva, NY

I’ve been in love with New York’s Finger Lakes region pretty much ever since we moved to New York in 1981. My first sight of any of those lakes came that first summer. We moved here in June, I think–pretty quickly after I completed fourth grade in Hillsboro, OR–and when we got here my mother had to do a bit of coursework to fulfill the requirements for her new teaching job in this state. This meant trekking from Allegany to Geneseo, NY, mostly every day for the summer. Sometimes my sister and I would stay home, other times we’d go along; and while Mom was in class, Dad and I would go off exploring.

Nowadays, whenever The Wife and I drive eastward into the Finger Lakes region, when we arrive in Geneseo via US 20A, I always consider that little college town to be the western “gateway” to the Finger Lakes region. Just east of Geneseo lies Conesus Lake, the westernmost of the eleven Finger Lakes. It’s also one of the smallest, but that was the first one I saw, way back when. Nearby are undeveloped Hemlock and Canadice Lakes, left undisturbed because they are sources of drinking water for the Rochester urban area 30 miles north. Then there is Honeoye (pronounced “Honey Eye”), which is another very small and highly developed lake with cottages and whatnot all around. Then you’re into the central Finger Lakes, where the big ones lie: Canandaigua (near the shores of which is the 4H Camp that housed the summer music camp I attended several years and then worked at several more as a counselor), Keuka (with its unique Y-shape), and the two biggies, Seneca and Cayuga (biggest and second-biggest, respectively).

The central lakes are big enough that they famously create their own microclimate in their long, narrow valleys, a microclimate that is ideal for the growing of wine grapes: hence New York’s excellent wine production. At the southern end of Cayuga Lake is my beloved dream hometown of Ithaca, while at the northern end of Seneca lies another town we love, Geneva. Around these lakes lie many other wonderful places: Watkins Glen, Seneca Falls, Aurora, Trumansville, Taughannock Falls, and more.

The Finger Lakes were a no-brainer for a location when I was thinking about booking a getaway for The Wife and I on our 25th anniversary (now several weeks back).

After doing some searching, I booked a cottage in Watkins Glen, directly overlooking the lake itself, and then while there, we used that cottage as a base for some exploring. We went to Ithaca for a day to see things that we usually don’t see because we always go to Ithaca in the fall for the Apple Harvest Festival, and then the next day we drove south to Corning to visit the Museum of Glass, a world-class attraction that I have spent the better part of the last 41 years within a two or three hour drive and yet never been. And also, we ate pretty damned well, too.

I have an entire album on Flickr of pictures I took from that trip (though I haven’t gone through yet and captioned many), but I’ll run some favorites below.

Seneca Lake from Fulkerson Winery

Wine tasting. We bought six bottles here at the start of our trip. We came home with two.

Seneca Lake, looking north from the dock at our cottage property.

To get to the dock you have to walk across a street, down a flight of wooden stairs, then across these tracks (which are still in use as there is a literal salt mine a mile up the lake). Not an impediment in any way! In fact, this made the place feel even more old-school and rustic, in a way.

A pretentious pose. If I ever do an acoustic indie-rock album (and I will not, mind you) this might be my cover art. OR, this could be the photo that accompanies a news magazine profile of the grizzled guy who watches the time go by from the shores of his beloved lake….

I love when you can see far enough and it’s just cloudy enough that you can see sunny patches on the distant hills.

Looking toward the village of Watkins Glen. It was still too early for there to be a lot of boats out yet; I imagine that starts up in earnest on Memorial Day Weekend. Note the passing rain clouds in the valleys to the south. I had issues, growing up in New York’s Southern Tier, but those forested hills are really something special.

Morning reading, before The Wife got up.

There is a LOT of public art in Ithaca.

The Chanticleer in Ithaca. I love their sign and I photograph it anew almost every time we’re there. Never been inside (it’s a bar).

Chicken and waffles at Waffle Frolic. We ADORE this place. We tried going last fall, but we missed them by half an hour, not having realized that their pandemic hours had them closing at 1pm! We were NOT going to fail THIS time. The orange sauce is their maple hot sauce; the other one is maple syrup. And YES, you use BOTH. I could eat this weekly.

The Odyssey Bookstore is one of Ithaca’s newest bookstores, having opened in 2020, just as the pandemic was starting up. Ouch, that timing…but they appear to be going strong! It’s a lovely little place in the basement of an old house, just beautiful for browsing. We only stopped in one bookstore this trip. I had to control myself SOMEHOW.

My book haul from Odyssey. Yes, for me this is “self-control”.

The “waterfront” at the Ithaca Farmers Market. We’d never been to this market, and it was wonderful! Everything a farmers market SHOULD be. (Among other things? Multiple people wearing overalls! I always feel like I’m amongst my people when I’m in Ithaca.)

Cayuga Lake, looking north from the top floor of the Herbert F. Johnson Art Museum in Ithaca (at Cornell). Wonderful views from up there. (And great art! Check the Flickr album for some of that.)

Ithaca, from the top floor of the Herbert F. Johnson Art Museum (Cornell). What a beautiful city Ithaca is. I could move there TOMORROW. (Well, next week. I’d need time to pack.) I only recall going to Ithaca a few times as a kid…with all the road-tripping we did, I wonder why Ithaca wasn’t a destination more often….

 

On Day Three we had breakfast at this butcher shop-and-eatery in Corning. Fantastic. We’d been planning to pick up something to grill (our cottage came with a grill) at the local grocery store in Corning, but we ended up buying two thick pork chops from here instead. Loved it.

Several items from the Corning Museum of Glass. More in the Flickr album. (MANY more. I took a LOT of photos that day. This museum is fantastic. We spent hours there and didn’t even see everything!)

Apparently in 1972 the Chemung River flooded BADLY in Corning and environs, resulting in considerable damage to the Museum of Glass. The Museum is only about a thousand feet from the river. This must have been devastating.

Another sun-dappled hill.

This fascinated me. It’s across the side-street from the ice cream place we visited in Watkins Glen. I wondered about that steep garage-door ramp thing. It turns out that this is the access entrance for cars to be driven up into, and out of, the upstairs showroom of the REALLY old-school car dealership which is in downtown Watkins Glen. The building still is a car dealership, though the upstairs showroom isn’t in use for that purpose anymore. Watkins Glen’s long automotive history is still apparent!

Two views from our last night there.

A stop on the way home at the Rasta Ranch Winery, a favorite of ours. The place is 60s-themed, very Woodstock. More wine bought here. (We were unable to stop during our wine tour back in February.)

From the Rasta Ranch (on the east shore of Seneca Lake) we could see the rain clouds approaching from the west. The day ended up being pretty much of a washout. We’d planned on a slow sight-seeing kind of drive home; that didn’t happen, sadly. Alas! A lovely weekend, though.

Pouring rain at Geneva. This is the northern shore of Seneca Lake, looking south; usually you can see for quite a distance. Not so THAT day. We’ll be back, though!

The whole Finger Lakes region isn’t just beautiful, with forests and high hills and deep valleys and waterfalls and streams and wineries and those gorgeous lakes, but it’s also by its very rugged nature something of a land that time forgot. The very geography and geology team up to make the entire region pretty much impervious to that enemy of all such onetime resort meccas, the four-lane highway. You can pretty much speed past the entire region to the north (via I-90) or the south (via I-86) in about 90 minutes, or you can get off the infernal expressways and take the twisting two-lane roads that run along high ridges before plunging into lake-filled valleys. You’ll drive past old places that were once bustling stops along the railroads that aren’t so bustling anymore, but the places endure, somehow.

I can’t wait to go back.

 

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