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.
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?
Anybody know where this shit came from? Because it’s dumb.
Back in my college days, our musical groups all had their own odd quirks and traditions. One of the Wartburg Choir’s stranger ones (I do not know if they still do this) was that when they were traveling as a group someplace and they were eating or having some kind of fellowship time, usually in a church’s fellowship hall, if any choir member spotted another with one or both elbows on the table, they’d shout something like “Hey [Name], get your elbows off the table!” and then the offending party would have to get up and walk around the entire perimeter of the room while the choir sang some goofy song about elbows on the table. (I’m not getting the particulars exactly, but it’s been 30 years and I was only present for this weird practice two or three times. And no, it was never me being called out.)
I was thinking about this yesterday while we were eating at 110 Grill in Henrietta, NY. (Yes, we road-tripped 80 miles to Henrietta just to eat at that restaurant, because their food is good and they have a big assortment of gluten-free options for The Wife. You do what you have to do when you have certain appetites and a food allergy that makes them difficult to indulge.) I ordered the fish tacos, which were (a) really delicious, and (b) really messy. The best way to manage this was to either eat them with the knife and fork (which looks absurd–I mean, really, who the hell uses knife and fork for tacos?!), or to eat them by hand and lean way over the plate while doing so. Obviously, I took option B, but I found that to comfortably assume that stance, it was frankly easiest to plant my elbows right on the table.
And this whole “No elbows on the table!” thing is so ingrained that I was feeling self-conscious about it the whole time I was eating. Yes, I was sitting in a public restaurant wearing a poofy Renaissance-faire shirt under a pair of vintage Hickory-striped overalls, and the thing that I was self-conscious about was my elbows on the table. What a dumb rule.
I’m going to stop counting the COVID days after today, because I think it’s pretty much done. I’m back to work Monday, so…yay. I have a bad feeling about what my Inbox is going to look like when I get back, but that’s Monday’s problem. It’s still the weekend.
Because COVID struck me before I could get our week’s groceries (over time I’ve evolved into less of a “Buy it all in one trip” person and more a “a few things here, a few things there” person), we’ve been cobbling things together here and there. My mother was gracious enough to pick up a few items for us on her trips, and then on Thursday I decided that I would try The Store’s curbside-grocery pickup thing. Since we also needed a dinner plan, I also figured I’d use The Store’s curbside “meals to go” thing and order some sushi for The Wife and a pizza for The Daughter and I. Easy!
Except…I’d never done the Curbside Grocery Ordering thing before, and it turns out that you have to do it way in advance. Like, probably the day before. This makes sense, now that I think about it: someone actually has to run around the store and literally “shop” the order, which takes time, and there are only so many employees available to do that. So you place your order and pick a time slot at which time you’ll expect to go pick up your stuff. I went to make my order at 4pm last night, and found that we couldn’t pick up until today. Oops. Again, that’s on me for just not knowing how it all works.
We did get the pizza and sushi, though! Another funny item: when ordering the pizza on the app, when it got to the toppings, I wanted pepperoni and sausage on the whole thing, and banana peppers on half. The app asked me what side I wanted the peppers on: the left or the right! That struck me as a really weird question. Does anybody care what physical side that only-half topping is on? I thought back to all the really weird customer interactions I had at Pizza Hut, and I couldn’t remember anyone ever lodging a complaint about their toppings being on the wrong side. I’d have pithily said, “Well, flip it around and it’ll be right!”
Of course, a minute or two later I recognized what the app was trying to do: that’s the phraseology they came up with to allow for pizzas like “pepperoni and sausage on half, mushroom and onions on the other half”. So you would input the pepperoni and the sausage on the left, and the mushrooms and the onions on the right. Makes perfect sense, but sometimes you encounter things that are perfectly logical but phrased in ways you don’t expect and it takes a bit of thinking to catch up.
(For the record, I had them put the peppers on the right. Which they did!)
Anyway, now it’s Saturday: Farmer’s Market, a quick trip to our favorite local bakery, and we have to pick up our groceries. We also have to do laundry and I’m way overdue in vacuuming the upstairs. Oh, and writing! Gotta write. I’m on a streak, and you have to respect the streak.
And now, time to finish this coffee and attack the day. I close with a cat.
As of this morning, I am pretty much completely symtom-free. Huzzah! Unfortunately, as of this morning, according to the test I took when I got up, I am not yet COVID-free. Boo! I assume this just means that my immune system still has some work to do in escorting the hangers-on and the squatters off-premises. It’s a work-in-progress, and all that.
So the timeline was basically this:
Last Friday: Attended the Erie County Fair. Toward the end of the day, noticed a throat tickle and a bit of stuffiness. Attributed this to occasional seasonal allergies and being outside and not having drunk nearly as much water as I usually do.
Saturday: Started thinking, “Huh, this is starting to feel suspiciously like some kind of crud. Might wanna keep an eye on this.”
Sunday: Got up after a night of sneezing, coughing, and a mild sore throat. Thought, “Huh. This is definitely some crud. Better test. Oh look, COVID. Well, shit.”
Monday: This was when I felt the worst. Slept downstairs, and then when The Wife (who has tested negative this whole time, Huzzah!) headed into her home office for work, I went to our bed and crashed for several hours. The worst of the sneezing and coughing was this day. Even so, it never got worse than any other normal cold I’ve ever had. By dinner time on Monday, I felt noticeably better. (Oddly, the way my colds usually progress, when I’m starting to feel better is when I sound the worst to other people!)
Tuesday: Definitely on the mend, feeling significantly better. Much less sneezing and coughing. Also, by this point the usual cold-related brain fog is starting to dissipate, so I’m starting to really think about writing again. In fact, on Tuesday afternoon I opened Scrivener and actually did get some writing done:
Not the easiest 500 words I’ve ever done, but I got them down.
Wednesday: Back to, I dunno, we’ll call it 80 percent. And I got more writing done!
By the way, another milestone fell on Wednesday:
Yup. When I started writing Forgotten Stars V, I hoped to be somewhere near the book’s end around the 180K mark. That is not going to happen. As I’m writing now, I’m finishing up the Second Interlude before I write all of Act III. Ouch. More on that below….
Thursday: Feeling 90 percent normal! And the floodgates opened up:
Yup, yesterday was a really good day for writing. The goal now is to have more and more days like yesterday.
Also, I had planned our dinner on Sunday to be grilled chicken wings, but obviously the COVID arrival screwed that up. Last night, though, our desire for wings would not be denied. Because, in the immortal words of John C. Reilly in the comedy classic Stepbrothers, “But what if I want wings?”
Shot…
…and chaser.
The sauce, by the way, is The Store’s brand of Korean barbecue sauce. I love this stuff. Just love it. It’s got that sweet-and-salty Asian soy thing going on, and it’s gluten-free, so The Wife gets to enjoy it. And yes, All You Grillers, I do apply the sauce at the end of the cook and let it caramelize and char a bit. There’s a whole school of thought out there in which this is heresy and you never put sauce on (“if you use sauce at all, and why would you, that’s what rubs and pre-seasonings are for, you heathen!” as another sub-school of grillers would say) until the meat is at the table, but I disagree, and it’s my grill and my kitchen.
(Oh, I would never put sauce on a steak on the grill. Steak gets S&P and that’s it. After all, “S&P, the choice for me!”)
So now it’s Friday, which means my forced vacation is coming to an end. Now, I’m thinking a bit about how I use my vacation time. Because I only get a few weeks of it (though I’m a couple years out from earning more), I tend to stretch it out through the year on vacations that are mainly long weekends. The exceptions to this are if we happen to have an unusually lengthy trip planned, such as our Hawaii trek last December, but as a rule, I rarely take an entire week off. But having done so now, I’m kind of thinking…I might start doing so. Especially once I hit the four-week plateau.
And now, I’ve got Friday’s writing to do, and since I’ve got some momentum going, I’m also going to get some plans in place for next week once I’m back to work. Also, look for an announcement on Monday! Hmmmmm!!!
I close with this funny thing I stole from Facebook this morning. Peace out, y’all!
