The Super Mario Sisters!
(BTW, World Five on Super Mario Brothers is kicking my ass. Stupid world, getting me killed all the friggin’ time.)
So much awesome in one place!
I saw this photo on Flickr. I have no idea what the story is behind this, but it appears to be a bunch of people setting out on a long excursion involving bicycles. For some reason, they’re all wearing overalls. Bikes and overalls? Never thought to mix the two, but hey, why not? Cool!
(BTW, looking a bit through this fellow’s photostream, it appears he’s been to a lot of amazing places. I love travel photography, and there’s some awfully nice shooting going on here.)
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Smell-o-vision
When cooking, you’re supposed to smell and taste your food. All the great ones say this. When smelling your food, you’re not supposed to just stick your nose over the pot; you’re supposed to lean down kinda-sorta close to the pot and wave the aromas of your food toward your nose. All the great ones say this, too.
Oddly, the great ones are mum on the subject of whether or not you’re supposed to close your eyes and furrow your brow and look like you’re trying to commune with the dead rather than just smelling the vegetables and meat you’re sauteing.
And holy crap, my hands look big here. They’re not that big. Really.
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Now boarding….
I’ve waxed poetic about the library in my town a bit over the years. Truth to tell, one of my favorite places in any town is the library, and whenever I’ve moved, finding the local library has always been something I do very early on. So the Orchard Park Library has been a major part of my life — our lives, I should say — for all of the seven years we’ve lived here.
That photo, above, is the view I had a couple of weeks ago when I packed up the laptop and went to the library for an afternoon of writing and whatnot. I hadn’t planned to take the photo, actually, but I did when I realized that I’d never seen the library from that vantage point before. Because the library doesn’t have a ton of seating places that are in close proximity to power outlets, I had to sit way over on the far wall, by the fire exit. That’s over in the Children’s section, actually, which is another reason why I don’t spend much time over there. (The Daughter does, but I don’t.) Anyway, the vantage point struck me, the way the carpet pattern seems to mirror the grid of the new drop ceiling. (Our library was remodeled a year ago.)
After I left, when the library closed for the day, I decided to spend a few minutes exploring a place that I’ve often noticed but never really investigated. The library building is directly adjacent the old Orchard Park railroad station, which was pretty rundown when we moved here but has since received a lot of volunteer-based restoration work.
Behind me there is the library itself (and farther behind that, if I weren’t in the way, is my church). If I’d had more foresight that day, maybe I’d have worn the more railroad-appropriate hickory-striped overalls over there, but we can’t have everything, right? To the station itself:
Walking around the corner there, I found myself standing on the boarding platform, looking southeast:
And, of course, the trains running the other way would go toward Buffalo, because all roads lead to Buffalo:
Here’s the front of the station:
The station has a second, smaller building, which is now the permanent home of an old passenger car and a box car. I assume this was a freight depot:
I love the way the light is, on a late wintry afternoon when it’s snowing so that the air looks like it has bits of starlight in it:
By this point I was cold enough, and decided to go warm up with some soup at Panera Bread. But I kept thinking about the old trains that ran through here, so when I got home, to see where the trains ran, so I pulled up Google Maps. The first view is here, but here’s a grab:
It’s a bit hard to see from this resolution, but I wanted to give a hint of a few miles of train route here. On the screen grab, find South Buffalo St; the library and train station are located just up and left of the ‘St.’ label. You can see the train route very clearly, then, tacking off to the southeast, forming, for a short time, the northern boundary of the Orchard Park Country Club.
Tracing the train route from there, using Google Maps’s satellite view, turned out to be a pretty interesting exercise, as the rail route is clearly not in use today. This means that as the route heads into the rural country south and east of the Buffalo-Niagara region, the rail route shows up as a line tracing thinly through forests and at the border of farm fields and so on. At times it seems to disappear altogether, such as where it comes into the small town of Colden. More than a few times I found that I was no longer following a train route and had instead found a stream or some other land feature, and had to double back.
The trick became obvious, once I thought of it: trains can’t turn sharply, so train routes tend to make their curves very widely. This means that when the train route seems to vanish, all one really has to do to find it again is look in a straight line from where it disappeared. Then, finding a faint feature that might be the straight line of an old railroad right-of-way, all you do is follow that feature until you confirm it. Here’s a good spot: note how the automobile road, Route 24, sticks close to the stream there, forming almost a right angle, while our railroad route makes the hypotenuse through the sudden forest there!
The train line stays easy to follow, for the most part, through much of the countryside. I love the way it looks in this spot, a few miles north of Springville, a town at the very southern edge of Erie County, where the Southern Tier begins (if you’re heading south, that is; coming north, Springville is where the Southern Tier ends and Buffalo-Niagara begins). The route is marked by a double line of trees on each side of the rail line. Were those trees planted along the line like that? Or was that just natural tree-growth by virtue of farmers obeying limits on their fields bounded by the trains?
Exiting Springville, I lost the line again, because the terrain down there is hillier and because there are more distractions like roads and rights-of-way for power lines. I almost assumed the train there ended at Springville, but that just seemed odd to me — surely a southbound train wouldn’t stop there, for no apparent reason, and sure enough, it didn’t. Part of my error was again assuming the trains would have run somewhat along the route traced by US Route 219, which it actually doesn’t; a mile or two south of Springville, 219 jigs west a bit while our train route turns east, and crosses the Cattaraugus Creek gorge on a trestle that I never knew was there, even though I’ve driven Route 219 through that area more times than the best hypnotist could get me to remember:
I’ve always tended to assume that when the automobile arose, the roads tended to follow train routes pretty closely; I’d never really considered what now seems pretty obvious, that train routes would often wind through regions now almost never frequented by car. When I started following this route online, I figured the route would likely trace one of the two main southward routes out of the Buffalo-Niagara region, US 219 or NY 16 (which runs about ten miles east of 219). It turns out that the trains ran roughly between them, through towns I have rarely visited in nearly thirty years of living in this area.
Continuing south, I puzzled over the odd fixture here, just south of a town called West Valley. In addition to our railroad right-of-way, it appears that there used to be a couple of spurs that came off the line and back onto it. Those curving interchange-like lines must be artificial; they’re too perfect to be natural. But I can’t see any evidence of what must have once existed at that spot for trains to enter and exit the main line. Was there a factory here? A big granary? A mine? Who knows? If anyone in my readership is familiar with the history of West Valley, NY, let me know!
Anyway, our railroad line continues south until it “ends”, not in a town, but at a junction of a larger rail line, which runs southwest into Ellicottville or northeast to…well, I didn’t follow it that far. But again my assumptions were thwarted; I assumed that this train route out of Orchard Park might lead all the way to Olean in the Southern Tier, but it doesn’t. It just goes to a spot in between, ending in another rail line somewhere in the middle of the hills of the Southern Tier.
I wish the trains still ran.
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Aim High! Leave yourself an out!
I just know that you, Dear Readers, have always wondered what I look like when I’m driving. So here are some photos taken whilst driving recently.
I’m a pretty paranoid driver, tending to assume the very worst about everyone else on the road. To my way of thinking, the only reasonable stance when driving is to adopt the belief that every other person on the road is a ne’er-do-well or, worse, a just plain malevolent soul looking to smash me with their vehicle. That leads me to looking like this:
I don’t trust any of you. Nothing personal, but when you’re on the road at the same time that I am on the road, you are now the enemy!
Now, one thing that frustrates me is when I get behind the Hesitant Turner. This is the person who is extremely hesitant about, you guessed it, turning. They’ll sit at the intersection until there is absolutely zero traffic in either direction, rather than make a judgment on when they can go based on their knowledge of their own vehicle’s ability to accelerate quickly. These people annoy me to no end, which leads to scenes like this, as I shout “GO GO GO GO GO!”
I’ve already established my loathing of people who refuse to turn right on red. Here’s the look I tend to give such folks, hoping they’ll look in their rear-view mirror and see the laser beams coming from my eyes to fry their brains, but they never do….
And here’s the bored look I get when I’m stuck on a long straightaway behind a lot of slow-moving traffic:
The title of this post is taken, of course, from the “Rules of Driving” that many of us learned in Driver’s Ed. (At least, those are the two I remember; the rest are here.) Try as I might, I don’t recall Mr. Wilcox (my Driver’s Ed teacher) telling me to not make contorted faces of extreme disdain at my enemy drivers, but he didn’t say not to, either. So….
(OK, in all honesty, I didn’t take any of these photos while the car was in motion. Heck, it wasn’t even in “Drive”; the car was stationary at the time. No, I’m not driving around taking self-photos of me making goofy faces while I’m actually handling a car in motion!)
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Adding to the Collection
I haven’t purchased any new overalls in some time, but one of the most recent pairs I acquired were these, via eBay: a nicely worn, vintage Hickory-striped pair by Lee. I don’t own much by way of Hickory-striped overalls — a couple of pairs of Dickies and one by Key was about it, before I got these. I’ve always been curious about the Hickory-striped cloth and its history. In my experience, Hickory-striped denim (I assume it’s denim, or maybe it’s twill) feels a bit lighter in weight than traditional denim, which makes the overalls a bit cooler in the wearing.
Lee used to make great overalls back in the day, which is probably why they tend to be pretty expensive when vintage pairs show up on eBay. I’ve been lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time on several of these auctions, but these striped ones are awesome. I love ’em.
This pair does need a little work, though. There are a couple of small holes in the legs, which isn’t that big a deal. But I’m certainly not going to be wearing these in public while there’s a hole near the back pocket, a bit closer to the butt than I’d like. Nobody needs to see that.
Overalls rule!
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New Tella
So, for years, I’ve wondered about the stuff in the plastic jars. I’d see them when shopping, and occasionally wonder if the stuff was good, but for some reason…I couldn’t summon up the urge to try it. I’m talking about…
…Nutella.
I don’t know why it took me years to get around to giving the stuff a shot. Maybe it’s the name? It sounds vaguely medicinal, and the jars with the type and the picture look like something out of the 1970s, and stuff out of the 1970s tends to not be all that great.
The problem with this rationalization is, of course, that it’s stupid.
I mean, really. That’s pretty dumb on my part. Nutella’s made of hazelnuts, which I like, and chocolate, which rocks. So I finally decided last week to get over it and buy a jar of the stuff.
Still, I had to work through my initial skepticism in trying it:
I scooped some up on a butterknife, put in my mouth, and:
And…yeah. Nutella’s good stuff. Sometimes I’m slow on the uptake! Now I have myself a new official “Breakfast of Champions”:
I have an English muffin with Nutella on one side and lemon curd on the other, with a glass of OJ to wash it down. (Lemon curd’s another story — I love that stuff and tried it with no fear, the first time I learned of its existence. Lemon curd makes me all kinds of happy.)
So: Nutella’s good stuff. Who knew? (I know…everybody knew. Shut up. I reserve the right to be dense sometimes.)
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The view from…inside my head!
Ever wonder what I see when I look straight down? Well, now you know. Moving on….
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The Year of the Dark Side!
On New Year’s Eve, we decided to do something we’d never done before: we went to downtown Buffalo for the annual Ball Drop and the ringing in of the New Year. Now, we’ve watched the Ball Drop on teevee a lot over the years; here in Buffalo, Channel 7 (our ABC affiliate) airs split-screen coverage of Buffalo’s Ball Drop with the big one at Times Square, as part of New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.
Now, I can’t lie — judging by what we’ve seen on teevee, I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about being downtown for our Ball Drop. For one thing, it involves being pack in with lots of people. For another, we’d been out very late the night before (for our TSO concert) and I’d then had to get up very early the next morning for a project at The Store, with the Ball Drop obviously keeping us up past midnight. But the biggest factor in my ambivalence was the fact that the teevee coverage always makes the Ball Drop look, well, lame. As in, “serving platter covered with Christmas lights being lowered out an office building window on a string and an extension cord” lame. So I figured I’d be freakishly tired while I froze my arse off standing around a huge crush of people waiting to watch a chintzy ball of lights come down a building before shoving my way through the crowds to get home. Luckily I was off the next day, but still.
Well, wouldn’t you know it — the Ball Drop was a terrific time.
Our parking strategy was a good starting point. Instead of trying to park close to the event, we decided to park in a lot down at the foot of Main Street, right outside the vacant-for-the-night HSBC Arena, and then ride the Metro Rail to the Ball Drop location. The Ball drops down the front face of the Electric Tower, a beautiful old building in downtown whose top tiers are always illuminated white except for the holiday season when they’re lit green, red, gold. This is what we saw as soon as we got off the Metro Rail train:
Swirling spotlights kept arcing over the building and into the air, sending those wonderful blue shafts of light into the winter sky. The snow was falling, but the flakes were big and fluffy, there was no breeze to speak of, and the temperature was just cold enough that we could stand there for a little over an hour without wanting to kill ourselves. (Still, a roving hot chocolate vendor or two wouldn’t have been a bad idea.)
Here’s the view from the vantage point we set up for ourselves:
The Ball itself was a lot nicer looking than what we see on teevee: a glittering globe, completely covered with lights that were swirling and spiraling and generally looking all, well, glittery. We got there at about 11:00, so we had to stand in one place for the remaining hour. But that hour went pretty quickly, because there was a lot of entertainment on the stage there, at the foot of the building: trivia contests, appearances by Buffalo Sabres, the Mayor receiving what I couldn’t discern to be either a cheer or a lusty boo, more trivia, lots of fun music, and then the final song of 2009. It was “Don’t Stop Believin'” by Journey, which is, frankly, a song I could live without hearing again for a good long time.
But anyway, the final minute of 2009 came at last, and during the last fifteen seconds of the year, the Ball began to descend:
And at last, we were into 2010!
More music, lots of cheering and kissing. The third song of 2010 the deejays of the night chose was “ABC” by the Jackson Five (at which every single black person around us started dancing). Then we followed some of the dispersing crowd out of the area, walking down Main Street until we got to the next Metro Rail station, where we caught the next train and rode it back down to our parking spot. It took us half as much time to get home from the Ball Drop as it had the night before from the TSO concert.
One final postscript. The Daughter loves stuff that either glows or lights up, so whenever we’re at a function that takes place at night, we’ll almost always have to go to one of the inevitable street vendors who are selling such wares — glow necklaces, glow sticks, light-up hats, et cetera — and get something. She chose this thing that was clearly a knock-off of a lightsaber, even though it’s incredibly chintzy and cheaply made, so much so that the guy could have hawked them for two bucks and made a profit. (Which is no doubt why he was hawking them for eight bucks each. I’m so easy.)
So The Kid came from from New Year’s with a toy lightsaber, whose siren call I managed to disregard for over a week. Yup, I made it a week.
Until last night, when I finally gave into the temptation.
Wow, the Dark Side is more seductive!
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NOOOOOO!!!
As I noted recently, we got a Wii for Christmas. The Daughter has taken to it like a fish to water, while I’ve taken to it like…well, not so well. The game we play most often is Super Mario Brothers, on which The Daughter is progressing nicely, while I put poor Mario through debilitating death after death, grisly demise after demise, and sad fate after fate.
Lots of times I can see Mario’s shuffling from the mortal coil coming a mile away as I scramble to avoid various pitfalls and nemeses, but then there are the times in which the Smiting of Mario takes me completely by surprise. In those moments, I look like the photo above. Ouch. Poor Mario!