All posts tagged: Buffalo NY

Old House | Freedom Thief

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We had freedom once. We hiked. We rode mountain bikes. We visited antique shops and flea markets, clutching take-out lattes. We read the whole Sunday paper to fill the time before brunch. But our lives seemed empty. So we bought a house and fixed up it. Then we moved. Bought another house and fixed it up. Then we moved, to the biggest, oldest house yet. It must be painted. I do understand that there are professionals who do these things for you. For buckets of ducats. But the WideEyedSpouse and I sort of want to see what is happening on the house. Get a sense of coming maintenance. And, we want to run the 35 foot boom lift and stare down at the neighborhood from our lofty position. Yesterday we started. We scraped. I washed with pre-painting detergent. No, I’m ok, it only burned a little when it dripped down my arms and off my elbows. We painted. Creamy white. Deepest blue. We painted until 12 minutes after sunset, knowing that rains were coming and hoping for the …

Pulled pork eight ways since Sunday

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The WideEyedSpouse smoked a ten pound pork shoulder over the weekend. I mean that exactly. Over the weekend. It was a 16 hour process, not including the preparation of the rub, the annual smoker cleanse, the pre-smoke meat rest, the post-smoke meat rest, and the actual pulling of the pork. The smoking aromas were intoxicating. Enticing. I told the Spouse that it was like I had traveled to some city with a BBQ reputation and I was in line for some of the good stuff. All day. As it turns out, ten pounds of raw pork shoulder equals about seven pounds of smoked pulled pork. For two people. We are now two days out from the initial meal of pulled pork sandwiches, Memphis style. I have eaten: Pulled pork on a plate, Pulled pork out of Tupperware, Pulled pork sandwiches, again, Pulled pork snackies for evening peckishness. There are half pound pulled pork packets in the freezer for future delights such as pulled pork chili, pulled pork omelets, pulled pork fried rice, pulled pork tacos, pulled pork …

Far in space, far in time.

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The mighty Pathfinder and I rolled down Main Street, heading home after a day of thinking and talking. Same as everyone, same as always. My freshly opened bag of Tyrrell’s Handcooked English Chips – Mature Cheddar and Chives flavor (flavour?) – rustled on the console next to me. “Crunch, crunch, crunch,” my chomping teeth said at a red light. “Crunch, crunch,” while we waited for a school bus to drop some kids. I checked the back of the bag for interesting potato chip news at an egregiously long red light. I was eating Lady Rosetta Potatoes grown in Herefordshire. Well ok. I examined the next chip in the afternoon light. It sorted of looked like a Herefordshire potato. “Crunch.” Tasted like one, too. I got to wondering about that potato. Who planted it? Was the farmer dreaming of a better life, or was she living the rural dream? Did the tractor need a new water pump and was the mortgage due so all hopes were with this potato and it’s brethren? Could the potato feel …

Surrender to the Sweatpants

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Miss Tibbit-the-Useless-Little-Black-Dog is pressed against me here on the sofa. She is super fluffy and still a little damp. Hamish is asleep in his chair looking rumpled. We all had a tense evening and I made an early surrender to the sweatpants. You know what I’m talking about. There comes a point when a person submits to the notion that the day is over. That there is no need to be in any way presentable. In this moment, sweatpants are the only choice. Not pajamas because those aren’t even clothes. Sweatpants. Elastic waist. Sometimes, preferably, elastic ankles. Droopy. Large. Sickeningly comforting. So horrifying that even if the house were on fire I’d change into other pants. Mine are 11 years old. I bought them when I was writing my PhD thesis and I vowed I would wear no other pants until it was finished. That took four months. Now they are a faded navy blue. They have zips at the ankles just in case I’m being active and need to shed my sporty outer layer. That’s just …

Spring on my bookshelf if not on the ground.

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Outside it is snowing. I can’t stand it. Miss Tibbit can’t stand it. My mouse keeps clicking on garden websites. I pretend ordered over $500 worth of dry, sunny condition plants yesterday. I bought tulips in an act of desperation. They are keeping me company in the office, nestled among the things I look at everyday…my dried frog from a beach cliff road in Estramadura region, Portugal. A favorite rock from the Rat Islands. Binoculars for staring down squirrels at the bird feeder. Beethoven on the radio because the Beethoven Festival is this week in Buffalo and that’s what’s playing. Grandpa WideEyed’s Perfect Attendance Certificate 1915-1916. My dented clock. Which would not be dented if it chose to stay on the wall like a normal clock. And, from my salad days – a Certificate of Award for participating in the Middle School jog-a-thon in 1981. I jogged 6.9 kilometers – I jogged in KILOMETERS you’ll note because the school system was still pretending to the metric conversion back then. Spring tulips among my everyday things. They are making …

Ludwig’s No. 9 on a Spring Evening

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We dug deeply into the closet for The Suit and a Dress. The WideEyedSpouse installed cufflinks. I glued a dangling sequin back onto my dress and pulled out the outrageous silk and roses wrap I made last fall, just as my world turned dark and winter. It is Springtime now. And, of course, Ludwig deserves the best and brightest. So last night we sparkled and gleamed the Mini over to Kleinhans Music Hall, leaving glitter and joy in our wake instead of carbon-rich exhaust. It was that kind of feeling. Have you spent much time with Beethoven’s Symphony Number 9? It overwhelms. It fills a person with complexities of sound and silence. There are whispered conversations between flutes and violins, there are arguments between basses and tympani drums, French Horns have opinions all over the place and eventually more than one hundred voices join the instruments, yelling in German about Joy.  More or less. The lyrics don’t actually make a lot of sense – I don’t know if it’s the translation from German or changing …

A good mattress.

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I love a good mattress. You just don’t see too many of them at this time of year. Maybe it’s so cold that people aren’t moving here and there as often in the winter. Maybe there’re good ones under all the snow banks – I don’t know but I miss seeing them. We were out on patrol two days ago when it got a little warmer. I didn’t even have to wear that horrible coat. I HATE that coat. A lot. … Oh, right, we were out checking our blocks a couple of days ago and there it was. A big, floppy mattress slung across a snowbank. I ran right to it and shoved my face into a really nice looking dark spot dribbled down the side. I breathed in hard and snorted back out. I rolled my eyes back in my head so I could really concentrate. I snuffled my chin hairs along the edge, to catch interesting spots along the whole length. I sneezed and looked around. No one seemed to be in a …

The meatballs are in the crockpot.

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The outside world was a rude -6°F this morning. The dogs wasted no time out there during morning walkies. They failed utterly to enjoy the hard, crystal blue sky and sparkling snow. Fair enough. I am appreciating it from my office window. Death dealing icicles are dangling from every house for blocks. One neighbor has glaciers forming in the deep vee swales of his roofline, the forward ends are ten-foot long broadswords aiming for earth. Or his car. Because he parks under them. The snow squeaks under feet and tires. The ground isn’t the ground anymore. We’ve all given up trying to clear sidewalks and driveways entirely – we’ve taken to forming a smooth surface of the trampled up, super frozen mass. My boots thunk on these elevated walkways. Miss Tibbit-The-Useless-Little-Black-Dog pees on them and it all disappears. She can’t be the only one. Melting day is going to be awesomely gross. Bleach down the neighborhood gross. In desperation I applied Swarovski Crystal tattoos this morning. They are tiny, wee crystals on adhesive. Now my cheek …

What happens when one of your top five take-out places gets a liquor license and installs a bar?

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Nothing good and everything wonderful. Last weekend I was starving, STARVING after cleaning the house, doing the laundry, walking dogs, and visiting the car show. Sliding gracefully in and out of dreamy luxury sedans (I recommend the Audi A7 for sheer comfort and interior silence) and climbing into wee-electric cars (the Chevy Spark doesn’t feel real) works up an appetite. We stopped at a newer restaurant that’s supposed to be good  – a two hour wait and hairblowingly loud music in the bar. The WideEyedSpouse looked down his nose. “No. Much No.” We tried a BBQ joint. One hour and 15 minutes. Good food but not that good. Drove past our number one sandwich take-out joint. Closed. Friends, we were now out of our milieu. We were in downtown Buffalo after dark. Unusual. We were looking for food without a plan. Rare. We weren’t calling for pizza. Shocking. In fact, we had given up on the very notion of take-out. The universe shook and I was cast adrift, hungry, helpless, sad. The Mini motored us up …

Darkest January.

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The long haul is here. The days are cold, too cold and windy for good dog walks, gardening, anything really. The nights are frigid, too frigid for standing in awe of the starry universe. The short hours of daylight, and don’t try to convince yourself otherwise, yes the days are getting longer but they are still short – the short hours of daylight pass interminably in the dark gleam of overcast skies and no end in sight. The house creaks and bangs in the shifts from cold to exceedingly cold. I can hear my neighbor’s back door slam in the hyperlucid air. The dogs bark each time. Shivering a little at my observation post at the window, I think dark thoughts about wearing their warm furs as a cloak. That would stop the barking. Sirens blast through the city more or less constantly. January is the season of emergencies. Fires burn hotter, car accidents shatter windshields and bones more spectacularly, the cold makes the emergency greater, the response itself dangerous. The WideEyedSpouse and I have …