wideeyedfunk

Tag: Buffalo

  • Dark energy and love.

    Yesterday evening I was reading about the form of the visible universe in my new backyard astronomy book. The WideEyedSpouse was doing something involving dinner while I sat at the awesome vintage kitchen table. Wiggins the Ancient Cat kept trying to put his butt on the page. Tibbit the Useless rested her chin on my knee. She was bound for disappointment, as I was reading not eating. Hamish the Corgi sat looking at me, learning about the universe through our mental link.

    Stars. Planets. Constellations. Yeah, yeah. Nothing new there. (Except that I discovered that I should be able to see the Milky Way directly above my house right now and all I can see is the glare of my neighbors’ anti-thief lights. Annoying, but what can do you? Cities are creepy.)

    Then, I looked at a photograph from the Hubble that captured hundreds of whirling galaxies. They face every which way. They are different colors. Big ones, little ones. Galaxies all over the place in every direction. There are billions of them. I felt a weird nerve rush.

    I didn’t know there were so many. Did you? Sure ok, the astronomers and physicists know but. I never realized. Did you know a little one is running into ours over on the other side? Holy cats.

    I looked at a depiction of the distribution of galaxies in the known universe. They cluster in strings and clots. They look like rumples of ocean foam on the incoming tide.  I sort of wondered what was in between. The astronomy book said there was nothing in between. That seemed weird but ok with me. I like a tidy universe. I guess it isn’t so simple.

    Evidently there is dark matter.

    Evidently there is dark matter-energy and it is abundant.

    Evidently we, the universe, are expanding because of this hypothesized dark energy and eventually all will be diffuse. All will be isolated and alone, beyond each other’s detection – unable to even know that anything else is out there.

    The WideEyedSpouse and I have been married for 19 years and 40 minutes as the clock looks at this moment. I’m sitting here at the desk worried about deadlines and dark energy. The WideEyedSpouse is 30 feet and 2 stories away worried about getting the racing stripes placed correctly on the Mini Cooper S. Our little bit of the universe isn’t expanding too quickly for us. I don’t think it can.

  • Trash picking for winter lettuce.

    It’s more complicated than that title makes it seem. With some in-between formative steps.

    The WideEyedSpouse and I walk the Useless Little Black Dog and the Corgi for several blocks through the neighborhood every evening. This is terrible in the winter, mostly. It is nice in the summer, generally. It is ALWAYS great on trash day.

    Because we live in a neighborhood of historic homes filled with epic volumes of historic junk, someone is always prying something out of the basement or off of the house. I scored a china cabinet that reeked of basement mildew two years ago. It is now my garden tool shack in the garage. Elegant, efficient, free. From Spode to Spades. (I know, right?)

    The trick is to get there quick. Super quick because as I’ve noted before, Buffalo has an active trash picking culture. My amateur attempts are pathetic compared to the experts.

    We moved into this house and set up the garden four summers ago. I’ve been waiting for someone in the neighborhood to replace their generously sized divided light windows for all of that time. I’m going to make a cold frame for winter lettuces. Sure, there have been windows out to the trash, lots of times. They were too small, not divided, broken, or the pickers got to them before me because they were so obviously awesome and worth something to someone. And sure, I can buy greenhouse panels to make a cold frame but why when there’s all this free stuff going out to the trash?

    This was the week my friends. Up on Summit, where the houses are big and the windows are wide, someone tore out their near perfect condition divided light sashes and put them out to the curb in a tidy unbroken stack. Hamish and I approached them first and I chased him away from his obvious intent to pee on the stack. “Cut it out,” I told him, “some of those are ours.” He looked at me like, “that was exactly my point.” The Spouse and Miss Tibbit came up. “What are you doing?” The Spouse asked in his suspicious, high toned query voice. He knew full well what I was doing and wanted nothing to do with it. “Score,” I said, “I’m coming back for these.” I think the Spouse rolled his eyes but if he did he made sure his back was to me a little bit.

    Hamish and I stepped smart for the rest of the walk. We made a veggie lasagna and tossed it in the oven for an hour. I didn’t even care, all I could think about was my windows laying all unprotected on the street. I was heading for the car when I noticed that the grass was sort of really, really long. I mowed it super quick. I yelled down to the basement where the Spouse was doing something with the fitness gear, “I’m going to get my windows!”

    The Pathfinder and I hove to the curb next to the window stack. “Yeah,” I muttered to myself, “but don’t be greedy.” Afraid I wouldn’t listen to myself, I grabbed the first two on the stack and fled.

    My new cold frame lids.
    My new cold frame lids. The white ones. The brown ones I got at a salvage reuse STORE before I understood. Besides, they don’t have windows in them. And they are the garden fence not cold frame parts.

    And there they are. Resting against the garage, the tops of my cold frames. Now. Now I am on the lookout for junky old bookcases to act as the frame of the cold frames. They always show up around this time of year when the college students move in and out. I just have to be patient. And quick.

    The garden today. Notice the grapeless vines, the pear-less trees, the unripe tomatoes. Frederico the Falcon is NOT deterring the pest.
    The garden today. Notice the grapeless vines, the pear-less trees, the unripe tomatoes. Frederico the Falcon on the Pergola is NOT deterring the pests.

  • Nuns and the Cosmos.

    I saw two nuns standing outside a condominium construction project that used to be a giant Catholic church. Back in about 1920 Buffalo was rich. Gangsta rich. More millionaires than any other city in the United States and that was back when a million was a million because a cup of coffee was about nickel and that included your lunch. The 1920s gangsta rich families built and maintained what seems like a thousand fabulously vast glories to God and themselves. The blasted, sinking shells of these vainglories litter the urban landscape. This one, the one with the nuns today, at least was spared generations of bats, birds, and urine-soaked crack mattresses. It is going straight from sins to kitchen sinks in a year.

    So, the nuns. One nun was holding a latte cup and the other had a green baseball hat on over her wimple. Both of them were wearing kicks. Sneakers. And their body postures weren’t all stiff and nunny. One was leaned back gesticulating (with her latte cup) and the other nun sort of bent forward in a laugh. I was reaching to open my car window to entirely violate their privacy by eavesdropping when the light changed and I had to go. I managed to get a look at them though – and here’s the thing. They were young. Like mid 30s. Maybe mid 30s on the outside.

    The nuns.
    The nuns.

    I parked the Pathfinder and shopped my way through the co op where everyone is slightly hipper than everyone else but I was distracted and couldn’t play the concerned hip citizen game very effectively. How do people know how to become a nun? Are there still places that take new nuns? How do people know where to look for them? Secret signs and sigils? Do you need a personal endowment like back in the Medieval day? Was there a Google search in these nuns’ pasts?

    I was stumped. Thunderstruck. Once again awed by the variety of life and the greatness of the human experience. It was too much. I came home and spent a happy 90 minutes cruising the Orion telescope website. I need a Dobsonian or a refractor scope right now to feel properly small again – to shrink humanness back into its tiny speck of consciousness. Nuns, not nuns, Miss Tibbit the Useless Little Black Dog, you, me – we are all just cells floating in the universe’s vastiness.

    Now for a glass of wine.

  • The eerily prescient fortune cookie.

    I love fortune cookies. The way they snap and crumble into shards of fresh tasting, sugary crispness. That crunch. Learning to say a word in Chinese.

    shí liú. grape.

    I hold fortune cookies in my hand and think about the fortune before I crack them open. Will I meet new people? Should I trust the man with green eyes? Will monetary advantage be mine? Does adventure keep the heart young? Should I learn to dance?

    What are my lucky numbers?

    15. 22. 37. 8.

    I never pick the fortune cookie, I let it pick me.

    Yesterday a long delayed, blizzard-stuck package arrived at my snowy door. The boys (dogs) and I dumped it in the front parlor, which is our official package opening location. Rejected items never make it out of that room. Dirty antiques found in other people’s estates begin new lives in the WideEyedHousehold there. It is the ante-chamber to my life. It’s the room where I let guests linger until I decide if they are permitted to participate in my greater homestead. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. It’s chilly enough in the front parlor that the uninvited aren’t inclined to de-coat. Perfect, really, for moving folks right along: “Yes, yes, nice to see you too, stop by again sometime…”

    I digress.

    The package. It had a fortune cookie in it, taped to the packing list, right at the top of the box. Since there was only the one cookie, the choice had already been made, this cookie came to Me. I cracked it open.

    “There will be snorkeling in your future.”Fortune

    The boys and I crunched through the cookie and I sat back in Hamish the Corgi’s rockstar chair.

    IMG_1687I was stunned. How did this cookie know I was heading out to snorkel in the coming days? How could this cookie know? I chewed the last of the cookie, because of course that’s part of the deal with a fortune cookie. Ok. Better accept it, I thought to myself. I leaned over to unpack the rest of the box.

    FeetandDogsTen minutes later I flopped my flippered feet over to the mirror above the hearth to see what I looked like in a low volume, water-injected silicone skirted mask and red ultra-dry snorkel. Heh. I looked funny. But geez, that fortune cookie really had it right. Weird.

  • Lemme me see the other side.

    I’ll tell you what. I have lived in Minnesota. I know what cold feels like. I spent a couple of winters in Anchorage. I know what big snow looks like. I grew up at the South Jersey shore.  I am familiar with bone cutting, sand carrying, January winds that administer the midseason microdermabrasion treatments. Stings a bit when the feeling comes back into your cheeks.

    Now I’m in Buffalo. And I am becoming expert in the wintry mix. Sloppy.  Gusty. Raw. The Christmas pine garlands are flopping all over the place. And dog walks are wretched.

    “Yeah.”

    Sorry, that was Miss Tibbit interrupting us. This afternoon she pranced onto the back porch, got blasted in the face with a sleety snow, and turned around to come back inside. Wasn’t worth it. No thank you ma’am.

    Buffalo winter means that Hamish the Corgi and Sweet Tibbit come home from walkies with salty wet feet. Hamish’s undercarriage is a cindery mucky mess. Every time. (The cat just sneezed in my wine by the way. Just saying. Nice moment.) If I leave the dogs alone I have mud on the sofa, salt foot prints all over the house, maybe a sick dog because I guess they aren’t supposed to lick that rock salt.

    So. Every day, several times a day, we do the lemme see the other side routine.  The dogs know and when it is gross outside they climb the first set of steps and wait for me in the hall landing. I unglove, unshoe, unhat, uncoat, unscarf, grab the dog towel, and crouch down. Hamish stands stiffly in front of me and presents his near foot – usually port side, held high in the air. I wipe it, rub his chest under there. Let go. He steps forward and balances his weight on the starboard side. I wipe the back foot, wipe the belly, let go. Miss Tibbit, who is anxious that this isn’t going fast enough, pushes past. “Lemme see the other side,” I tell Hamish.

    He steps forward a bit, performs a Corgi K-turn, hoves into reach and presents his starboard foot. Wipe. Forward. Wipe. “Next,” I say. Miss Tibbit appears in my face, one front foot in the air. Wipe. She steps forward. Back foot wipe. “Other side,” I say, like a train conductor announcing the stop. Tibbit steps away and carefully negotiates a turn, presenting the other front foot. Wipe. Forward. Wipe.

    The dogs assemble conveniently near the dog treat storage area while I drape the dog towel on the heater. It’s irritating, the dogs get rubbed with a warm towel after the Buffalo winter walks. What am I running here, a dog spa?

    Anyway, I rattle the lid of the treat jar and toss snacks into waiting maws. “Alright,” I tell them, “I’ve got work to do,” and we head back up to the desk. Oh boy, only a couple of hours until the next Buffalo winter dog walk.

  • Budget Sequestration Made Me Eat Cheap Peanut Butter.

    The WideEyedHousehold must make decisions about financial sequestering by prioritizing categories of expenditure. Just as our Senate is divided in debates about preferential priorities, so we are. Just as our nation must make difficult choices, so we must. “Compromise” in the WideEyedHousehold results in unpalatable solutions, as it does in our nation.

    As you may know, I dreamed of an exotic winter break far from snowy Buffalo. Last week during spring break, we ate lunch at the Ikea just outside of Toronto for our international vacation. The basic parameters of an exotic, international locale with regional cuisine were met. They were met stupendously if the rumors about horsemeat in the Ikea meatballs are true. How intrepid of us to eat the little meat balls all unknowing, even with an unconcerned panache.

    As you may know, the WideEyedSpouse likes beer. I like to eat. He feels that beer sort of is food. I feel that food is food. The Spouse prefers good beer. I prefer organic, limited ingredient, small batch peanut butter. Our preferential priorities battled at Wegman’s. The beer lobby won. I still got the peanut butter, but at radically reduced funding. Evidently the beer drinker’s lobby in the WideEyedSenate is far more powerful than the peanut butter eater’s lobby.

    I fear for the next battle. I mean “compromise”.

  • No Dogs Allowed? Hamish the Corgi Finds a Way.

    “Where are we going?” Hamish the Corgi asked as he watched me dig the hiking pack out of the coat closet. It wasn’t easy. Five months of hats, scarves, gloves, reusable bags, dog towels, and YakTrax had crammed themselves on top of it.

    HamishSteps5I looked over my shoulder and up the steps to look at Hamish. He stood in the hall, big ears perked wide and high. He was smiling. “Tifft Nature Preserve over by the lakeshore,” I told him. “Awesome,” he said, “that’s not mine yet.” He disappeared into the kitchen and I heard rummaging in the dog cupboard.

    I yanked the day pack strap and slammed the closet door before all the other stuff escaped. I went up to the kitchen to fill my water bladder. Hamish was waiting by the sink with the dog hiking water bowl and dog water bottle. He looked from me to the treat bin on the counter, me to treat bin, me to treat bin. “Don’t forget to pack the go-go crunchies,” he reminded me, nudging my ankle with his nose.

    “Oh no Hamish,” I looked down at him, “Tifft doesn’t allow dogs.”

    “What?” he was outraged. “No dogs?” he couldn’t believe it.

    “Nope. Sorry Little Man,” I screwed the lid on my water bladder and eased it into my pack. Hamish stared at me for a while longer, tilting his head left and right. His ears shot straight up and he trotted out of the room on his stubby Corgi legs. Clearly he had an Idea.

    I was in the dining room fussing with the camera when Hamish bustled back 10 minutes later. He was carrying something Very Carefully in his mouth. He set it down next to my foot. “Whatcha got there Hamish?” I asked him absently, there was a smear on the lens that just wouldn’t give up.

    “Will you please take this with you and squeeze out a few drops every couple of feet?” He asked. “Trees are best, but a good clump of grass is ok too.”

    “What?” I peered down at the vessel bumping my foot. It was a translucent squeezey ketchup bottle, the kind you see in diners, and it was half full of a pale yellow fluid. I blinked at it. I wrinkled my brow. “Hamish, is that? Wait, what it that?” I asked as I leaned down to feel the temperature, yep, warm.

    Hamish gave me his soft warm Corgi look. “Tifft can still be mine, even if I can’t go,” he explained. I shook my head. “Ok,” I said, sort of doubtful. “But I don’t know if it’ll work.” Hamish bounced out of the room to tell Miss Tibbit the Useless Little Black Dog.

    It wasn’t until a few hours later that I wondered, as I dutifully dribbled the base of a nice big tree, how did Hamish with his stubby little legs fill that tall bottle? I shrugged to myself. Better to not think about it.

  • The tiresome collision of skeletons and snow.

    Skeleton1Outside the lab window, above the human skeletons dangling from their cranial hooks, I could see the wind howling snow across the small Fimbulwintered quad. It looked horrible. I put my chin in my hand and gazed into the whirling wretched iciness and thought about a beach. A long, wide beach with nice medium sized waves and only a few other people around. The sun glared off the water and I could almost feel the heat. I sighed and imagined settling my shoulders deeper into the hot sand. It was great. I smiled.

    I heard a faint, wah, wah, wah sound off to my right so I turned my head, idly wondering what it was.

    Oh. It was one of the grad students in the lab. He was describing his research project to me. To get my input. Which I really wanted to give because I like that part of my job.

    I tuned back in, sighing to myself.

    I’m tired of winter.

    Temperature at posting: 16 degrees F, light snow, wind ~15mph.

  • Snow trash is the best.

    Gloriously foul and endlessly fascinating, snow trash happens when the deep snow melts and reveals the urban detritus of weeks. It is a special seasonal process to be enjoyed only a few times a year. Because I happen to be a professional studier of the material remnants of human activity, I can’t look away from a nice nasty city snow bank. I like them to be really full of good stuff and I stop for particularly rich ones to be sure I’m seeing everything. This isn’t the WideEyedSpouse’s favorite activity, but the dogs sure don’t mind.

    Dog dookies are ubiquitous in the melting snow banks. Big, small, dark, light. You can really see the variety of diets fed to the neighborhood canines. Here in Buffalo chicken bones also are typical in the melting snow mounds. Perplexing. Yes, Buffalo Chicken wings, but does everyone eat them all the time? They must fly from car windows like confetti.

    I see newspapers, catalogs, dryer sheets, and Kleenex that appear used but may just be wet from the melt. I haven’t developed a way to determine used versus wet yet but I do tend to think crumpled means used. They come in all colors: white, pink, green, yellow. I have suspicions that the yellows started as white and they are in fact used.

    A shoe appears every now and again and it baffles me every time. Where does that single shoe come from? Who walked home with one shoe? If you noted that your shoe had come loose from your foot, in the winter, would you not backtrack? Go on a little hunt for your missing shoe? What I should do is determine if the single shoe is statistically significantly correlated with the presence of a spray of brightly colored vomit. Which, by the way, can be observed on the white snow with alarming frequency. Here my broader hypothesis is that inebriated people throw up hard enough to toss a shoe, and then they don’t notice their shoe is gone. Although, there are no bars in the immediate vicinity, so they must be home drinkers. Alternatively, the vomit could innocently result from too many chicken wings or a terrible Kleenex supported flu that hits while walking the family dog (which parsimoniously explains the vomit, the Kleenex litter, the uncleaned up dookies, AND maybe even the shoe. Now that’s hypothetical model building friends.). I might be looking for too many causal links. I can’t help myself, that’s what I do.

    Yesterday the dogs and I saw something entirely new. A unique specimen. A kidzbop 3 CD had sliced into a snow bank and it gleamed in the morning sun. A prize. Hamish sniffed it pretty good and Tibbit wee’d near it. From its position in the snow bank, about 1.4 meters in from the street, I could posit that kidzbop 3 had been flung from a moving car. The presence of the kidzbop cd in the snowbank distracted me all day and I developed a series of hypotheses explaining why the cd had been flung:

    H1: “What? No baby I don’t have any kids.” Fling.

    H2. I went home and found kidzbop 3 online. Gave it a listen. Who wouldn’t?. And so, Hypothesis 2: Track 1: remake of Soak up the Sun. Track 2: remake of Hey Baby Hey Baby Hey sung by tunelessly chanting children. Track 3: (does it even matter?)…Fling.

    H3: “Oh look, a cd came in my used car…” Fling.

    H4: “Oh God, the baby just puked in the car! All over everything!” Fling.

    H5: “Mamamamamama play kidzbop. Play kidzbop. Play it. Play it. Plaaaaaayyyyy iiitttt.” Fling.

    I went back later to get kidzbop 3. It was gone. Gone.

  • 1,500 miles of family, Or, Caviar tastes like chicken pox.

    Stop 1: Scottsville, Esmont, Charlottesville Virginia WideEyedFunks:

    I was spooning caviar onto a smear of cream cheese at the pre-Christmas dinner snackie spread. Sister-in-law L. and Older Brother set us up with fine cheeses, Dracula’s Dilemma pickled garlic, some kind of awesome aged herbed salami.  And caviar.

    Our WideEyedParents were across the room and from around the Christmas tree we could hear dad shouting at mom: “Do you want some cold cuts?”

    “A cool one?” she said, “no, I don’t want a beer.” Heh. Might be time for hearing tests.

    Sister-in-law N. pushed through Sister-in-law L. and me to get to the snackies, “Quit snack blocking,” she told us. I inched my counter stool over an inch or so, but not really too far. I hadn’t tried all the cheeses yet.

    I lifted my caviar cracker to take a bite. “You eat that stuff?” Older Brother asked, clearly doubtful. I shrugged and ate the cracker. Older Brother watched me chew. “I don’t eat it,” he said. “Good,” Sister-in-law L. said, “more for the rest of us.”

    Older Brother glanced at her and put his attention back on me. “Caviar reminds me of when I had chicken pox in my mouth,” he paused, I think to judge my response. I had stopped chewing, riveted despite my worries for what was coming. “When the chicken pox popped they released salty juices that tasted juuuuust like caviar.” He smiled at me. I swallowed my chewed up and popped caviar with difficulty.

    Younger brother walked by, jiggling Baby Nephew. “Oops,” Younger Brother said, watching a big drooly spit up splat to the floor. Hamish and Miss Tibbit were mildly interested. Oldest Brother called from the Sunny Southwest. We talked about Sister-in-law J.’s belly dancing costume and safety pins. Young nephew strolled past in his new skateboard helmet, and Niece clacked at her new laptop.

    Stop 2: Ocean City, New Jersey Family of WideEyedSpouse

    Two particularly elegant women from My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding accidently joined us for Christmas 2.0.

    Older Niece wore her excellent new hat while she thumbed at something on her new smarty phone and Younger Niece trotted around the living room, tormenting Hamish with her interest in his plush fur. He ran, WideEyed, from corner to corner seeking asylum.

    Sister-in-law K and Brother-in-law P sat numbly watching Younger Niece and Christmas 2.0 events. They manage in retail and Christmas is Not Kind to the folks who at the most fundamental level facilitate our national economic security.

    Mother-in-law sniffed her new Chanel perfume, remembering Valentine’s gifts from her dad back in the day, and WideEyedSpouse and I waited to see what the relentlessly greedy Miss Tibbit would manage to steal from the table.

    All the while, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding flickered on the TV behind us, benign and quiet, until we noticed the bride and her maid of honor beating each other into the sidewalk outside of their wedding hall. Sister-in-law K. grabbed the remote to turn it up. We watched in awe.

    Stop 3: Buffalo, New York WideEyedHousehold

    1,500 miles, 14 accidents in the cat hut, 2 major winter storms, 9 bottles of water, 7 travel cups of coffee, 6 days later, and we are home. The Christmas candles burned in the windows of the WideEyedHouse to greet us. The new snow gleamed on the garden fence and pergola, and Miss Tibbit did a little dance in the drive while Hamish rolled and rolled in the snow.