Vacation! (part the second)

 More photos from a two-day trip! Huzzah!

When last we checked in, The Wife and I had just finished up a visit to a Cayuga Lake winery. Next up was a stop that we make every single year, without fail: the great Taughannock Falls, which have the distinction of being the tallest waterfall in North America, east of the Mississippi River. Maybe next year we'll try the longer walk on the Gorge Trail that goes up to the base of the Falls, but the higher overlook is always spectacular. This summer and fall have been pretty wet, so there was a good amount of water going over the brink. One year it had been so dry that the Falls were literally dry on the day we went.

I honestly do not remember a time in my life when I was not deeply thrilled by water, whether it be a placid lake, a running river, a surging sea, or a plunging fall.

As you drive up and out of Taughannock State Park, the road follows the stream before it starts its quick descent down its gorge before the fall. Up there it's a beautifully picturesque Upstate New York stream, running quickly along its rocky slate bed. The temptation would be great to simply pull over and look for a swimming hole, if not for the signs all along the road pointing out the danger lurking a few bends downstream.

After Taughannock, into Ithaca we went. Unfortunately we had to miss this year's Apple Harvest Festival, so we were just...in Ithaca. Which is fine! Ithaca is one of my favorite towns anywhere, and were I able to wave a wand and instantly move someplace, Ithaca would be the place. We went into bookstores and a few boutiques and gift shops and generally just soaked in the Ithaca vibe.

Ithaca is really a place that presses all my buttons. It's big enough, with its population base and the two large colleges nearby, to have the cosmopolitan feel of a larger city while being very small. Its very geography keeps the degree of sprawl possible there to a minimum; the hills and the lake really keep Ithaca at a size where its only option is to expand upward, which it's doing with a lot of high-rise construction of late. Still, the overall vibe is one of liberal weirdness. It's the kind of place where I show up in a poofy Renfest shirt under a pair of vintage overalls, and I'm the one dressed kind of conservatively.

And the bookstores! Oh, my, so many bookstores. I only got into two this time (three if you include the comics store): Autumn Leaves, which is a wonderful used bookstore right in the middle of The Commons, and Odyssey, which is a beautiful new bookstore that just opened last year. Somehow Odyssey Bookstore has made a go of it despite having opened as COVID-19 hit. That says something. The only real downside to this year's visit to Ithaca was that Waffle Frolic, our beloved joint for waffles and fried chicken, was closed! We arrived about 1:25pm, and Waffle Frolic had closed at 1:00. It never occurred to us to check their hours for abbreviated operation. Alas! But the day was lovely.

We passed a few hours in Ithaca and then had to strike out for home. We made one more stop, this time driving across the rise to the west of Cayuga Lake and into the valley of the next lake, the mighty Seneca Lake (largest and deepest of the Finger Lakes). Here we stopped at Rasta Ranch Vineyards, another favorite place of ours. This place is steeped in hippie vibes, with wines called things like "Uncle Homer's Red" and "Terry's Teaser". Rasta Ranch is a joy, and here we pretty much wrapped up the "tourist" part of our day.

After this? Well, a sunset drive along the eastern shore of Seneca Lake, and then dinner at a fried chicken joint in Geneva (sadly they were out of bone-in chicken, so we had popcorn chicken), and then a stop at Trader Joe's in Rochester for various items. And then...the trip home.

I'm always sad when we get home from a trip, any trip, to the Finger Lakes. The whole region always feels just slightly off-the-beaten-path, just slightly forgotten. It's an entire region that still rolls along, probably with less money and fewer people than in days long gone by, but the bones are still there, and so is the wonder and the beauty. In fact, maybe some of that decay has even helped in some way: the old railroad tracks where the trains don't run are a part of the landscape now. A long-abandoned army depot, which happens to house a herd of white deer because their population is protected by old fences. Occasional Amish folk in their buggies. The feeling of cresting a hill, leaving a lake behind you...but there's still another one ahead.

Maybe it's time for me to write that sequence of stories set in the Finger Lakes, after all....

Vacation! (part the first)

 The Wife and I made our annual trek to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes this weekend. Our trip was timed a bit oddly and was truncated by a day, because of Reasons; usually we stay two nights in a hotel near Rochester, leaving Friday and spending Saturday trekking through the FLX region and Ithaca before returning to the hotel and coming home (at a leisurely pace) on Sunday. We usually attend the annual Apple Harvest Festival in Ithaca, but this year the folks in Ithaca took a rather long time in announcing the dates for the festival (or if they were even having it at all). We took a gamble, booking our trip for this weekend, since the Apple Fest is usually either the last weekend in September or the first in October, waiting as long as we could to nail down our price. And wouldn't you know it: right after we booked, Ithaca announced next weekend as the Apple Festival.

Oh well. Win some, lose some, and all of that. It's not really that big a deal! I know that the COVID pandemic has made it difficult for towns to plan things like annual festivals, and we had a good time nevertheless. It was a stunning weekend for weather: it had been annoyingly hot and humid until the beginning of last week, when it turned dreary and rainy for the better part of three days. By Friday, though, when we set out on US 20A heading east? Blue skies and cool breezes, and it's been that way ever since.

And even though we missed out on lunch at our favorite joint in Ithaca on Saturday (apparently they're closing at 1:00 and we got there at 1:20, having not even thought to check their hours for staffing-related changes), did we ever eat well.

It started at the Broadway Deli in Lancaster. Behold this cheesesteak sandwich!

And for dinner that night? A visit to PF Chang's. Yes, it's a chain joint, but not all chains are bad. PF's puts thought into what they do and it's always a delight to eat there.

The next morning we headed out, bright and early, looking for breakfast. We found it in someplace new: Macri's Deli in Canandaigua, which has a nifty selection of breakfast sandwiches and they also make them gluten-free. The place is right on the city's municipal pier, right on the water, which made eating there an absolute joy.

(This phone does panoramas!)

Our next destination was the Goose Watch Winery on Cayuga Lake. We discovered this winery last year and liked it so much we had to return.

(Note The Wife, eyeing my wine because she hasn't been served hers yet!)

I'll stop here for now, but the day wasn't even close to being over at this point. Stay tuned!

A Pirate Looks at Fifty

 Normally I don't post on Sundays much, but...well, today's my birthday. I am now fifty.

Here's what fifty (minus two days, since I took this two days ago) looks like:

Not a lot different, huh?

So, how does fifty feel? Well...so far, not a whole lot different from forty. A bit stiffer, a bit achier, a bit...longer. Mentally, it's OK. I still have tons of interests and tons of things I want to do, places I want to see, stories I want to tell.

Introspectively, I suppose...geez, I don't know. Is this the life I saw myself living twenty, thirty, forty years ago? Not even close. Is that bad? Not really, though in all honesty, as much as I generally avoid thinking about roads not traveled, I do find myself wanting my college decision to leave music behind back, more than any other decision. Everything else, I'm mainly fine with, at least as far as things that have happened over which I had any control. The worst things are the things I had no idea were coming, and I expect that's true of most people.

So, anyway, that's my introspection on turning fifty. Check back in ten years for sixty. Maybe then I'll stop thinking mostly like a twelve-year-old sci-fi geek. More like...thirteen!

Onward and upward! Zap! Pow!!

Nuphone, whodis!

 The most exciting development at Casa Jaquandor of late is this: I got a new phone! Yay!

There it is, on the right: my brand-spanking new Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, with 512gb internal storage and 5G capacity (which will go along well with the microchip I got from m COVID vaccine*). Yes, I went big. Yes, I went expensive. Yes, I've been saving shekels and quatloos** for quite a while to pay for this. Yes, I usually am more frugal than this, but yes, this one time I wanted the best shiniest thing that's out there.

My previous phone was a Samsung Galaxy S8 that I had been using for three years. Its performance was still holding up, but I have noticed that the battery life has started suffering in the last six months or so. I used to be able to get through an entire day without having to charge, but more and more I'd been needing to plug it in mid-afternoon or risk dying at night. More pressing was that Samsung had announced earlier in the year that it would be ceasing support for this model phone later this year, which meant no more security updates. The S8 model had been out for a year when I got that phone, so four years of support really seems reasonable to me. My goal with each smartphone I get is at least three years of use, which I got with the S8; my phone before that was an S4, which lasted me four years until it got to the point where apps couldn't even update anymore because it was out of date. The S21 is now my third smartphone in seven years. I'll take that. (I know folks who upgrade their phones yearly, which seems frankly insane to me.)

So I knew earlier this year that I would be switching to a new phone, and I did some waffling between staying with Samsung, whose products I've used almost exclusively in the "mobile gizmo" area (my three tablets have also been Samsungs), Samsung isn't perfect, by any means. Their devices do tend to get bundled with a lot of extra crap that you may not really want, which can be a bit frustrating--especially when the apps the thing comes with can't always even be removed. I do not need a Netflix app on my phone, for example--I would never stream something I really want to watch on a screen this small, even if by phone standards the screen is actually pretty big. Also, Samsung's digital assistant, "Bixby", takes up space that I'd rather use for something else. As digital assistants go I'm fine with Google's, which is pretty much on there anyway, since Android and Google go hand-in-hand. There tends to be a lot of duplication with Samsung devices: Samsung Pay and Google Pay, for example.

I can live with all of that, to be honest. I like the ease of transferring stuff from one phone to the next, and since I already have a Samsung account it's easier to just keep using a Samsung account than port stuff from one platform to another completely different platform.

But the final factor that really got me to buy this phone was the cameras. Now, even that was not a slam-dunk, because Google's Pixel phones are also possessed of fantastic photo-taking ability. Their cameras may not have the biggest or best sensors out there, but Google's camera software somehow does magic stuff that takes up a lot of that slack. This S21 has a giant set of lenses: there's a wide lens, an ultra-wide lens, and two telephoto lenses. I'm not going to get into the nuts and bolts of it all here, because I'm not that knowledgeable about it all and because I still have a lot of playing with this phone to do. Articles reviewing this phone's camera performance abound online. I'll just say that the 108 megapixel main lens is pretty amazing, and I love that the front-facing "selfie" camera is better, all by itself, than the main camera on my old S8.

Here are a couple of selfies I took using the front-facing camera:

And here are a couple of "general" photos, using the main camera:

Now here's where it gets interesting: zooming. Phone cameras have historically not been able to do much in the way of optical zoom; there's just not room in the phone's casing for the mechanics needed to make a lens zoom. Phones have relied on digital zoom, which is OK at low-levels but at higher zoom multipliers results in photos that start to take on a Claude Monet kind of look.

This phone has a lens set at a 3x zoom, and one more at a 10x zoom, so I can stand in one place and take photos with multiple grades of zooming. Note the following trios of photos: in each case I was standing in the exact same place to take each shot!

Night photography is also fascinating with this phone. I'm not sure how this works, but I think it's a combination of long exposure and overlaying of multiple images to composite one image. I might be wrong, though. These photos were taken at night, when things were considerably darker than they appear:

And all of this is just scratching the surface! I haven't even attempted anything with video yet on this phone, after belatedly discovering that my old S8 was pretty damned good for video. I've also read that astrophotography is possible on this phone, by manipulating the Pro settings in the camera. That's an exciting prospect.

Not everything is rosy: apparently the newest version of Android limits the use of the phone's cameras to the native camera app, which is kind of a bummer because I've been using the CameraMX app as my default camera app all the way back to my S4. I was used to it and to its interface, and it had a pretty solid on-board editor. I suspect it's hard to make a third-party app that takes proper advantage of all the various lenses that are available from one phone to the next, and I read that there are some other technical reasons for this as well, though I didn't quite understand them. Also, this phone is my first of the post-headphone jack era. Now, I'm on board with Bluetooth earbuds, but I do still want that functionality, particularly for plugging in an outboard microphone for video making. I'll need to get a USB-C adaptor for that, at some point.

All in all, though, I am quite happy with this phone and I look forward to getting several years out of it. I can't imagine right now how the S24 or S25 will blow my mind, but hey, I've got time to get there.

* Yeah, I made the joke. Deal with it.

** Quatloo: a Star Trek reference.

August is the new July

 This was a long-range forecast from nine days ago:

I've noticed for a while that I deal better with hot temperatures these days than I used to. Ten years ago, or more, I would personally start getting very uncomfortable any time temperatures climbed above the 80 degree mark. Over the last few years, that's started to shift: I may not like 80s, but I no longer find the low 80s debilitating. I can function outside when it's that hot.

Over 90, though, and I'm back to my heat-hating grumpiness of old. Add to that the searing humidity of late, and I have to cry "Uncle!"

It's just too effing hot of late.

Apparently it became official earlier today: August 2021 was the hottest August ever in the Buffalo Niagara region. The month actually began with five days or so of below-normal temps, and there was a lovely weekend two weeks ago with seasonal temps and humidity, but aside from those brief moments, it's been a relentless month, with temps hitting at least 85 degrees regularly, and with dewpoints well north of 70 degrees.

August in these parts is almost always the best of the summer months: June can be iffy, and our heat and humidity is usually packed into July. Usually by the time August rolls around, we're in for a bit less heat and a bit less humidity. Usually by August we can start having nights where we can turn off the central air and open the windows. Couple that with the fact that some of our favorite summer events (the Erie County Fair, and our usual trip to the Sterling Renaissance Festival) happen in August, and also add in that even with DST sunset starts returning to a time where I can start to feel I'm getting night back, August is generally a month I look forward to.

This month, though...August 2021...this one was tough. I've been a sweaty, sticky mess more most of it, even with my newfound ability to function in hot weather. The central air trucks away, but after a few days of it the air starts to take on a "canned" feel that not even all our houseplants can make go away. And for a new wrinkle, this year we had a night when the air conditioning system actually iced up, so heavily had it been running! That was last night. This weekend was among the most brutally hot and humid of the entire summer, and the AC finally ran so hard that it had no time to defrost the evaporator coil. Luckily I was able to deal with this by turning off the compressors and just running the fans for two hours, which cleared out all the ice. Still, when that happens, we know it's been hot. That particular small malfunction has only happened one other time since we've lived here. (Luckily I know a few things about AC and refrigeration systems! Thanks, Day Job at The Store!)

The cruelest cut, though? I haven't been able to comfortably wear overalls for sixteen days.

I know, right?

(OK, the actual cruelest cut is probably that most days I haven't been able to walk the dogs right after work. They love their walks and I enjoy them too, burning off some steam and doing some podcast listening; my podcast queue is piling up again after I had it down to about fifteen unlistened episodes.)

Yesterday saw a cold front finally push through the region, and now we're settling in for a much more seasonal kind of weather: warm days and cool nights. We'll be able to turn the AC off overnight (take that, Electricity Bill!), and I'll be able to start walking dogs in the afternoon again. Night will continue to arrive earlier and earlier, and hopefully we won't get any blasts of heat in September like we've had occasionally. A couple years ago, our annual trip to Ithaca on the last weekend of September coincided with an 84-degree day, when I had packed for autumnal weather. Ugh!

My suspicion is that as our climate continues to shift and our world continues warming up, this kind of August will become more and more the norm, and the Augusts that I remember enjoying fifteen years ago will cease...or they'll become September. Octobers will become September, and November October, and so on. Summers will become a lot less enjoyable. I can see a future where in summer I'm not able to wear overalls for sixty days, instead of sixteen.

But hey, like I said, we've turned the corner for now. Which means...

Still, something cool will be needed later. Enter the Mojito....

A morning of adventure! Or...this.

 What passes for an exciting weekend morning 'round these parts.

Actually, they may have been on to something. Our morning errands are complete, as I write this it's mid-afternoon, it's hot enough outside to not be conducive to sitting on the deck, so I may as well go take a nap.

Zzzzzzz, indeed.

Round about we go....

 OK, here's a question regarding driving behavior and roundabouts: Do you use your turn signal when entering one?

But before I get to that, let me just note that I love roundabouts. I find them civilized and much less prone to idiotic bullshit than your typical 4-way intersection. There's no running red lights, and there are no pesky left turns which always gum things up. Studies a-plenty have demonstrated that roundabouts are not only safer (producing far fewer accidents per capita than standard intersections), they also move more traffic through an intersection in a given time than lights or the combination of four-way stops and relying on people to know the right-of-way rules will.

(On that last topic: People suck at right-of-way these days, and it's only getting worse. What happens at YIELD signs always irritates me: if you have no sign and I'm sitting at a YIELD, what happens is YOU GO, and I wait until you've passed to do anything. What is not supposed to happen is you coming to a complete stop and waving at me to go. The same similar thing happens at 4-way stops all the time. If two cars arrive at the same time, the one on the right is supposed to go. What actually happens, if I'm the car on the left, is that the nitwit on the right starts waving at me to go. This shit drives me crazy and my approach is to ignore the waving and look the other way until they go. But anyway, back to roundabouts.)

I see more and more roundabouts in my travels these days. There's been on in the village of East Aurora for years, and now there are several in the village of Hamburg (more on that below). I've even learned, via Facebook, that my old hometown of Olean has several roundabouts in its downtown! I'm sure this went over very poorly down there, just from what I remember of that city's denizens: it's a very conservative area that tends to be deeply resistant to change. Sure enough, a Facebook group I occasionally check out about Olean's history had a thread recently about the roundabouts, and there was comment after comment to the effect of "I HATE THE ROUNDABOUTS!" And one fellow actually said my favorite talking point when people want to resist change: "Roundabouts work great in Europe, but they're not for Americans!"

I always wonder just why such people think that "Americans are too dumb and/or stuck in their ways to do anything new at all, ever" is such a virtue, but again, I digress.

So, back to the roundabouts in Hamburg. There's one right in the village core, and as we travel to Hamburg every week for a trip to a bakery there and to the Farmers Market in the summer months, we go through this roundabout more than any other. On this past Saturday we drove through there, and something odd happened. Here, via Google Maps, is the roundabout in question:

We were at the spot labeled B in the pic, heading west, into the village. Ahead of us was another car (who had already done a couple of confusing things, which made all this stand out in my head). This car was at position A, just about to enter the roundabout and therefore bear right, when they turned on their left turn signal. This is because they were heading for position C.

And I thought, "What the hell are they signaling for?!"

Now, I can see the logic, sort-of. If this was a 4-way intersection with a light or STOP signs, the driver at A would have been making a left turn, hence the left signal. But this is not a 4-way intersection! It's a roundabout, and since it keeps traffic moving at all times and since each act of exiting is a right turn, I maintain that there is no need to signal at all when negotiating the roundabout, no matter which way you're going. If you're in front of me in a roundabout, it does not make any difference at all where you're turning. There are only two possibilities in a roundabout: exit, or keep going around. Which one you're doing at each exit point does not matter to me at all. There is nothing for me to do with that information.

What say you, folks? Am I all wet (and guilty possibly of crappy driving)? Should I be signaling my way into and through the roundabout?

(Note that this is only about this kind of roundabout, not the more complex ones you find in larger cities where there are things to contend with like lane changes.)

"Well I'll tell you this and I'll tell you that, I'm very very scared of a very big hat!"

 I've recently made an important decision regarding my wardrobe. It's time to make a change.

No, I'm not ditching overalls. I'm adding something.

Yup: I'm starting to wear a hat.

For me, this is kind of big, because I've never been a hat person. I had a black-and-white fedora in high school that I liked, especially for jazz band concerts, but that was about it. Baseball caps were never my thing, and I've never actually owned one aside from the ones I wear at work when I'm entering a food production area (it's a health department requirement). I have nothing especially against hats. Hats are fine (though, with regard to the ball cap, I've been kind of irritated that the ball cap has become the vastly predominant acceptable hat in the world); I've just never made it much of a habit to wear one.

But as I am nearing my last three months in my 40s, I have noticed to my slight chagrin that my hair is thinning a bit, which means that I'm exposing the top of my head to more sunlight than I really want to when I'm out walking with the dogs or whatever.

So...enter the hat.

I did not want a ball cap; I wanted a hat that's decent for hiking with a brim that goes all the way around. I did my due diligence in researching the topic of which hats are best for hiking (by typing into Google, "Which hats are best for hiking"), and after doing a bit of research I ordered a hat from the Henschel company: this hat, specifically. In olive green. Double XL, because apparently I have a gigantic head. Who knew!

(That is not an opening for wiseacre comments, by the way.)

Well, the other day the hat arrived and I have donned it for my afternoon and evening dog walks each night since. How have I fared? Well, here's the pictorial evidence:

I actually think this hat looks pretty good! I'm happy with the way it looks. There's a bit of self-consciousness of the kind that I suspect always comes when you wear something in public that you have not worn before, which is weird because I'm out there thinking, "Oooooh, I hope nobody is thinking I look weird in this hat," and they're almost certainly thinking, "Oooooh, I hope we're having spaghetti for dinner" or "Oooooh, there's a new episode of my favorite show tonight" or something like that, and if they notice me at all, there's no acknowledgement of a guy in a hat at all, much less one that starts with "Oooooh".

So yeah, I like the hat and will be wearing it to protect the skin on my head a lot more, moving forward. And I do think it looks at least a bit cool!

(By the way, the title of this post is a reference to this routine from the British version of Whose Line Is It Anyway.)

The Flannel Conversion

 It's almost June, so it's just about time to retire the flannel shirts until maybe late September, but more likely, some time in October.

When I was a kid, in third or fourth grade, my father decided that I needed to wear flannel shirts. At the time I did not understand this. I quite hated collared shirts as a kid, for whatever reason, so I took a rather instantaneous dislike to the flannel shirts that ended up in my closet. As I recall, they were new and stiff and scratchy, and all of that was on top of my already-establish dislike of buttons and collars. (Again, I've no idea why I hated those things so much. We all have things about which we are dumbasses in our youth; collared shirts were one if mine.)

Even when I started coming around some years ago on collars and button-ups and such, I was still kind of hesitant about flannel, because while I've long since discovered flannel bed sheets and I have a couple of denim shirts that are flannel-lined, I still have that association with stiff, scratchy flannel collars and shirts that fit, well, stiffly and scratchily. Also, there was a bit of fear that flannel--especially plaid flannel--paired with overalls would make me look like something of a cast extra from Hee Haw. (That show was on a lot in our house when I was very young, which may explain where my lifelong love of bib overalls comes from. And since it was a variety show in the 70s, I'm guessing the occasional pie wound up in a face or two....)

Over the last couple of years a few flannel shirts have made their way into my wardrobe, though, via thrift stores and eBay, and I'm happy to report that I am finally embracing that particular fabric...and even in the plaid. Hey, there's a reason why plaid flannel and overalls is a classic combination, right? And yes, it's a classic combination!

I started with a couple of flannel shirts that I picked up at the local thrift stores, and while I like these, they're a bit more broken in than I would like. I have since found more intact ones (new, with tags) on eBay, including a black-and-white checked shirt...

...and a blue one...

and, most recently, this cool multi-colored one.

I remain in the market for a flannel shirt that is predominantly red, but I haven't found one I really like yet. As with just about all of my button-up shirts, I prefer button-down collars or, as in this one that I found in a stroke of luck, a banded collar:

Anyway, roughly 32 years or so after my father first tried getting me to like flannel, I'm finally on board. What can I say...I'm not the fastest study in the world. Of course, now it's warm out and I'm having days where I don't wear overalls at all (shorts and a t-shirt as I'm writing this, go figure), so it'll be a while before I'm wearing flannel shirts again. But fall will be here before we know it! (And not soon enough, if the 90s in May we've had already are any indication of what's in store for summer.)