captainsblog | I'mmmm Sooooo...... TIRED!

And done with it in record time:)

I was having a rather hard time pushing buttons this morning heading to and then settling in at the tire place. On my way to finally getting my snow tires off,^* I went to deposit a check to our personal account, which was running a little low. I instead hit the “$60 fast cash” button on the ATM, which was exactly the wrong thing to do if a preauthorized debit suddenly goes through. ^**Then, once I dropped off the car and sat there in the waiting room^*** to begin this very post, I hit the “forgot my PIN” button on my laptop, taking 10 minutes to get it going with me not remembering my rarely-used Windows password. And before I could even upload the photos from my phone to the server, the tires were on and I was on my way!

^* Don’t judge. It snowed less than two weeks ago and I only put 4000 miles on them the entire winter.

^** No harm. Because tire appointment went so quickly, I got the check deposited before any bad things happened.

^*** Alternatively, I could have waited in the sitting room #NickDangerThirdEye

Then, a quick Wegmans run and I was back here. The place wasn't ridiculously busy, which means Eleanor likely would have been sent home early if she'd worked as scheduled today. Turns out she didn't; late yesterday afternoon, her right knee misread the holiday calendar and went off like the Fourth of July. (See us and national holidays, previous:P) It's better today, but she called in anyway for the first time all month, since seven hours on and off a stool wouldn't have been a chance to take.

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Before those fireworks, Pepper and I spent our usual morning checking out a new-to-us place to roam as the dog park remains closed. (Dog parks in Rochester, a bit ahead of us on the phased reopening schedule, are due to reopen this week.) This weekend's choice is one I've always known of but never went through. It's called Walton Woods Park and is part of the Audubon planned community that I lived in when I first moved here for law school going on 40 years ago:

In the original plans, Audubon would have been UB's Collegetown, with single-family and townhomes for students and faculty, a central gathering area and even its own subway stop. But in the mid-70s, the state came close to going completely broke, little of the originally planned campus or community ever got built as originally intended, and little remains of the "new community" except the woody style of most of the homes-

- and the nature surrounding it.

I remember hardly any of it from living there, other than it then being built on the very swampy ground that it still is. My clearer memories are of the room I took in a little townhouse over there, with my Marxist landlord (who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War and has a whole set of papers of his life and times in the UB Archives). My sister probably remembers more about his kitchen; she saw a waffle iron he might very well have stolen from the Fascists and never washed in the 40 years thereafter. Later, along came two other roommates, Korean engineering students who cooked kimchi in a crockpot directly below my bedroom. To this day, I have occasional triggers when I smell cole slaw.

But back to the here and now:

When first heading into the wooded area behind Audubon's centre of public places (which did eventually get built- no subway stop, but it houses the town's main library, court and cophouses and senior center), I saw this woman setting up for tai chi. Eventually a whole group joined her, but alone she evoked Nei Nei from The Farewell.

Behind them was what is somewhat overstatedly named "Lake Audubon." It probably would be more aptly called "Walton Pond," but that might confuse cultural tourists of either Henry David or John Boy.

Saw these guys casting into it. To be honest, in these two-plus months, I've seen more people out fishing, even walking through our own neighborhood with fishing gear, than I have the previous 25 summers. And the rules by which they operate are clear:

Seeing that sign, I was reminded of Robert Klein's bit about the monster fish he imagined NYC fishermen catching out of the East River: GET THAT GODDAM HOOK OUT OF MY MOUTH! YOU THINK THAT TICKLES, YOU MORON? GIMME THAT BAIT!

Not all play by those rules, though:

Duck Duck GOOOOSE!

And Jake, dog to our friends Ken and Ellen (who I go back to those UB Law days with), got into the water himself....

...only to go on his second dive into a drainage ditch, requiring me to help pull him out. Note the mud all the way up to his butt:

Pepper, on the other hand, preferred landlubbing, just stopping by woods on a summer morning and refusing to move for a few minutes:

These woods were full of all sorts of little tableaus left by people:

The little sign on that last one says "STAY SAFE." The type should probably be bigger, because not even half the people we passed on the trails were wearing masks, much less maintaining any distance between themselves and us.

But the simplest message for this Memorial Weekend was seeing this: