Myyyyy storeeeeezzz....
Jun. 25th, 2020 04:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblog I don't know why I've been so stuck in the past lately. Probably because with no sports or concerts or new films to go to, there's less to go on about. We have gotten lucky with homebound entertainment, though: I discovered last weekend that a second season of Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts had dropped on Netfix the week before, and we've been wending our way through that. Next, Emily told us about another series on the Big N that she thought we'd like. It's called Somebody Feed Phil; the titular character would be Phil Rosenthal, who created the long-running if slightly-mistitled CBS series Everybody Loves Raymond. It's a mix of a foodie fest and travelogue where Phil visits the culinary capitals of the world, mugs for the camera, and eats eats eats. We started with the current season premiere, set in Marrakesh, and it was a wonderful tale of cooperation and calories among people of very different backgrounds.
The next day, though, I was reminded of my own less exotic food history, and how a tale of dressing on a local sports show threatened to take one of my own culinary memories and bring it down in Roons.
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August 1981. I'd moved to Amherst to spend the next three years in the circa 1973 brick monstrosity of a law school building which, other than two pre-university structures (one, a former church housing the campus cops then and now, the other a 1930s edifice now handling campus mail) was the oldest building on the entire campus. Big plans had been made and scuttled by 70s state finances- for a medical school complex that would have been a beehive of 20 interlocking hexagons (in the end, only two of the 20 ever went up), for a subway linking North and South Campuses, and for silly student amenities like a bookstore and a student union. The former didn't arrive until halfway through my studies, while the latter, largely by design *, never showed up until much later.) I did not live on campus, and neither did hardly anyone back then, and most of those who did were undergrads. So our off-hours lives mostly revolved around homes and businesses located elsewhere: at many bars and restaurants around the older Main Street campus to the south, rarely then downtown, but for closeness to campus, particularly for those of us with no or unreliable transportation, there were a few places within a modest walk.
This was one of them:
Rootie's Pump Room. This was the de facto UB Law School bar. Our parties, complete with faculty, were often held there (motto: open bar until the keg runs out, so get there early). It was a palace of Lincoln Logs and spilled beer sitting just north of the Ellicott Complex, near the corner of Millersport and Campbell on Stahl Road. This is from a still-active Facebook tribute page, but that photo must date, from the look of the car and outfits, to around the time in 2003, after I left town, when the family closed the place and sold the land.
Sometime later in the oughts, or maybe into the past decade, we discovered that the restaurant's signature blue cheese dressing had returned- as a legacy product on the Wegmans produce refrigerated shelves. This is quite a Thing around here: Buffalo has its homegrown sauces to die for. Weber's mustard and horseradish. Chiavetta's barbecue sauce. Until recently, the pasta sauce from an unfortunately unwoke Italian joint we now refer to as Spaghetti-O's. But closest to my heart- literally, I just tasted it the other night- is the blue cheese dressing once gracing the wings from this long-gone Getzville dive.
A year or so ago, I took our friend Scott to a place near it called Elmo's, one of a dozen or so to qualify for the just-launched Buffalo Wing Trail. I asked if they had any connection to their preceding neighbors; no, they said, but they were certainly familiar with the place, and mentioned that its longtime owner had recently passed away. (I cannot confirm this; I am now a little more sure of the connection to a Louisville KY joint bearing its name, which is apparently run by the family of a different former owner with access to their recipes.) So the legend lives on, from the drumsticks on down, though- or does it?
On Tuesday afternoon's WGR sports show, aka WTF Are We Gonna Talk About Now?!?, they brought up this dressing, and the host mentioned that the label of the Rootie's jar actually suggests a defacement of their own product to make it more authentic. With two ingredients, in fact. Having never noticed this in all the years of buying this very product, I raced to the kitchen like a kid on Christmas morning, and, IT'S TWUE, IT'S TWUE!
These make sense; the jars are meant to be kept refrigerated and the store does so, but this bottle's expiry is sometime in November after I bought it maybe a month ago, so the milk would likely go bad and the powder would be less oomph-y. Still, I'm not sure I can deal with the lack of packaged perfection. I shall try.
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I had early telephonic court in Rochester the next morning, and followed it by going even a little further back in time.
As noted a few weeks ago when I posted a list of recently acquired pieces of music, we have been thinking about reclaiming some of our ancient record collection from a pile of racks of cassettes, some purchased but most recorded off of their vinyl originals after we got married and before the 1991 ice storm that ruined the stored-away LPs. I got hold of a modern-equipped boom box, but which included a cassette deck, to attempt this project. Next came the tech support: our friend Scott, more recently than the trip to Elmo's, suggested it could be done by linking the deck into a PC with a freeware program on it called Audacity. The download went fine, but the new boom box didn't come with instructions for the connection:
On the left side, there's an old-school headphone jack; on the right, a USB port. Amazingly, despite being a pack rat for old cords of every imaginable kind, I had none that would allow these pieces of equipment to have sexy audio time together. So I went out and got more, which have now both joined the cord-scrapheap of 348 other adapters and extenders and whatnots. First to arrive was a headphone-out-to-USB-in cord; the computer didn't even register it being there. Next, after about five tries at different brick-and-mortar stores, I found a USB-to-USB cord, which did create an Audacity file that sounded like actual human beings, or more specifically like a human being in a Tin Man costume. So since I had to go to Rochester again anyway, I made my second Brighton stop in less than a week for Scott's expert audio advice.
We think I don't need a new cord at all; there are recording buttons next to the USB port that appear to create mp3 files simply by plugging a flash drive into it. Meanwhile, while parking at Chez Scott, I saw this across the street: it would have been Brighton High graduation day this week, and the kids were out celebrating and, on this driveway at least, possibly inventing something: 
I never saw them using both nets at the same time, which is a shame. I thought they were following in the tradition of the unsanctioned NCAA sport of “ice tennis." Back in college years, my friend Dennis helped create it, for the back page of the April Fools issue of his college paper. It included some primordial photoshops of players with racquets and skates, a brief summary of the rules, and an invitation for students to show up for tryouts. If I remember correctly, the line the next morning was out the door of the gymnasium.
Maybe the Sabres would even have a shot at this game, because at least on one end of the courtrink, everybody has a fair chance at scoring, not just the opposing team.
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That got me home at a decent hour last night, and we ate dinner in the greenhouse. We also discussed some new and improved plans hatched a few nights before, though, to have yet another place to eat out there:
As noted before, our current patio setup is within ten feet of the lot line separating us from our newest neighbors- but not from their noise. Or smells (from barbecue to firepit and even the occasional blast of weed). It's been improved the past couple of weeks, but all day Sunday, they were out there with an entourage of parents and friends, plus the truly obnoxious sounds of the husband's work buddy we refer to as Foghorn Leghorn. When time came for our much more subdued Father's Day observance, Eleanor had moved the smaller table from the greenhouse to the other side of the yard, resting up against this concoction from a few years back when she was big into growing tomatoes and such. We call it the Playpen, despite it having been played in very little the past several growing seasons:
For immediate purposes, it served as a placeholder for the boom box, and the extension cord for it reached to the greenhouse, so we had music out there. We also had, well, us:
A rare selfie of the two of us. Now come Plans, to fill in a patio in that area. Initial prices were north of $1,000 for materials, but checking with some other sources has cut that down considerably. It will provide quiet, and something to do on these COVID-limited summer weekends.
When I was in Rochester early yesterday, I mentioned these plans, and the reasons for them, to a co-worker, who sympathized. He said he has asshole neighbors, and in fact said he has to go talk to them because they're getting a horse.
a divorce.
Oh. That's very different.
(Did I mention I had just finished a client meeting and was still wearing my mask? And that I've noticed the past few months that wearing it affects my hearing? Eleanor picked right up on this and observed that, to at least some extent, sounds reach your ears through your mouth- more so, more likely, if you have a hearing impairment in one ear as I have had most of my life.)
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Now to see what one more trip out there will bring. My dental fix is at 10, a client I last heard from in 2018 will be back in, and I have to spend plenty of other time cleaning up after other clients....
Of course of course.
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ETA. I can't end on such a shitty note, so I'll instead end on the footnote from above:
*I've posted here a few times recently about some memories involving my years at UB Law School. One memory I don't have from those years, but suddenly top of mind after the George Floyd murder and the resulting protests that reached Buffalo, was of student protests, riots or takeovers in my day. That's because there weren't any, and that was very much literally by design.
The Amherst Campus began going up on that fetid swamp in 1973 or so, just after the era of war and racial justice campus protests. It explains much of the architecture and psychology that went into it.
Traditional college campuses had "quads." UB has a "spine," and is about as collegial as a prickly pile of bone can get. The first-generation Spine buildings themselves are Brutalist brick and concrete, with no ground-floor windows for those darned hippies to break. The easiest, and sometimes only, way to move between them was designed to be inside, with a second-floor passage through interconnected Halls and across skyways that ran, in my day, all the way from Clemens to Talbert- and with inconspicuous but very effective "riot doors" that could swing into place on a moment's notice and seal off a protest faster than Enterprise Deck 20 under Klingon attack.
Best of all for the scared administrators? To prevent any kind of natural gathering place to foment trouble, they simply built the place without one. "Founders Plaza" is a freaking bus stop, and the only natural beauty on the entire campus was Baird Point, made up of Greek columns from a torn-down downtown building and put far from any usual campus activity.
As for congregating inside? UB North was built without a student union of the traditional Willard Straight/Wilson Commons/Old Norton Union type. Instead, smaller literal pits were offered up, from the "Bullpen" in Talbert to "Kiva" in Baldy. The Clowns in Brown would always be able to outnumber any single bunch in those. Eventually, fears receded and nicer things, including an actual student uniony building, came along- but I'll bet donations to donuts that those riot doors are still there and University President Satish Trapathi knows exactly where the button is to activate them.
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Date: 2020-06-26 01:38 am (UTC)