So we did some major clean up and pick up. Moved some things around and getting reading for a toddler running around the house. I set up the pack n play bed and brought down the high chair. Brought down the toys including the always very popular castle. We took away the candle holders in the fireplace and also the big piece of pottery that always sits there. That's upstairs safely in our room.
I went online to see if I could get his novel The Night Agent but all copies were checked out. I put a hold on it but was the 24th person in line and the estimated time to get a copy was about 10 weeks. So I downloaded this book to hold me over and get a feel for Quirk as an author. I had just binged-watched The Night Agent on Netflix but that is another story.
Now I'll look for some of his other novels.
Eventually I got into a conversation at the bar with a young twenty-something man who I learned had recently been married and moved in the neighborhood around the corner. He was new to Buffalo having only lived here a few months when his wife got a job at one of the local television stations in the weather department. He was from Erie PA and met his wife at Penn State.
He really didn't know very much about Buffalo or the community and for instance they had not been down on Elmwood Avenue yet. He was very interested in my perspective of the city when I told him I was originally from Philadelphia and moved here many years ago. I told him about my experience here and how we originally only planned to be in town for a couple of years but liked living here so much that we stayed for over forty years and raised a family.
He told me about their recent marriage and their love of traveling. I was surprised to hear their favorite place was Singapore. We talked about our trips to Rome, Florence, London, Paris, Dublin and Edinburgh along with my military travels during my Navy years. He was telling me about their plans for an upcoming road trip across the US this spring and asked if I had any suggestions of places to visit. He was happily surprised when I immediately suggested Santa Fe and my reasons for going there. They were planning to drive across the south and head toward the Grand Canyon but they hadn't considered Santa Fe. Now maybe they will.
So I had my couple of beers and an interesting conversation then walked back home.
I can't say I'm very impressed so far during the several weeks I've had the account and I can't say I'm spending very much time on the site. I take a look every few days but it is not something that has engaged me yet. Part of my issue initially was the content of the feed. It seemed to be initially cat infested. Do they think everyone wants to start their day looking at cat photos. Dog pictures too. I had to spend some time purging my feed using the Personalize Your Feed which allows you to eliminate certain categories from your feed such as "pets".
So now my feed has a red banner that says Everything Except... and this list what I don't want in my feed. Why do I need to be reminded every time I look at the app of the things I don't want to see in my feed. I just want to say no to something and forget about it and never see a reference to it again. But no, apparently that's not how it works. I just switched to the All Categories feed just to see what happened and immediately I saw a dog photo on my screen. Tribel seems to be obsessed with pets.
I'll try it for a little while longer but I'm not hopeful.
The Beat Goes On - Covers FV
I saw a lot of robins today and I sat in the backyard sunroom for about an hour where I could see many plants coming up in the flower beds but it didn't warm up very much in there today. The temperature in the room only got up to about 62 degrees because of the very high wind blowing against the windows and seeping in a little. I did have the sun shining on me and I read for awhile while the stereo played an old CD mix of music from 2007. I needed to play the music loud because the wind was so loud.
Yesterday it was cold, cloudy and snowy for the St. Patrick's Day parade in downtown Buffalo. Not very nice and I saw a lot of comments about the wind and the snow from parade goers.
I'm really looking forward to some real spring weather after this very strange and severe winter. Now I'm back in the house drinking hot tea and listening to a Sandy Denny album on the stereo.
It's hard to imagine very many people, if any, picked these two upsets in their brackets. It was nice seeing #10 Penn State beat #7 Texas A&M too. I watched parts of some games today and saw an almost upset when #3 Xavier came back and hung on to beat #14 Kennesaw State in the final minutes. #11 Pitt pulled a smaller upset beating #6 Iowa State convincingly.
Looking forward to some of the games tonight and tomorrow but not expecting any more major upsets but of course it's always fun to watch one when one doesn't have any brackets or home teams on the court.
Then I had to update this post because later in the night there was another major upset. A much bigger one. For only the second time in the history of the tournament a number 16 seed beat a number 1 seed. Fairleigh Dickenson shocked Purdue 63-58 tonight and busted everyone's brackets in the men's tournament.
We sat at a booth in the bar area where we could watch a little March Madness and see the happy hour crowd across the room at the bar. The place was jumping. I decided to have a Guinness on tap to start while Becky had a German beer. They had a special Irish menu of specials and we got some Irish potato pancakes to start. Becky ordered a chicken milanesse and I got a BBQ pulled pork sandwich with fries. Cole's has always had what I would consider the best consistent fries in the area.
We left the bar around 7 pm. It was a wonderful dinner.
Link to this playlist on Spotify.
The Richest Man in Babylon - Night Chill FV
I've had a subscription to ESPN+ since early December when they had a special promotion going on and it was good for watching a wide selection of games including Canisius and Niagara. On our usual Sling TV channels I've been able to watch games from the Big East and the A10 which are probably the two conferences I would pick to watch. Overall thought I've not watched as many college basketball games these past few years as I've done it the past which is probably part of my overall decline in interest in sports on TV.
I will watch some of the games coming up. The First Four play-in games are being shown on TruTV which I have access to on Sling. The Pitt game is later tonight. Then on Thursday the main tournament begins with the games being shown on TruTV, TBS, TNT and CBS. Between Sling and Paramount+ we have access to all of the games with the final weekend on shown on CBS. I'll watch what I can when I can.
Then there is also the women's tournament and the NIT that is all part of March Madness. I'm looking forward to seeing how Villanova does in the NIT but it's been a bad year for them overall.
This is more of a quiet collection.
All Things Must Pass - Covers FV
Yesterday we were talking with Katie and the kids on a video chat and Clara was very excited to show us large magnifying glass. She was examining everything around the house. She then came over to Katie and the phone and held up the magnifying glass up to her face and looked at us in the camera. We were seeing her cute big eyes as she loudly exclaimed that Poppa and Grammie looked "big and old" and she wanted to keep looking at us.
Becky and I got a kick out of that comment and we've been repeating it ever since and probably will for a long time. We are "big and old".
I've had this book on my to-read list for over 40 years but just never got to it until this month. This is actually the first book I've read by Kingsley Amis.
This is his only really alternative history parallel world science fiction novel. The story about a young boy singer takes place in a world ruled by a totalitarian catholic church during the year 1976. It is a world where the protestant reformation did not take place and there is a Christian/Muslim cold war. The society is viciously controlled by the papal authority through the manipulations of the Holy Office which is a Gestapo/KGB kind of organization. This repressive government is also extremely anti-science. Electricity has been banned in the papal run parts of the world.
It is a very different modern world. There are some interesting parts of the story concerning historical figures and cultural references that had a drastically different life experience in this world. The world is very different with the North American continent divided among the European powers that became a group of different countries such as New England instead of the USA that practices apartheid against native indigenous peoples.
The alteration in the book title is the castration of the boy singer in order to preserve his voice and his attempts to flee the church rulers. There is a coda to the story that takes place in 1991 and the boy is then a famous male castrati living in Rome.
Overall a very interesting and fascinating book. It only took me a few days to read this.
The show has had a lot of press and promotion but I thought it was significantly overrated, disjointed and violent for the sake of. Maybe that's why so many people liked it. It's been one of the most popular shows in the history of HBO.
There were nine episodes and I did watch them all so there must have been something about it that I liked and kept me going back to it. I guess I was thinking that it was going to get better and live up to the hype. The story takes place in a post-apocalyptic America twenty years after a fungal infected global pandemic has wiped out most of the world's population.
I've always liked watching apocalyptic television shows and movies and zombie stories in particular going back to The Night of the Living Dead. This one had all the great special effects of a good science fiction show and the acting was pretty good although I thought Pedro Pascal was extremely overrated.
There is a second season in the works but I'm not in any hurry to watch it but I probably will and hoping the show improves.
Here is a link to the playlist on Spotify.
Go Your Own Way - Covers FV
Some other of my favorite NA beers are Special Effects Hoppy Amber from Brooklyn Brewery, Run Wild IPA from Athletic Brewing and Hazy AF from Brew Dog Brewing.
There are also good NA beers from Guinness, Lagunitas, Heineken and Weihenstephaner.
I just don't drink beer the way I used to and will often have a regular beer followed by an NA. It's nice to have that option and it's good that some bars and restaurants are starting to carry a decent NA which hasn't always been the case. There are still plenty of places that will only have a Labatts or Bud NA.
Now we keep some NA beers in the house at all times. Becky enjoys a good NA too and so do Katie and Sean. I feel heathier too.
Here is a link to the Spotify playlist.
Private Universe - Covers FV
We had some weird problems over the past several days. Becky drives the car a lot more than I do and she noticed an old sound coming from what she thought was the exhaust system or maybe the engine. She also considered it might be from the transmission. When I was standing next to the car when she started it up I did hear an usual sound which might have been the muffler. She also said she sometimes heard a knocking sound. All of these weird sounds were very intermittent and she would drive for around for awhile and not hear anything.
We bought the car in June of 2019 and there is only about 17,000 miles on it now. There shouldn't be something going wrong like this. We think it may have something with the ice storm last week that might have damaged something down below in the exhaust system.
The car has needed an oil change so yesterday Becky took it over to Parkside Automotive and told the mechanic about the additional problem. He drove the car around a bit, heard the noise but could not find any reason for it. He had the car up on the lift and he examined the bottom of the car. He found no obvious problem or broken part. He said we should take it to the dealer.
We've bad experiences with the service department at Northtown over the years and are very reluctant to take the car there except when absolutely necessary. We've always had good experiences buying our cars there but the service department is inept. Becky called them to explain the problem and to make an appointment. The person on the phone said it would take a month to get in there. April 7th was the earliest we could get scheduled. We tried again at another Hyundai dealer at West Herr in Williamsville. We were able to schedule an appointment to check out the car in a week.
Becky then called Chris at BC Automotive. They were our mechanics for many years when they were located on Hertel Ave a few blocks down the street from Becky's studio. We used them a lot but then they moved over to Delaware Ave near Amherst Street and we then had the new car. It was just easier to have our oil changes and inspections done around the corner at the Parkside shop. But now we needed someone we trusted and Becky, who dealt with Chris the most, called. He was happy to talk with her and remembered us and our two Hyundai cars he took care of for so many years. He offered to look at our car right away but we said we would bring it in around 9 the next morning.
In the meantime I took the car and drove down to Canisius to drop of a book. On the way down I did hear the slight banging noise for just a moment and then it followed be about 30 seconds of a groan. That was it. I drove without music so I could listen for strange sounds and I was very careful going over the several speed humps on Crescent. On the way back from Canisius I did not hear or experience anything out of the ordinary.
So this morning I drove over to BC Automotive and dropped off the car. I spoke with Chris so more and described the sounds again. He said he would take the car out and listen himself. He asked me if I needed a ride back home and I said I was planning to take a Lyft ride. He then suggested that he kill two birds with one stone by driving me home in our car and he would get to hear and experience it with me. We did hear the knocking for about 3 seconds and then a little more of a quiet droning sound for a few more seconds. That was it. Nothing more.
He had the car in the shop most of the day as we waited to hear from him. Later in the afternoon getting close to 4 he called and said that he had the car on the lift but like Eric at Parkside he found no obvious problems. From the sounds he had heard he thought that maybe there was a loose part in the muffler or somewhere in the exhaust system but he could not pinpoint anything. He said that the best thing to do was to keep driving the car and either it would stop making noises or it would get worse and we would then bring it in for him to determine the problem. He thought there were no safety issues or something that would breakdown enough to cause the car to not run. He thought that if the problem got worse then it would sound more like a bad muffler. He did not charge us for anything he did today.
I got myself over to the shop using a Lyft ride and then drove the car home. It made only a very brief faint sound that I would probably not had heard if I had the music on. We'll drive it around like normal and see how it goes. We still have the two appointments scheduled at the dealers and Chris wants us to come by and see him if things get worse or we continue to have problems. If he determines the problem is the muffler than maybe we should just get it replaced. We'll see.
Interesting year for The Beatles and lots more psychedelic pop. I discovered the Velvet Underground too.
A little over an hour and a half of music and a link to the Spotify playlist.
All You Need Is Love - Songs 1967
I was buying a lot of albums and singles that year
Once again this mix runs a little over an hour and a half and here is a link to the playlist on Spotify.
Smell of Incense - Songs 1967
She tweaked the recipe a little bit as she usually does and put it together. She always reads the comments on the posting from users who have made the recipe and made adjustments or slight changes. Sometimes big changes too. She enjoys reading the comments. The NYT food section has always been a good source of great recipes.
Then everything went into the big dish with the mashed potatoes on top and into the oven to bake. It was smelling heavenly. We had a wonderful dinner
There was also plenty of leftovers enough for at least two more dinners and probably a lunch too. Looking forward to that.
However, seeing a robin is not really a sign of spring. They can and do spend winters in the north. Now we usually don't see any robins all winter long in Buffalo at least in our backyard until early spring each year. It's just technically that robins are scientifically not a perfect determiner of the arrival of spring.
Now what about that fly. What got that one flying about our backyard in early March.
So what happened? When we got the new remote I took the old one that wasn't working anymore and set it on the dining room windowsill with the solar panel charging and forgot about it. About a week or so later I took a look at it thinking I was going to throw it away and saw that the red charging light was on. I took it over to the television and tried it but there was still no response... but that red light was on so something was happening. Then I plugged in the charger and let it sit for a couple of days. Then I tried it and it works fine. The television responds perfectly to the remote controls on this previously dead device. It had revived.
We're using the new battery remote for our everyday use and the old revived solar remote sits on the table with the solar panel facing up. It's our backup but I don't really trust it completely but it doesn't matter because we have the old standard battery charged remote too.
The mix runs an hour and a half and here is the Spotify link for a listen.
Is It Like Today - Covers FV
There were several that were really outstanding and our friend and neighbor Greg took first prize for the Best Overall Chili. He has always been an amazing cook and has specialized in BBQ. They gave us cards to put in the containers next to each chili contestant for voting.
