Canister vacuum-cleaner fiasco

And so concludes futile-attempt number-two in the tortured quest for a small, portable canister vacuum-cleaner to supplement the giant 454 in the basement.

The Keed.

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

The 454 (pictured) is the giant sucker in our housewide central-vacuum system.
Pictured is iteration #2. #1, a Nutone, lasted 17 years, but was burning out the motors — there are two.
We could have replaced the motors in #1, and probably should have, but #2 was only $200 more.
The first time our builder fired up #1, I said “it sounds like a 454-Chevy.” It was about four feet tall and 18 inches in diameter.
#2 sounds like #1, but doesn’t exhaust to the outdoors like #1. It has bags, but they’re not installed the same (they’re open-mouth; almost as big as Jack at full-volume).
The letdown is that changing bags in #2 may be messier than #1. We probably should have kept #1.
But a central-vac is inconvenient for certain jobs: e.g. cleaning inside cars — and we have a garage-outlet.
We got a bagless shop-vac for that, but hate it. Its filter clogs in no time, which drops suction to almost nothing.
On top of that, it makes an almighty racket, which we could accept if it worked.
-Foray number-one was the mighty Wal*Mart, supposedly the “best store in the entire universe.”
But contrary to the accepted famblee wisdom that “Wal*Mart has everything,” their array of vacuums was minimal. Most of what they had was uprights, about 15-20, that lined up looked like rejects from the Star-Wars cantina set.
In fact I could imagine them serenading Han and Chewbacca and Princess Lea and Luke before setting out across the galaxy in the Millennium Falcon in pursuit of evil-doers.
They had two wimpy canisters, one with a bag so tiny it would have had to be changed after one outing.
“So I thought Wal*Mart had everything, Jack;” said my wife. “I thought Wal*Mart was supposed to be the greatest store in the universe.”
A gigantical online search for canister alternatives ensued.
One result was the dreaded Sears, which had a canister-unit adjudged by Consumer-Reports to be a “best-buy:” incredible performance for only 300 smackaroos.
But unlike the typical cowed Dubya-worshipping REPUBLICAN American, just buying the thing online and hoping for the best, she had the awful temerity and unmitigated gall and horrific audacity to wanna see it in-the-flesh.
This meant a trip to mighty Sears — and the all-powerful Tim Belknap of the mighty Mezz suggested there was a Sears at Eastview Mall, and that would be closer than the Sears I have gone to before at MarketPlace Mall in Henrietta.
But we had never been to Eastview before — no reason. So that meant finding the Sears in the maelstrom that is Eastview.
So yesterday (Friday, March 30, 2007), after the Canandaigua YMCA, we set out for Eastview.
Thankfully, Sears is an anchor-store at Eastview, meaning it occupies an entire wing. If I couldn’t have found it that easily, I would have gone to MarketPlace.
We then treaded gingerly into the store, and found the vacuum-cleaners after going through a Land’s-End section (what..........).
This wasn’t my gig; I could stand back and take in all the sordid developments.
“Is there something I can help you with?” a kindly salesman asked.
“Is this the (insert model-number here)?’ my wife asked; “on sale for $299.95?”
“Yes, this is it,” the salesman said. “What features were you looking for, ma’am?”
“Well, I prefer a bag — no bagless — and a bag big enough to not have to change it often.”
Everything on display had a motorized power-head for doing rugs.
“We don’t need that,” I said. “Anything without a power-head?”
“Well, all the canisters made nowadays have powerheads.”
What we were being shown was a whole-house vacuum-cleaner, but we already have the 454.
“I guess what will best fulfill your needs is this tiny bagless Dirt-Devil hand-held.
“Yeah, but I need a bag,” my wife said; “and if the vacuum-cleaner is small enough, I have to change the bag every use.”
(At this point the almighty Bluster-King weighs in noisily telling us “to conform.”)
A number of insanities stood out:

“Let me show what great advances have been made in bagless technology.” The salesman disconnects a dirt-container from a bagless vacuum, and removes the cap as if to empty it. Dust pours all throughout the atmosphere.
“What’s that?” my wife cries. “Looks like dust to me. What sense does it make to have a HEPA-filter that filters out 99.9% of the dust, when you’re just throwing it back into the atmosphere when ya empty the thing?”

Insanity #2:
“Each of these units has a switch atop the power-head wand that disconnects the wand.”
“Yeah, but those are the plastical-switches everyone is complaining about in the unit-reviews,” my wife observed. “They break.”
“That’s right, ma’am,” the salesman said. “On two of the units on display here, the switches have already broken off (HMMMMMMMMMMMMM.....). The third one is more substantial, and may last longer.”
“People complain they have to attach the wand with duct-tape,” my wife said.

Insanity #3:
“Make sure ya disconnect the power-head wand before ya store the thing in the closet. If ya have clothes hanging in there (HMMMMMMMMMNNNNN; what are closets for?), they can break the hose, and a replacement-hose is a ‘hundered’ bucks.”
So finally we walked out; contrary to REPUBLICAN desires, the salesman had lost the sale, or rather his merchandise had lost-the-sale for him — he was an awfully nice guy; not a viper.
“Thanks for showing us everything,” Linda said — he wasted about 20 minutes. I could barely contain my chuckling.
I’m walking outta here with gobs of material.
And so the tortured search continues.

“Jack” (“the almighty Bluster-King”) is my loudmouth macho brother-in-Boston who badmouths everything I do or say. He has loudly declared that Wal*Mart is “the best store in the entire universe;” and that by comparison Sears is utterly disgusting.

“The all-powerful Tim Belknap of the mighty Mezz” is City-editor Tim Belknap of the Canandaigua Daily Messenger newspaper where I once worked. I once posted one of his e-mails that had a few spelling-errors to our family’s web-site, and my brother-in-Boston immediately declared the whole reason the Messenger was so reprehensible was that Belknap was the editor — he’s only one of many.

A number of large shopping-malls ring Rochester — two are Eastview and MarketPlace.
Eastview actually isn’t in the county Rochester is in — it’s just over-the-line in adjacent Ontario County.
MarketPlace, the largest, is near Rochester in Monroe County, and is atop the old Hylan Airport, a small FBO once owned by Ray Hylan.
All the malls made downtown Rochester a wasteland (“waist-land?”).

“Linda” is my wife.

My brother-in-Boston loudly insists the kerreck spelling of “hundred” is “hundered;” and “wasteland” is “waist-land.”

REPUBLICAN-LOGIC ALERT!

Sign noticed on door at Canandaigua YMCA:
“This is not a door.” (Funny; looks like a door.) “Please use the door adjacent.”

3/30/07

Hairman:
Yesterday (Thursday, March 29, 2007) was a visit to the venerable Hairman; where, to give the bluster-boy something to foam about (cover your monitor, Bubby!), I got the entire treatment befitting an elderly (and therefore more mature) person: permanent, beard-trim, blue-rinse, the whole stinkin’ kabosh.
Most fearsome about this visit was asking about his wife, who has cancer.
“Well, she’s gone back to work (at a nearby high-school); you’ll see her shortly.”
Apparently they’re putting up a good front, or her cancer has been beaten back.
An operation in Boston (hopefully not in an abandoned mini mall) removed the cancer, and now she’s on radiation locally.
She looked and sounded normal when she appeared.
We moved on to other topics.
-Hairman’s back is bothering him; mainly because his grandson wants to be picked up.
“Ya gotta use your legs,” I told him.
He also had to drive a snowblower, and his wife can’t help, due to her cancer.
He’s almost 66.
-The motherboard apparently lunched in Hairman’s PC.
Hairman is as enthusiastical and ‘pyooter-literate as I am.
“That’s almost worth getting a new ‘pyooter,” I said. “A motherboard lunched on me once, but I was planning to buy a new rig anyway.”
“I coulda done that,” he said. “But it woulda meant completely reconfiguring the new ‘pyooter to be like my old one, so we just fixed the old one.”
“Found a new motherboard on the Internet for $66.”

Sabrina:
After Hairman I went to the Honeoye Falls Veterinary Hospital, which like Hairman is also in Honeoye Falls.
Sabrina’s cremains (ashes) were back, and I needed to pick them up.
They were in a small can in a small cardboard-box.
“Oh, I recognize that box,” a lady said as she was opening the back of her black Cherokee.
“One of the neatest dogs we ever had,” I said.
“Well, this one’s next,” she said, pointing inside her Cherokee.
I walked over and looked inside.
“Oh, a cat,” I said. The cat was meowing plaintively in a crate.
I felt bad. Obviously my ability to say the right thing was being compromised by my stroke.
The poor lady looked at me as if I were some kind of weirdo. If she only knew.
“And so it goes,” I said after a long, difficult pause.
My compromised communication was destroying my intent.
I figured I might as well leave. Like Iraq, there was no worthwhile exit.
-No doubt, people are wondering how I could be so attached to a dog — after all, she was just a dog.
Sabrina was a very classy dog — also “my dog.” (Killian is Linda’s dog; although he thinks of me as “the Master” — and is thrilled when I walk him.)
Despite 89 bazilyun things wrong with her, and the fact I can’t render much attention to a dog (because of the stroke); she never gave up, and always enthusiastically served me.
If it was me walking her, she pranced and danced. If she fell — and her back-end was weak — she’d get right back up.
There were two staircases at the so-called elitist country-club she’d march right up.
Toward the end it got so she hated dog-food of any kind, and preferred the Milk-Bone diet.
It lead to various Mexican-standoffs, wherein I’d point to her supper-dish and loudly declare “No Milk-Bones unless you eat that supper.”
She’d give up and go lay down. “If this is what the Master wants, so be it.”
And yet she’d prance-and-dance at the park. “Yippee; the Boss is taking me hunting. That deer-bone is over here; I remember it. Let’s go over here, Boss.”
Even the day we put her to sleep she was determined to jump up into our van on her own; no matter how weak she was.
Thankfully, she never got invalid (like Tracy, which depressed her mightily: “I’m letting the Boss down”). The morning Sabrina crashed (she crashed in the afternoon), she had a wonderful time at the park: prancing-and-dancing.

Web-cam follies:
The Web-cam at the mighty Curve has been zoomed out (see pik) such that it’s still aimed at the south leg, but now it gets the tunnels under the fill — which zoomed in it didn’t get before.

The mighty MAC.

Since I generally fire it up every day (it’s my Netscape home-page) I’ve noticed a few things:
A) Quite often the web-cam has auto-focused on the housing, which puts the railroad way out of focus.
Apparently someone has to notice and override it and focus it on the tracks.
B) There is a toggle-button to get it to double the size of the feed (the pik is double-sized).
With my old Netscape 7.0, clicking that toggle would freeze the stream, and then after about 10 seconds the stream would go back to active double-size. That’s what I would monitor in the background. “Double-size” is apparently not a web-address; I can’t bookmark it. Double-sizing seems to be an Altoony function.
My new Netscape 7.2 doesn’t freeze the feed when changing to double-size.
C) Often the stream will freeze, and what I get is what was happening minutes ago — e.g. a passing coal-train frozen.
Last night I noticed it had frozen during dusk, but it was pitch-dark outside. If the stream had been active, the picture rendered would have been pitch-black.
Usually a “refresh” puts the stream back on.
I even leave it on after dark, because the headlights of passing trains will illuminate the trees.
D) Sometimes the web-cam doesn’t work (like now, 8:16 p.m., 3/30/07). Despite the utterly predictable and tiresome blustering from Boston, I doubt it’s a MAC-issue; not when Linda can’t get it either on her PC, and we get other sites.

“The bluster-boy” is my all-knowing macho younger brother in Boston, who bad-mouths everything I do or say — like my MAC ‘pyooter.

I had a stroke 10/26/93.

“Linda” is my wife.

“The so-called elitist country-club” is nearby Boughton Park; called that long ago by an editor at the Canandaigua Daily Messenger newspaper where I once worked because it would only allow citizens of the three towns that own it to use it.

Altoona, Pa. (Altoony) is the location of Horseshoe Curve (“the mighty Curve”), by far the BEST railfan spot on the entire planet.

My brother’s colonoscopy, in the vaunted Boston healthcare system, was done in “an abandoned mini mall.”

Order-out-of-Chaos

Last night (Tuesday, March 27, 2007) I decided to update the Quicken Canandaigua-National-Bank checking-account register relative to our online Canandaigua-National-Bank whatever.

The mighty MAC.

Used to be CNB updated the Quicken-register via the Internet — nifty, but rather flaky. Occasionally transactions wouldn’t download; or post, whatever; in which case you had to go through the CNB online statement and post the transactions yourself.
Then Quicken decided to no longer support Internet-functions for Quicken-2003 — which is what I use.
I thought it might lunch the stockbox at the mighty Mezz, but apparently it didn’t. Apparently all it was was the login. Since the mighty Mezz was logging-in every day, it never tanked on them.
But since I wasn’t, and could no longer log in, I can no longer access the Quicken-portfolio.
This also meant I was no longer able to download the CNB transactions; which meant posting them manually myself.
But that wasn’t a hairball; since I already had to go through the CNB site to see what transactions hadn’t posted.
The download posted online bill-pays, ATM-transactions, deposits, and cleared checks.
Doing it that way saved a lotta time, but I had to check the CNB-site anyway for what hadn’t posted.
So now I post manually; since 2003 can’t do Internet.
Conceivably I could upgrade Quicken, but why bother? 2003 is doing all I do, and I’ve heard various sordid dramas about Quicken-upgrades — like how it likes to delete data-files (the executive-Es just passed; uphill, no train).
In fact, 2003 has bells-and-whistles I don’t use — all I’m doing is account-registers which it will reconcile. I have our checking-account, our Visa-account, and our home-equity loan (which — cue Bluster-King — is only a tiny maintaining balance).
In fact, it even operates under OS-X; a pleasant surprise. I wasn’t expecting it to.
I figured it would end up being the onliest “classic-mode” app I had — it’s antique. But it operates under OS-X.
When I update the Quicken CNB-register I see if it balances against their web-site. All it would be is add the uncleared checks to the ending balance.
But CNB was $560 less than Quicken.
“So what?” bellows the bluster-boy.
But long ago I worked for a bank, and know 1) the account can and should balance; and 2) the bank occasionally makes mistakes, and likes to hang their customers relative to how much income they turn over — for which reason you have to watch them like a hawk.
We’re just small potatoes; not an executive vice-president of Xerox with 89-bazilyun dollar loan balances.
Our checking-account probably costs them money, despite a $15,000 balance.
And according to the latest scuttlebutt, our Visa-account is worth little, since we pay off the entire outstanding balance monthly; instead of maintaining a huge outstanding balance and paying them mega-loads of interest.
So when I update the CNB-account I verify that it balances.
But last night it didn’t — to reiterate: The CNB-balance was $560 less than the Quicken.
It was about 9:30 when I discovered this — which meant by 10 p.m. things were getting insane.
You’re also dealing with overlapping on a ‘pyooter-screen. One thing obliterates the other.
I’ve also learned it makes little sense to try finding an error at 10 p.m. It’s called stroke-overload. Frustration overtakes reason. I have two Visa-statements to put together, but they’re waiting for a morning; since p.m. turns into a disorderly mess.
Our taxes need a morning too. I started them the other night, but only did “Schedule A;” doable even at 9 p.m.
So finally at about 10:30 I shut off this here rig and we went to bed — error unsolved.
This morning was “down-and-dirty” time. I printed the entire CNB-site, and then the entire Quicken-register: over 40 pages in all. Back-and-forth on a ‘pyooter-screen is impossible for a stroke-survivor.
The print-outs went next to the can. I know there are two outstanding checks, each a membership in the Western New York Irish-Setter Club; $20 each.
That’s $40; subtracted from $560 equals $520; added is $600, which — hello — is the amount of an online bill-pay against our line-of-credit.
So, easy-as-pie; the online bill-pay for $600 had never been entered.
So now the Quicken-register balances. Toy not with the master!

RE: “Stockbox at the mighty Mezz:” every day the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper ran a small stockbox of about 15 local stocks: the open/close/change/percent change thereto. I had preparation of that stockbox down to about 5-10 minutes by using the Internet.

I’m watching the Horseshoe Curve web-cam in the background. The “executive-Es” are antique streamlined E-units, preserved by Conrail for use on its Executive-trains. The locomotives were still in Conrail paint, even though Conrail no longer exists, and Horseshoe Curve, in Altoona, Pa., is now operated by Norfolk Southern (railroad).

“Bluster-King” and “bluster-boy” are my all-knowing younger brother in Boston who bad-mouths everything I do or say.

I had a stroke 10/26/93.

3/27/07

Yesterday (Monday, March 26, 2007) was our first visit to the vaunted Canandaigua YMCA (and the dreaded PT-gym before that) since Sabrina’s passing.

Linda Hughes.

Killian.

Such a trip always involved leaving the dogs alone here at home, made easier in Killian’s case by the fact Sabrina was with him.
Killian is a nervous dog — probably a product of his previous lives. He also is the smallest dog we’ve ever had. Sabrina was the biggest we ever had, and although rather mellow, wasn’t afraid to protect the property.
Killian is also terrified of thunderstorms; a thunderstorm yesterday morning had him trembling in fear and stalking around to find a place to hide.
We don’t like to leave Killian alone, but to work out we must.
And of course he no longer had Sabrina to help him cope.
Thankfully, I don’t think any thunderstorms attacked while we were gone. As in the past, he got to listen to WXXI, the local classical-music radio-station we listen to.
He seemed okay when we returned, but got sent cowering again last night when another thunderstorm rolled through.

Those thunderstorms knocked the power off twice, although not long enough to kick on the standby generator.

The Keed.

The standby generator.

The standby generator has a 30-second delay before kicking on. There also is the possibility a service-guy inadvertently disabled it. Seems the power was off about 30 seconds; yet the standby did not kick on.
The standby also does a self-test on Mondays at 12:30 p.m. E.S.T., but lately we’ve been at the Y. Apparently it wouldn’t self-test when snow blocked the air-intake, but now there’s no snow.

Yesterday Linda wore her black Norfolk-Southern tee-shirt to the Canandaigua Y.
She was accosted by a railfan; an occurrence that has happened to me on occasion. (There is a googly-eyed geek who always attacks me at mighty Weggers. He notices my mighty Curve jacket.)
“Do you know someone that works for a railroad?” he asked.
“No; that’s just my husband,” Linda said. “He’s a railfan.”
“Well, so am I,” the guy said.
“Ever been to Virginia Railroad Museum?” the guy asked.
“I don’t think so,” Linda said; “although I’m not so sure about that (we have). We’ve been so many places, we’ve probably been there.”
“We got this tee-shirt at Horseshoe-Curve,” Linda said.
“Never been there; and I’m from Pennsylvania,” the guy said.
Too bad I wasn’t around: “By far, the best railfan-spot on the entire planet. Gimme an e-mail address and I’ll send ya the web-cam link.”
Apparently more yammering followed, including mention of Cass. “Never been there either,” the guy said.
“Every railfan should be required by law to hear the steam-whistles echo through the hollers,” I would have said.
“Me and my Harley-group are gonna go to Steamtown this year,” the guy said. “Hope to take a picture of ‘iron-meeting-iron’ for publication in the Harley-rag.”
“Steamtown is okay, but the main thing is to ride the excursion if they still have it,” I would have said.
“They had that thing climbin’ a grade at 30 mph. Strasburg by comparison is wussy.”

Yesterday we patronized mighty Weggers after the YMCA.
They’re relocated everything; such that “helping-hands” need to stand around to show you where things are.
“Okay; where’s the tuna-fish? It’s not where the sign says.”
“Aisle 12A” (12A was empty shelves).
“Nope; hasn’t been moved yet. Over here!”
“Okay; where’s the ketchup? You’ve vaporized the ketchup.”
“Over here — aisle 16B.”

Not a Dubya-sticker:
Leaving mighty Weggers a Sube wagon cruised blithely through a stop-sign.
I could see it coming, so I stopped to let the Sube amble through.
We then turned behind it at a traffic-light onto 5&20.
The Sube had a red-white-and-blue political-sticker on the rear hatch, but it wasn’t Dubya-04.
It was Hillary Clinton.

“Linda Hughes” is my wife.

“Mighty Weggers” is our supermarket: Wegmans.

“Cass” is Cass Scenic Railroad, a West Virginia state-park. It mainly runs steam logging trains.

“Steamtown” is a railfan-site in Scranton, Pa. “Strasburg” is another railfan-site in the Pennsylvania-Dutch country — one of the first tourist-lines.

“5&20” is the main east-west drag through our area. It passes through Canandaigua, and past the “mighty Weggers.” It’s about a quarter-mile south of our house; State Route 5 and U.S. Route 20 — two routes on the same highway.

“The Cruel Sport”

For the past few weeks I have been reading a book loaned to me by the all-powerful Tim Belknap, City-Editor of the mighty Mezz.
The book is “The Cruel Sport” by Robert Daley, about Formula-One Grand-Prix auto-racing. Belknap, like me, is a car-guy; enamored of Formula-One Grand-Prix racing as it was in the ‘60s.
The book was published in 1963, which makes it out-of-date; but it was — and still is — a classic.
The title, “The Cruel Sport,” comes from Dan Gurney; a comment he made as a dead spectator was removed from a crash he had, wherein his car spun into the crowd and scythed a spectator.
Gurney is ex of the post-war southern-Californy hot-rod scene, who went on the become a race-driver. He raced a long time — won Le Mans with A.J. Foyt, and I think the Daytona 500 once, He eventually fell to manufacturing racecars, one of which he won a Grand-Prix with. I think it was Belgium in 1967; his car had a three-liter V12 Weslake engine.
His cars also dominated Indianapolis for a while, although by then he had quit driving. Bobby Unser won the Indy-500 in one of his cars, which were called “Eagles.”
Gurney’s swan-song, I think, came in Can-Am, driving a McLaren M8C powered by an aluminum Chevy Big-Block.
But Gurney was contracted to Firestone-tires, and the McLarens were on Goodyears. He only raced McLarens a few weeks.
It was nice while it lasted. He was racing the ultimate hot-rod. A model of his McLaren is in our living-room.
As a 1963 book, “The Cruel Sport” treats Formula-One Grand-Prix auto-racing as it was when Da Cronies and I first visited the U.S. Grand Prix at Watkins Glen in 1964.
Formula One were still the tiny 1.5-liter cars until the formula was increased to three-liter motors, I think in 1966 or ‘67.
Who knows what they are now? Plus the cars have gotten so insanely fast in corners passing is near impossible.
But in 1963, the cars looked a lot like what ‘70s Formula-Ford looked like: tiny cars with skinny tires; and the limits-of-adhesion of those tires weren’t much.
What was appealing was the high-strung motors they had — I remember this from that first Grand-Prix.
The book does a stellar job of depicting the whole Grand-Prix scene — particularly the insanity of working for Ferrari. It also is the time of Jimmy Clark — one of the greatest Grand Prix drivers ever; perhaps the greatest — and the departure of Stirling Moss, who Daley thinks was the greatest. (I’m still partial to Mario Andretti — I saw him drive at Watkins Glen in a Formula-5000 with a small-block Ford V8. He was the only one that could take a certain corner flat-out. Everyone else was jukin’-and-jivin’ all over.)
Unlike so many race-drivers, Andretti is still alive. So is Gurney.

“The mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily Messenger newspaper, where I once worked.

“The all-powerful Tim Belknap” is one of many editors at the mighty Mezz; but I once posted one of his e-mails to our family’s web-site, which had a couple spelling-errors; and my macho brother in Boston immediately declared the reason the mighty Mezz was so reprehensible was because Belknap was its editor.

“Da Cronies” were a bunch of guys I associated with at Houghton College in western New York in the early ‘60s; where I attended college.

Sad regrets:

The Keed.

Sabrina’s collar.

The saddest regret of all is that I never took Sabrina to other places beside Boughton park (the so-called “elitist country-club”).
She loved Boughton Park, but of course there are other places on the planet to stalk frogs, as she loved to do.
Mendon Ponds Park is the place I got ticketed for loose dogs: Tracy and the Sass — policed by suburban namby-pambies.
It also was the nature-preserve where Sass gaily bounded about with a dead gosling in her mouth. (“Hot-te-tott; hot-te-tott. I got it, and you do not!”)
But Mendon Ponds had fabulous trails Sabrina would have loved to hoover.
And it had gotten so we were walking Sabrina on a leash; since she liked to wander off into the forest in search of rotting carcasses and deer-poop.
There are of course other places I wanted to investigate; primarily abandoned railroad right-of-ways converted to trails.
The Lehigh-Valley Trail is the old Lehigh Valley railroad’s Buffalo-Extension; built for 60 mph running and two tracks, therefore wide and straight-as-an-arrow. They’ve even paved it.
All that a dog might find interesting is beside the trail. In fact, it isn’t very interesting to me — not much physical challenge in an abandoned mainline railroad.
It still has the giant steel through-trusses, but other than that it’s boring; no giant fills or tunnels.

The other regret is not getting around to trade the CR-V for a more dog-friendly car (what I had in mind was the Toyota AWD Matrix wagon).
Killian could jump into the CR-V without problem, but to Sabrina the CR-V was intimidating.
She’d fall trying to get in; the door opened in her way, the folded-up rear seat partially blocked the entrance, and it was a high step.
We have a ramp, and fell to putting it onto the hitch so she could walk up into the back.
We also fell to using the Bucktooth-Bathtub, since she had much less trouble with that.

But none of these regrets are as heavy as.....
-A) Not putting Tracy out of her misery early enough,
and
-B) That Sass might have starved to death alone and utterly lost.
We always have to hope someone picked up Sassy and gave her a home.
But it wasn’t us; and I’m sure she would have missed us.

I plan to distribute Sabrina’s ashes at Boughton Park, off in the woods, east of the road-in we walked so many times, where she found the rotting deer-carcass, and once cornered a raccoon.

The “Bucktooth-Bathtub” is our 2005 Toyota AWD Sienna minivan; “Bathtub” because it’s white, and like sitting in a bathtub, and “Bucktooth” because it appears to have a bucktooth on the grill.

The “CR-V” is our 2003 Honda CR-V SUV.

where is Sabrina?

Devastated.......

The Keed.

Sabrina with critter-skull she found.

For an Irish-Setter, Sabrina was a very laid-back, mellow, peaceful dog.
Our first Irish-Setter, Casey, was fabulous. We got her about the time I started driving bus, and I think she was free.
We had been referred to a girl named Sandy O’Mara, a friend of our next-door neighbor; that neighbor was also a bus-driver.
O’Mara had a litter of Irish-Setter puppies, and was reduced to giving them away.
I remember picking up Casey in our Vega. She was only 12 weeks old, and terrified. —Never again; next time Linda would come along to hold the pup.
I think we had Casey at least 10 years, but she developed bone-cancer: a massive growth on one side of her mouth that closed an eye.
Casey got hit by a car once. She used to run loose while I rode bicycle.
I’d ride flat-out down a street though the Browncroft neighborhood — 30-35 mph — and Casey would be ahead of me.
A guy would be out mowing his front-yard, and all of a sudden Casey would boom through; come-and-gone in less than a second.
Ran the pads right off her feet, but she loved it.
The car-accident punctured a lung and broke her hip, but she recovered — although weak in the rear.
She was at the vet at least a week. —Linda said the first good sign was the first time Casey wagged her tail at her.
Casey dispatched at least 30 squirrels. After the accident she learned to stalk them.
I tossed her ashes in the park where she caught her first.

Shortly after we moved to West Bloomfield, we found dog #2, another female Irish-Setter.
Dog #2, Tracy, was a Cassandra-dog (Casey was an O’Mara-dog): one of a litter of pups from the rural outback east of Webster, an eastern suburb of Rochester. The Cassandras were her breeders, and Tracy probably cost us $200 or so.
Tracy was probably the alpha-dog of her litter, and I had to give her the third-degree when she snapped at me.
After that I was leader-of-the-pack, Tracy was #2, and Linda #3.
Tracy grew up to look a little like a Labrador-Retriever; too short in the nose, and broad in the face. (Casey was rather small for an Irish-Setter.)
Like Casey, I began running with Tracy at the park; loose because she wouldn’t stray.
Most depressing was leaving Tracy alone all day for the 8-9 hours we were at work.
Worst of all was leaving her alone as a puppy — never again.
Which lead to Sassy; a full-grown Irish-Setter that was supposed to provide Tracy company.
But that didn’t work; Tracy was extremely upset that another dog was on the property. Sassy was an interloper; the Trace felt she was supposed to be an “only-dog.”
Sassy was a rejected show-dog with a lower-jaw that projected ahead of her upper-jaw. We (I) never noticed. All I knew is that she was very spunky; a complete spazz. (Cost us $200: that was my offer; 200 buckaroos if you think we’ll give her a happy-home.)
She also was very tall, but skinny — the opposite of Tracy. And looked too much like a wolfhound: too skinny in the back.
We took both dogs to a nearby park, and the Sass, seeing the Trace was loose, wanted to get loose too.
Did we dare? I let her loose and she ran down an embankment about 100 feet into the woods, but then came back to us.
Wonder-of-wonders. Both the Sass and the Trace could run loose with me, and they didn’t stray.
In winter when I couldn’t run I’d turn 180° down a path, but the Sass would have started going the opposite direction.
Then she would see I had turned, and all-of-a-sudden the Sass would boom past going down the path I had turned onto.
The Sass was also an escape-artist; we used to call her the Houdini-dog. We built a kennel inside our fenced-yard, and the Sass would escape despite a chain-link roof.
Sometimes she’d dig her way out under the fence; other times she’d wiggle out a gap she had made in the roof. Many times the the 93-year-old nosy neighbor (not 93 at that time) had to collar her and put her back in the kennel.
Once we boarded her with the vet, and the vet wondered how she had gotten into an adjacent cage.
Then he saw her climbing the chainlink fence one day — pawed right up. Nothing would stop the Sass.
Then one day she escaped during a thunderstorm and we never saw her again. Ran through the motorbike-store down the street, but they couldn’t catch her.
That was after my stroke (I was working at the mighty Mezz at that time); and I’ve always felt I might have been able to do a better job of looking for her if I hadn’t been so stroke-addled.
So Tracy was back to being the “only-dog;” and lived out her remaining years with us.
Finally one day her back-end gave out while running.
And so began the long degradation. She still loved going to the park, so I’d (we’d) take her and we walked — and stop when she pooped out.
Finally it got so she couldn’t stand up, and the vet prescribed steroids. Never again! Steroids made her have to widdle a lot, and widdling was a struggle. Linda would have to carry her back inside.
We tried to get her to go to the bathroom in the garage — spread out newspapers, the whole kabosh.
But she insisted on going out.
Finally we gave up; and I’ve always felt not soon enough. We should have pulled the plug when she could no longer stand up.
Her ashes are in the south weed-lot she used to love to hoover. Even at the end, her nose was extraordinary.

With Tracy gone, we began to think about getting another dog — although this time without puppyhood. Leaving a puppy alone at home ain’t fair.
Which led us to consider a rescue-dog; a product of a broken home, or abused, or otherwise abandoned. Such a dog had already grown up.
The local representative in Rochester of the Irish-Setter Rescue Group came out to assess our digs, and brought her two championship Irish-Setters along, probably to assess how we reacted. One has even been in the Westminster-show.
How could we react other than positively? Here were two utterly spastic Irish-Setters running all over our backyard like loose cannons, thrilled to be hoovering a new, and quite rural, place.
That lady began looking for a rescue Irish-Setter, and located Sabrina; product of a family that had recently divorced.
The dog had ended up with the husband, and he felt badly that he wasn’t providing a proper environment. (The dog had been his wife’s.) At one time they lived in Californy.
He had given the dog back to it’s breeder in nearby Avon, N.Y. (pronounced “AH-von;” not “AY-von,” like the beauty-supplier).
E-mail pictures were supplied, and we went to look at “Sabrina” in the breeder’s home.
We ended up bringing her home. We had Sabrina alone for a few months.
Then “Killian” appeared as a rescue-dog; a product of at least two homes, one of which was apparently abusive. —We surmised this because Killian is always being submissive, and is frightened of raised voices.
Killian was ex of Kentucky, and apparently being kept near Harrisburg.
Getting him meant a long trip to Williamsport, and when we were first shown him we could refuse.
Killian was very rambunctious and pulled like a horse.
But how could we refuse an abused dog? Sabrina was a big dog, and Killian rather small — more a field-setter. I guess that could have been the refusal-angle.
We had Sabrina along, and she looked confused. What were we doing bringing that dog back home?
Again, our attempt to provide companionship was crashing mightily in flames.
So then we had two; and I could have broken Killian of pulling so hard, but he was already messed up enough as it was; so let him pull.
He also refused the crate — despite being frequently kept in a crate in previous homes. Obviously the crate was the slammer. —Apparently he had once knocked over the baby-carriage with the baby in it; running around like the loose-cannon he is.
So we now had both Sabrina and Killian.
Both are since the stroke; and I’ve always felt the stroke effects my ability to supply adequate attention.
But apparently the dogs don’t think so.
Killian is always thumping his tail at me the minute I show up; and Sabrina was thrilled to have me taking her for a walk.
In fact, both dogs love it. A proper walk is with the master.
And Sabrina was a very classy dog — a bit mellow and quiet, but very determined.
Once she waded into a small pond to get a drink, and immediately she was up-to-her-belly in mud.
She flashed us a worried look, then proceeded to extricate herself. (After that we passed that pond on the leash.)
Recently she fell ker-plop into the parking-lot trying to jump into our van. Got right back up and tried again.
Once, long ago, I took her along, loose, when I went cross-country skiing at Boughton Park (the so-called “elitist country-club”) and a ski came off and slid all the way to the bottom of a dam-dike; about 70 feet.
I had to walk all the way down the dam-dike to retrieve the ski — and that dog waited for me the whole time atop the dike; at least 10 minutes. Any other Irish-Setter would have run into the boondocks.
CLASS. And walking with me she’d prance-and-dance. Eleven years old and still pulled like a horse.
And memory of an elephant. “I remember that deer-bone. Let’s go over here, boss.”
Last Tuesday (March 20) we went to the park, and she pranced-and-danced like nothing was wrong.
Then about 3 p.m. she crashed — apparently the tumor on her liver had ruptured, and that made her weak.
Suddenly breathing was an effort.
When we picked her up the next day at the Honeoye Falls Veterinary Hospital for the ultra-sound she hardly knew who we were; or couldn’t react.
Yet the old dog was still convinced she had to get into that van on-her-own — although we had to help.
Who would have ever expected last Sunday I’d have to put her asleep before the week was out. She was losing weight; and something appeared to be wrong; but she still seemed healthy.
So now Killian is on-his-own; the only dog.
He looks confused: like where is Sabrina?

I “started driving (Transit) bus” May 20, 1977.

“Linda” is my wife.

The “mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily Messenger newspaper where I once worked.

3/22/07

Streaming audio:
Yesterday (Wednesday, March 21; Bach’s birthday) I got the streaming-audio feed from the classical-music radio-station in Rochester we listen to, WXXI, to play on this here rig.
No doubt this will prompt the usual tiresome blustering from West Bridgewater about advancing age, wrong century, whatever.
But I got it to play long ago; and every time since it’s wanted me to download a RealPlayer.
I got it to play once — who knows why it couldn’t find that RealPlayer. I already had at least five RealPlayers, yet it wanted me to download another for every attempt.
It may have worked recently. WXXI opens their stream-feed with a solicitation-promo. It lasts about 30 seconds, and then switches to the audio-stream. I may have been giving up before the stream-feed.
But yesterday there was a new angle. No RealPlayer; it wanted me to configure iTunes.
Well, okay; iTunes was a downloaded install of an Apple app — free.
So now the WXXI audio-stream resides in my iTunes library. Double-click it and I get the WXXI audio-stream. (No monkeyshines.)
With RealPlayer I had to manually crank the WXXI-URL into it and enter.
Why should I go to all that trouble just to play an audio-stream — especially when background-music is so distracting I can’t play it? (I have to quit the iTunes.)
Thank ya iTunes; thank ya OS-X. Boom-zoom!
With iTunes I can also construct playlists; so that perhaps some day I can reconstruct the fabulous audio-cassette I had of ‘50s rock-n-roll: “strummin’ to the rhythm that the drivers made;” “Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on;” “Let’s go to the hop,” and “a-WOP bobbalew-bop, ba-LOP-BAM-BOOM!”

New apps:
Yesterday I 1) ordered a new OS-X Tiger (10.4 I think; I currently have 10.2), and 2) downloaded a new OS-X compatible Netscape browser (7.2 as opposed to my old 7.0).
The Tiger cost $129 (cue Bluster-King), and apparently will ship as discs. I.e. it wasn’t a download; which was what I was expecting.
Well, I’m not in a hurry. 10.2 is fine for the moment.
And who knows; downloading an OS-X might have taken hours.
Netscape was a download, another .dmg. Double-clicking on that instituted a StuffIt expansion, after which the new Netscape installed on the desktop.
I thereafter moved it, and FireFox, into the Applications-folder.
I then made an alias (Windoze “shortcut”) to that new Netscape and dragged it into the dock.
That left two Netscape aliases in the dock: one to the old 7.0 and one to the new 7.2.
But this morning (Thursday, March 22, 2007) when I fired up this here rig only the one to 7.2 was resident. Who knows what happened to the one to 7.0.
Supposedly the 7.2 would upgrade the 7.0, and grab all my bookmarks.
Looks like it grabbed some; but not all.
So I started reconstructing new bookmarks, but then found that it had already grabbed quite a few — it’s just that they were in folders no longer on the toolbar.
So it’s a mess, but I guess I don’t have to reconstruct bookmarks from scratch.
FireFox apparently upgraded too. The OS-X has a software-update search, and in the case of FireFox the update was automatic.
I still need to crank bookmarks into FireFox. So far I have the blog(s) and also MyFamblee.com.
It looks like I may start fiddling MyFamblee with FireFox. It’s the same size on my monitor as Netscape; and we were thinking it might be smaller — Linda’s was smaller at first, but that was on her laptop.
So I might make MyFamblee the FireFox home-page. I was thinking I’d make the blog-publish the home-page, but not if I fiddle MyFamblee with FireFox.

Diplomacy as usual:
This morning we were to take Sabrina from the Honeoye Falls Veterinary Hospital to Mendon Veterinary Hospital — as a referrel for an ultra-sound; since they couldn’t do ultra-sounds at Honeoye Falls Veterinary Hospital.
“So where is the Mendon Veterinary Hospital?” Linda asked.
“Simple,” the girl said. “Just go back into the village and turn north on Route 65. Then take 65 all the way into Mendon.”
“Whoa-whoa; wait a minute!” I shouted. “65 doesn’t go through Mendon.”
The girl corrected herself. “65 to 251, and then 251-east into Mendon.”
”Yep,” I said. “251 goes through Mendon.”

“The moving finger having writ moves on.......”
We had to give up on Sabrina.
The ultra-sound determined she had inoperable cancer of the liver.
So “the end.” No sense bringing her home to die — not when she’s so zonked she hardly knows who we are.
A tragedy — another “my dog;” although not as much as Tracy.
But she made over 11, and had a wonderful time the other day.
A really nice dog. Now Killian is the “only dog;” and I think he’s wondering why Sabrina is gone.

The “Bluster-King” is my all-knowing macho younger brother in West Bridgewater, Ma.; near Boston.

MyFamblee.com (actually it’s MyFamily.com) is the location of our family’s web-site.

“Sabrina” was one of our two dogs. Both are “rescue”-dogs; Sabrina was seven when we got her, and was the older of the two.

Marky-Mark

This morning’s (Wednesday, March 21; Bach’s birthday) dream was about Marky-Mark, recently retired from the mighty Mezz.
Mark (Syverud) was an editor when I first appeared at the mighty Mezz long ago as an unpaid intern following my stroke.
As such Marky-Mark assembled pages for the mighty Mezz, one of a few page-editors.
His bias was more national than local, as I recall.
As an unpaid intern I used to rewrite, and/or type in, press-releases for “Names-and-Faces” for the mighty Mezz.
“Names-and-Faces” might be college Dean’s Lists, military assignments, whatever.
One afternoon I was typing in something, when I observed “If you can’t do it, teach it; if you can’t teach it, teach others how to teach it;” a comment I made at Houghton regarding my boring secondary-education classes.
It stopped Marky-Mark in his tracks.
He looked at me as if to say “And this guy is brain-injured?”
Years later Marky-Mark was head of the so-called presentation-team that constructed all the papers (Messenger daily and 10 Post weeklies).
As such he reviewed me at that time.
He couldn’t believe I had reduced the time of the daily stockbox from two hours to 5-10 minutes.
Previously the stock info had come as a fax from Canandaigua National Bank, and had to be retyped by a secretary, about two hours.
I cut it to about an hour by OCR-scanning the fax.
Then Linda and I decided to try getting the stock-values over the Internet.
Our first attempt was Yahoo, but I discovered that with Quicken I could construct a complete stock-portfolio that was the exact duplicate of what we ran in the paper (open/close/change and percent-change; the whole kabosh), and that in fact I could rename the stocks to be what we ran in the paper.
End result: access the Quicken-portfolio, copy it, then flow it right into the Quark stockbox template.
Wham-bam; ready-to-run in 5-10 minutes.
“And you’re running on only seven cylinders?” Mark asked in amazement. “I got people running on all eight who I wish could do as well.”
We had been doing the astronomical-events (sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset) from the Farmer’s Almanac. The events were projected, and not very precise (mostly the moon-events).
I stepped out the garage-door one afternoon, looked up, and said “What’s that moon doing up there? I had it setting four hours ago.”
I thereupon began Googling an astronomical-events site on the dreaded Internet, and found the Naval Observatory site; which gave me the exact times of astronomical-events for Canandaigua.
No more “What’s that moon doing up there?” From now on the astronomical-events could be precise; and we renamed that section “Skywatch;” which was what it was called in the Altoony paper.
Marky-Mark’s retirement is rather sad. He’s only 53, but has Parkinson’s — about the same condition as Reynders; i.e. not very bad, but noticeable.
Marky-Mark’s retirement-party was a few months ago.
The dream was about a mighty Mezz recollection Marky-Mark had written. The recollection is just a dream, but Marky-Mark was an excellent writer.

“The mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily Messenger newspaper, where I once worked.

The Messenger ran a small stockbox every day, which gave the open/close/change and percent-change of about 15 stocks of local interest.

“Linda” is my wife.

“Altoony paper” is the daily Altoona Mirror newspaper, which we usually get when we visit the mighty Curve (Horseshoe Curve; a railfan site) in Altoona, Pa.

“Reynders” is Tom Reynders, age 61, my sister-in-Floridy’s husband. He has Parkinson’s, although only slightly.

3/20/07

XM-radio:
The Canandaigua YMCA plays an XM-radio station, Flight-26, as background music in their workout rooms, weight-room, and locker-room.
It’s late ‘90s and recent rock-music. All the singers are nasally strident and project well.
I consider it okay; at least it ain’t unbearable racket, like Hip-Hop or Rap.
Although their playlist is rather narrow. Things often repeat within an hour.
It has the advantage of no ads, or none that I’ve ever noticed.
One wonders how its financed.......
Of course it’s nationwide: “broadcasting at the speed of music; Flight-26.”
The morning-man on the local classical-music radio-station we listen to, who’s been at it for eons, has commented: “I suppose this is what my pursuit is coming to. Radio broadcast nationwide over satellites, so people like me disappear.”
The vaunted PT-gym played a radio too, but it was a local station on a boombox.
The announcer on Flight-26 is a self-assured browbeater, in full command of what she’s doing wielding immense-powah over musicians and listeners alike. She’s as nasal as her playlist.
The Chevrolet HHR we rented in Orlando last fall had XM-radio, although it was a bolt-on; not in the dash.
The thought crossed my mind to try it, but (COMPENSATORY-BEHAVIOR ALERT) I didn’t, knowing how things go for a brain-injured person confronted with a technical challenge.
But the siren-song of no ads is appealing, although supposedly the classical-music station has no ads.
But it has local promos willy-nilly: “This segment brought to you by Velmex of East Bloomfield, supplier of rotary positioning systems for science and industry.”

Moving-time at Weggers:
“Didja find everything?” the cashier at the mighty Canandaigua Weggers asked yesterday (Monday, March 19, 2007). They probably train them to ask that.
“Sure,” I said; “after considerable struggle.”
“You guys moved everything. Believe-you-me that Ben & Fat-Jerry’s ice-cream was at least a three-mile hike; and we probably never woulda found it had not we overheard Granny asking where the ice-cream was to some teenybopper in a purple mohawk stocking microwave pizzas into a freezer-cabinet.”
No doubt the cashier has heard this all week as mighty Weggers moved stuff all over. Usually “Didja find everything?” gets a compliant “Yes.”
The Physical-Therapist worked at Weggers while in high-school and college, and told us Weggers relocates stuff to get shoppers to wander around the store, making impulse-purchases along-the-way.
Well, that’s not how it works in our case: “You guys put the Quick-Oats where I can’t find it, and fugetaboutit; we’ll just buy the stuff elsewhere; i.e. ya lost the sale. Same for lima-beans.”
Why should I hafta ask a kid in a purple mohawk?

Clock-alert

The onliest reason I write this up at all, is because I know it will send the almighty Bluster-King deep into orbit.
In fact, I noticed the so-called “discrepancy” almost three weeks ago, and since I didn’t really care, I only got around to mentioning it now.
My OS-X clock is about five seconds behind the vaunted atomical-clock in Boulder, Col.
My old 9.2 had a number of clock-options, one of which was to get its time over the dreaded Internet from the Nist-site. (time-b.nist.gov)
This is where the dreaded atomical-clock is; the source of time on cellphones, which comes from satellites.
So I could make the time on my ‘pyooter agree with the official time on the dreaded atomical-clock (a computer-guru thing from the mighty Mezz).
I could therefore make my digital-watch agree with my ‘pyooter, and anything else digital (e.g. stove, microwave, VCR) agree with my watch.
So it was possible to make all these gizmos agree with the dreaded atomical-clock, although they would go out of synch.
This here ‘pyooter was slow, the VCR was slow, and the microwave fast.
So every month-or-so, like pumping up the car-tires, I might reset them all.
This might seem obsessive, but they were close enough. What usually prompted a reset was the VCR nearly cutting into the news — so that two months might pass before a reset was done.
The CR-V can be set according the the atomic-clock, as could the so-called soccer-mom minivan (Astro) and the Faithful Hunda.
But the Bucktooth-Bathtub can’t. All you can reset are the hours and minutes. It’s clock has the seconds preset — you can’t zero it.
OS-X get its time over the Internet from Apple. There’s no option to add the nist-site.
So it’s five seconds slow compared to the atomic-clock. Do I care? It’s only five seconds — close enough.
Not the 15 minutes here and 20 minutes there from West Bridgewater.
And even that ain’t as bad as the shadow of the mighty De Land water-tower, where clocks are off that amount, and you’re reprehensible if you don’t know how much they’re slow or fast.

The “almighty Bluster-King” is my macho blowhard brother in Boston.

The “mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily Messenger newspaper, where I once worked. It had a tech-support guy, Dan Gnagy, known as the “computer-guru.”

The “so-called soccer-mom minivan” was our 1993 Chevrolet Astrovan.

The “Faithful Hunda” was our 1989 Honda Civic AWD station-wagon — by far, the best car we ever owned; 160,000 miles without a hitch, until it got smashed up. “Hunda” because that was how a Transit bus-driver pronounced it.

The “Bucktooth-Bathtub” is our 2005 Toyota Sienna AWD minivan; the van that replaced the Astro. “Bathtub” because it’s white, and feels like sitting in a bathtub. “Bucktooth” because it has what appears to be a bucktooth on its grill.

“West Bridgewater” (near Boston) is where the almighty Bluster-King lives.

“The shadow of the mighty De Land water-tower” is where my wife’s mother lives, a retirement community in De Land, Floridy.

Naturally, the almighty Bluster-King feels the fact I can align all my clocks with the atomical-clock is a reprehensible obsession. I do it only because I can. (Those I can’t are off.)

two railroad-bridges

Pictured are the two railroad-bridges we walk under to get to the vaunted Canandaigua YMCA.
The small shopping-mall we park at is west of the railroads; the YMCA is east.

The Keed.

The two railroad-bridges.

The one closest is no longer used, and the one farthest is the Auburn-Road, still in use.
The Peanut left Canandaigua too; apparently north of these bridges. Both are ex-New York Central, although the Peanut was originally Canandaigua & Niagara Falls, an independent.
The railroads did not technically split Canandaigua, since the Auburn came in from the east, and left to the north.
The Peanut left to the northwest.
The Auburn bridge is operated by shortline Finger Lakes Railway.
The Peanut is long-abandoned.
As far as I know, the Auburn is the first railroad across the state, or at least the first into Rochester; built in the 1830s.
Which explains why the first abutment is still stone — it’s probably the original Auburn-Road alignment. (We walk the south sidewalk next to those abutments — it’s in the picture.)
Everything north of Canandaigua is abandoned, although a stub-ended portion out of Rochester was still in use a few years ago to service industries.
From Canandaigua east the Auburn is now Finger-Lakes, the county-subsidized operator that bought the line from Conrail. The line north (the bridge is part of it) is still in use, but stub-ended at Canandaigua-Wine.
That section to Canandaigua-Wine went right past the palatial offices of the mighty Mezz. I once pointed out the storied history of the line to Junior (he had no idea).
The Auburn was first because it skirted all the physical challenges, some of which were met by later rail-construction that became the Water-Level’s main stem.
Biggest challenge was the Irondequoit Creek defile east of Rochester. The Water-Level crosses it on a long fill, but the Auburn misses it completely.
The Erie-Canal also had to go around that defile.
The Auburn was kept open, because NYC could use it as a bypass when the Water-Level was blocked.
But that bypass became moribund, and a large portion was abandoned.
Stub-ended segments were kept open to service industries, but eventually abandoned too.
Now all that’s open is the large segment east of Canandaigua, and within Canandaigua.
—Which is now operated by Finger Lakes Railway to continue rail-service to industries that had rail-service.
The Canandaigua & Niagara Falls (later Peanut) was originally built as a way of getting Pennsylvania coal to the Niagara Frontier. It was originally built with a six-foot gauge, to match the Erie it was getting coal from.
Coal was probably coming up the Northern Central, which originally only went to Canandaigua.
When Pennsy got it, the coal-outlet to the Niagara-Frontier became moribund, as Pennsy extended its line to Sodus-Point on Lake Ontario; where it could transload coal into lake ships from a giant pier they built.
The C&NF came under the control of NYC, where the prez of NYC (a Vanderbilt) referred to it as a “peanut” compared to the mighty Water-Level.
The Peanut thereafter drifted into obscurity; most of it abandoned in the ‘30s.
The tiny segment from Canandaigua to Holcomb remained in use servicing an Agway farm-supply, and its affiliated grain-elevator, in Holcomb.
But it was eventually abandoned too during the ‘70s, and the Agway recently torn down.
Much of the alignment of the Peanut remains. We once walked a part of it with Jack-a-Bill’s kids. It goes over hill-and-dale and twists and turns: a rural line. It delineates the pastures.
Those abutments were apparently rebuilt in 1920. There also is a railroad-bridge over the the old 5&20 in Canandaigua with only a 10-foot six-inch clearance (south side) that has decapitated semis.

The Keed.

West Avenue railroad-bridge.

The Auburn (Finger-Lakes) over the main north-south drag through Canandaigua is a grade-crossing with traffic-lights.

“Junior” was George Ewing Jr., the head-honcho of the Messenger Newspaper (the mighty Mezz) in Canandaigua, where I once worked. He was a son of George Sr., the owner of the paper who bought it in 1959.

The so-called “Water-Level” is the New York Central’s mainline across New York State. It became part of Conrail, and is now part of CSX. It was called “Water-Level” because it didn’t have any mountain-grades.

The “Erie” is the Erie Railroad across southern New York State. It connected to affiliated railroads in northwest Pennsylvania that sourced coal. (The Erie was originally six-foot gauge.) —Erie is now part of Norfolk Southern.

“Jack-a-Bill” are my brothers Jack and Bill. Jack lives near Boston and has two kids. Bill lives in northern Delaware, and has one kid, an only son, Tom (Agent 44), a railfan like me. I had a mentally-retarded brother (Down syndrome) who always pronounced “and” as “a;” i.e. Jack-a-Bill.

Mighty Wal*Mart has everything............

First time for everything, so yesterday (Wednesday, March 14, 2007), was our first visit to the grand Canandaigua-Wal*Mart extravaganza.

The Keed.

Photoshop is such fun.

For years, Wal*Mart had a tiny, depressing dungeon out beyond Weggers on Eastern Boulevard (5&20). It was not actually in Canandaigua. It was in Hopewell, one of the next towns east of Canandaigua.
The new Wal*Mart is even farther out, situated in one of the few pieces of vacant land left in the valley Canandaigua Lake is in; primarily because it was utter desolation before.
No doubt the original Wal*Mart, at about 20,000 square feet, was large at the time it was built.
But now that superstores (supperstores?) are big enough to hanger an entire fleet of giant B36 bombers, it was depressingly small.
The old store’s ceiling was only about 20 feet. The new store is 40 or 50 feet.
The new Wal*Mart is a bit strange because it doesn’t have direct access to Eastern Boulevard, the main highway.
In fact, you access its vast parking-lot from a competitor, mighty Lowes.
Wal*Mart is behind a row of fast-food joints and turgid franchise restaurants that line Eastern Boulevard.
So we treaded gingerly into the vast Wal*Mart parking-lot, big enough to land a 747, except for the shopping-cart corrals sprinkled here and there.
Those corrals are open, but have a large framed entrance with blue signs overhead advertising various Wal*Mart services: e.g. digital film-processing (huh????????).
We did not barge into the lot at 152 mph, but instead at about 5 mph, looking warily side-to-side for hard-charging Granny, or angry REPUBLICAN intimidators in gigantic Chevy pickups festooned with support-our-troops ribbons on the tailgate, and a gigantic translucent American-flag applique covering the entire rear-window.
We also had to dodge two riffraffers gathering carts with a motorized donkey.
We first saw these things in north Floridy at a Wal*Mart near Linda’s mother, except they were powered by gas. Perhaps a Briggs and Stratton or even a Harley. Sounded right: “puttato-puttato-puttato.”
The one in Canandaigua appeared to be electrically powered by a storage-battery — perhaps made by Toyota with the same motivator that was in their electric forklift.
Whatever; they all had the flashing yellow strobe-beacon to warn Granny and the Intimidators to stay away. Although in north Floridy the beacon was atop a tall wand — in Canandaigua it was atop the donkey-case.
The intent of our visit was to hopefully come away with a new bathroom-scale, and a canister vacuum-cleaner.
Our central-vac (the 454) is ailing, more-or-less. It’s 17 years old, and has gotten a lot of use.
A few weeks ago it screeched and made strange sounds.
It still sucks fairly well, but smells up the basement — as if the giant motor may be burning out.
A technician will come tomorrow (Friday, March 16, 2007) to look at it, but if it’s still sucking fairly well, it ain’t clogged.
Meanwhile, our house fills up with dog-hair; plus the central-vac is rather inconvenient cleaning out cars.
I can imagine the Bluster-King noisily asking why the central-vac doesn’t have an outlet in the garage.
Sorry, bluster-boy; but it does. It’s just that it’s rather inconvenient using it. It ain’t as easy as using a canister would be.
“So get a shop-vac,” the bluster-boy foams. Sorry Bubba; we already have one — and it’s a disaster. Makes a huge racket, and blows smoky dust all over.
“Dealing with it” means getting a portable canister.
And so we patronize mighty Wal*Mart, since it was in the vicinity of the Canandaigua YMCA and mighty Weggers.
Into the huge front-entryway we walked, to be immediately accosted by a little-old-man with dollar-bills stapled to his pork-pie hat, cascading to the floor. He was soliciting donations to some hospital-charity.
“No thank you,” we said. Them kids can rot in their rooms!
A lady greeter was laid out in a chair at a small desk on the side of the entrance. She never got up, and appeared to be in her middle-50s. —So in other words, we got in without being bussed by some foul-smelling geezer.
Once inside the vast store, we set out in search of the vacuums, but thankfully big direction-signs were hung from the ceiling, so we didn’t have to be snapped at by a smiling illegal-alien store-associate on a donut-break.
We found the vacuums, but they were all uprights, looking like rejects from the Star-Wars canteena set. Turn them all on, and I can imagine them serenading Han Solo and Princess Lea and Chewbacca and Luke glomming large spindly crustaceans deep-fried in transfat.
There must have been 36 different uprights, and only one tiny canister on display.
Actually two were marketed, but the GE was out-of-stock, and not even on display.
The one there was a yellow Eureka with a smallish bag that might fill in an hour.
“What is it with all these uprights?” Linda asked. “How ya supposed to get it under a chair?” (We’re going to have to purchase a canister online, or heaven-forbid: from SEARS.)
Next move was a new bathroom-scale.
We stumbled upon the bathroom-scale aisle, eying a display of various gizmos.
“I just don’t want anything that talks to me,” I said.
About six or seven scales were on display; both analog and digital. A baby-blue one was endorsed by Weight-Watchers; two others, an analog and a digital, were Taylor.
I guess this is the infamous Taylor-Instruments of yore, once one of the mighty industrial icons of Rochester.
But the digital-scale we purchased was made in China (by Chinese child prison-labor, no doubt); at least that’s what it says on the box. One wonders if Taylor-Instruments is still in business.......
As we began leaving, my wife said: “while we’re in here, we should also look for kitchen-towels.”
We stumbled upon an array of kitchen-linens overlooked by a huge yellow smile-face; audibly blubbering something about “Always.........”
The dish-towels looked like knitted socks.
Feeling around, my wife found a single choice of pot-holders — two pot-holders.
“I thought Wal*Mart had everything, Jack. Is this all they got? There must be something else somewhere.”
Sure enough, as we walked out we passed another selection of plastic-like kitchen-linens at the end of an aisle with signature Dale Earnhardt beachballs.
“How ya supposed to find anything when it’s hanging all over?” Linda asked.
We slowly passed a large box with glowering green Ninga-geckos on it; apparently from a Saturday-morning cartoon. Step back; lest you get bit. The box had angry plastical Ninga-geckos in it — ready to save the world. (The Universe is Bruce Willis.)
After checking out, we walked past the little-old-man with the cascading dollar-bills stapled to his hat.
At least my electronical signature seemed fairly accurate. Unlike mighty Lowes, it wasn’t conjuring up lines when ya approached with the writing-instrument.
“Thank ya for shopping Wal*Mart,” the greeter barked from her semi-supine position.

Now; regarding our fabulous bathroom-scale from mighty Wal*Mart, and the accuracy thereof.
Linda tried it this morning and it said 124 pounds.
She shifted forward and it read 115.
Back and it read 125.
Slightly forward and it read 118.
We bought that scale because our hand-me-down (from Linda’s deceased Aunt Ethelyn) appeared to consistently be reading seven pounds less than the one at the PT-gym.
Plus the Y didn’t appear to have a scale.
Although I see one in the men’s locker-room, but I haven’t used it yet, because it’s buried where ya don’t notice it.
It’s one of them medical scales with all the levers and weight-bars.
I tried the new scale, and it read 199; the weight I crank into the treadmill and elliptical.
But the scale is from Wal*Mart, the most fabulous store in the entire universe; so “deal with it!”

State Route 5 and U.S. Route 20, both on the same road, go through Canandaigua.

My brother-in-Delaware has a turbocharged Volvo he claims will do 152 mph. My Boston-brother dropped his Harley in a parking-lot in Altoona, PA, trying to avoid me (he had charged the parking-lot).

I call our central-vac the “454,” because when I first heard it, it reminded me of a 454-Chevy.

“Bluster-King” is my macho blowhard brother-from-Boston; AKA “Bubba,” and “Jack.” He’s always telling me to “deal with it;” translated “shove it.” He is also always telling me mighty Wal*Mart is vastly superior to Sears, and worth a 35-minute side-trip that burns five gallons of gas.

“Linda” is my wife.

My brother-in-Boston noisily insists “Super” is spelled “Supper.” E.g. “Supper-Bowl.”

3/12/07

Mobile-Web:
Yesterday-morning (Sunday, March 11, 2007), after bringing our dogs back from so-called elitist country-club because it was too icy........
......I decided to try the web-function on my cellphone. After waiting about 10 seconds (this some Gates gizmo?), I was entreated to sign up for “Mobile-Web” for only five additional buckaroos per month.
What in the wide, wide world do I need that for? About the onliest things I do with the Web are 1) e-mail; 2) this here site; 3) the blog; and 4) occasional Googling and Jeevesing.
I’m not about to become a slave to my e-mail.
If I remember it, I try to process it every night.
That might be 1-3 new messages (from ex-Messenger photographer Anmari Linardi and the all-powerful Tim Belknap — both are ne’er-do-wells), and maybe 5-8 spam messages from the great email-server-in-the-sky to delete.
MyWay never gets spam. It has filters, plus the spammers haven’t discovered it yet.
And parrying Jack would be no fun at all from a cellphone. A cellphone would be worse than the De Land Public Library. Not only no macros or HTML-tags, but a tiny keypad that requires multiple hits per keys to get different letters.
So get a Blackberry with a full qwerty keyboard. Great, but still no AW macros and no HTML-tags.
So maybe the macros could be programmed into the Blackberry, or you can get software that has HTML-tags.
La-dee-DAH! All that just to parry Jack?
I ain’t that desperate.
He gets maybe 3-4 hours per day while I drink coffee or eat an orange at this here rig.
That’s plenty.
I don’t need no Mobile-Web.

MAC-ad:
Yesterday-afternoon a snippet of an Apple-ad was on the TV in the background while I was watching my Tehachapi DVD.
Two guys were standing outside the operating-room at a hospital: one being a rather droll-looking “PC” in a frumpy hospital-gown. “PC” was flabby minion — appeared to be a fat-cat, except he also had geeky glasses and a buzzcut.
The other guy was “MAC,” a hip youngish dude looking very modish — no tie.
“PC” was about to walk into the operating-room: “New operating-system,” he said. “New video-card; all kinds of things. Every time they change anything I hafta be rebuilt.”
“MAC,” utterly dumbfounded, threw up his hands trying to make sense of what “PC” had just told him.
“Lissen here MAC,” PC said; “If anything goes wrong, I wantcha to have my peripherals.”
“Hell-ooooooo,” I said.
Not too long ago our LL Bean catalog arrived, and it has all MAC-equipment in its ‘pyooter-desks.
For at least the last 12-or-more years I have been hearing about the impending death of Apple.

And so begins Daylight-Savings Time, no longer important to us, since we’re retired, and don’t have to show up at work.
When I first started at the mighty Mezz, I had to be there by 6 a.m. or so, so we could start pasting-up that day’s sports-section.
It meant getting there in the pitch-dark until the sun started coming up earlier.
Driving in the dark and riding the mighty Cow in the dark, and parking in the so-called elitist parking-lot in the dark.
I parked under an orange sodium-vapor streetlight, both car and motorbike. I was usually the first one in the lot.
Once it deluged after I got there — a fast-moving thunderhead — and we were afraid the mighty Cow might blow over.
But it didn’t — my boss was going to help me pick it up.
During my final years at the mighty Mezz, my arrival was by 8 a.m., and then 7 a.m. when we moved up the deadlines and publication an hour.
So it was usually light when I got there — and I was only doing the web-site: iteration #3.
But none of that matters any more. We get up when it gets light; which used to be about 6:50, but now it’s 7:50.
That means getting out later, but soon we’ll be able to walk the dogs before supper (super?), and then after.

The “so-called elitist country-club” is nearby Boughton Park.

“This here site” is our family’s web-site.

“The all-powerful Tim Belknap” is one of many editors at the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, where I once worked. My brother-in-Boston noisily decided he was the onliest one.

“MyWay” is my e-mail service. (My old RoadRunner e-mail still exists, and accessed “the great email-server-in-the-sky.” MyWay accesses it.)

I can access our family’s web-site from the ‘pyooters at De Land Public Library, while in Floridy in the shadow of the mighty De Land water-tower (where my wife’s mother lives) — but it ain’t as easy as here at home. I can also process my MyWay e-mail (it’s like Yahoo e-mail).

“Jack” is my macho blowhard brother-in-Boston.

“Tehachapi” in Californy is the location of the famous Tehachapi-Loop; a railfan-site.

“The mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper.

“The mighty Cow” is the Kawasaki ZX6R motorcycle I had for many years.

The “so-called elitist parking-lot” is the parking lot I parked in at the mighty Mezz; so-called because management used that lot. The hourlies used the other lot: the so-called “riffraff” parking-lot.

My brother-in-Boston noisily insists “super” is spelled “supper” (e.g. Supper-Bowl).

My brother-in-Boston also noisily insists the Macintosh-platform is doomed.

FireFox

At long last, FireFox is installed on this here machine.
We could have installed it much earlier, but I was running 9.2. FireFox wanted OS-X.
FireFox was a simple download, but it was a .dmg, a file-extension we’ve never heard of.
As such it installed as a separate disc-drive on the desktop. I couldn’t find it, as desktop files are hidden, even under Windoze. I couldn't make an alias (Windoze “shortcut”).
You had to run the app from the separate disc-drive icon, whereupon it would appear in the dock. But quit the app and it vaporized.
Seemed silly. I don’t wanna run an app from a separate disc-drive. I wanna activate it from the dock from an alias.
I don’t wanna dance all over just to run FireFox. All my other apps stay in the dock, even when off. I even got my Quicken-2003 in it last night (Saturday, March 10, 2007); although of course it runs “classic-mode” (maybe-not).
Finally we copied the actual FireFox application onto the desktop, and were able to make an alias. As such the app is on the desktop — eventually it will get moved to the Applications-Folder.
So FireFox resides in the dock; even when off.
Beyond that, the actual location of the app is another “Find” (it’s on the desktop).
I now have three browsers, which would be a lot except that some work and some don’t. —Netscape 7.0 often bombs with online purchases, for which Internet-Explorer is better. Yet IE doesn’t work at all with the blog (thank ya Gates); in which case I had to use Netscape.
Yet neither worked adding pictures to the blog: IE showed no toolbar, and Netscape went off to never-never land.
Blogger says their site is written for FireFox, so WE SHALL SEE.
What was rather amazing was that FireFox seemed to be firing up even from the trash.

broken-record

And so begins the long and tiresome broken-record about what motorbike I should be riding, that I should conform to his exceeding great wisdom by getting an 89-bazilyun pound glitzy antique-wannabe GeezerGlide like his, and sink my state-of-the-art Honda CBR600RR deep into Canandaigua Lake.
This despite my noting on numerous prior occasions that I didn’t like the seating-position on GeezerGlides, and seating-position was the main reason I rode so-called “rice-rockets,” not a desire to appear young and virile.
Whatever; starting this here boring litany 1-2 months before riding-season seems to signal reversals-of-position on other topics.
Namely..........

We were indeed the designers of our house, and the bluster-boy cannot display undeniable-proof my father designed the house in Erlton — which he didn’t.

The handicap-access at the Newark railroad-station is not the concrete platform in front of the station, which (ah-duh) has a blocking railing, and secondly is about 5-6 feet back from the tracks.
Indeed, 44 had the awful temerity and unmitigated gall and horrific audacity to point out that the handicap-access was a wooden ramp built next to the track farthest from the station (where I said it was); and not only that, you could see it under the bridge next to the NS-freight.

All the blustering stopped when I suggested he post pictures he had had nationally published (there weren’t any), which a co-authored book ain’t.
Examples of his superior photography have been posted on this here site: pictures of people with water-towers/phonepoles growing outta their heads, wires, pictures that are two-thirds sky and cut-off bodies, and above-all blue snow.
He takes my picture of the Amtrak MetroLiner and crops out my foreground and framing that gave it a sense of scale; calling it better that way (oh, how the mighty have fallen).
But of course an uneducated Instamatic-eye is far superior to one with experience; so much for culture.
Um, sure; a magazine is far more likely to use a photo that is two-thirds sky and cut-off bodies, because that’s what most people take. (For years we had to endure video-cams whipped all over, to mimic the frenzied movements of plain folks wiggling their video-cams all over.)
I tried to get the bluster-boy to re-aim to offset this, but the bluster-boy ain’t about to take no advice; especially not from no older sibling and so-called “Godless Liberial.”
So now I’ve been riding motorbike almost 30 years.
I began driving bus at Transit in May of 1977 at age-33, and took up motorcycling within a year.
A number if factors played a part: first, the encouragement of fellow bus-driver Murray Schroeder (“Morley Schwartz”), who rode a Triumph; second, my immediate neighbor’s boyfriend, who had a gorgeous Triumph “Hurricane;” and third, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” the best book I ever read (not the Bible), wherein the author Robert Pirsig recounts a motorcycle camping-trip he and his son took on a clapped-out motorbike in the Pacific Northwest to Californy.
My involvement with motorcycling moved far beyond all three factors (I’ve never camped out on motorbike); but my first motorcycle, my 1975 Norton 850 Roadster, was most like a GeezerGlide.
It was a large motorcycle, bought that size on the advice of a bike shop owner I had interviewed earlier for City/East Newspaper.
His advice was to start with the largest motorbike you’d ever buy, to avoid trading up.
It probably weighed over 500 pounds, but I learned how to ride on it, including figure-eights on narrow city streets.
But it sat you in the “sit-up-and-beg” position; fine until about 40 mph, and after that it was “hang-on-for-dear-life.”
I modified that poor thing 89 bazilyun ways to correct that; first a lower BMW-bar, and then Clubmans.
The Clubmans were better, although they felt out-of-place on a streetbike. But your feet were still too far forward.
So I bought rearsets, but never got around to mounting them. They were a contorted mass of chromed tubing and bracketry — rearsets meant putting the brake-pedal behind the kicker, even though the brake-control was still in front.
For some reason I patronized an indoor foreign junk-car parts shop in Rochester, and aside from seeing the old trunk lid from my TR250, I also saw a gorgeous Ducati 900 SuperSport (“SupperSport?”) inside on its center-stand.
So that when the infamous “Strohmier-bike,” a black-and-gold 1980 Ducati 900SS, appeared for sale in the newspaper, I decided to go look at it on my Norton.
As soon as I sat on the Ducati, the Norton was for sale.
Here, at last, was the seating-position I had been trying to get on my Norton, the dreaded “racing-crouch,” very much like riding a 10-speed racing bicycle.
Meanwhile, my brother Jack had begun riding surreptitiously at LeTourneau, on a ratty puke-gold 500-four Honda.
Finally he came out of the closet and told my parents to “Deal With It;” which always seems to be the equivalent of “shove it.”
Years later he moved up to a Honda NightHawk, a 700 inline-four, but it was the right color, black with blue trim. The 500 languished in his garage until disposed of: sold, junked, whatever.
Jack brought the NightHawk along when in Fulton to supervise (suppervise?) the building of the Nine-Mile Point nuclear power generating facility, and he rode it to Rochester once so that we could ride together.
I was riding the RZ350 by then, and was absolutely terrified.
I admit I’m overly cautious, but Jack was riding like there was no tomorrow; no heed whatsoever to his own safety (or mine). I had to lay back to avoid getting hit.
Well, I admit he’s mellowed some, but I wasn’t surprised he dropped his GeezerGlide in the Daze Inn parking-lot, or dumping it in front of that Jetta.
A few years ago he bought his Harley-Davidson Road King (his GeezerGlide), and the strident litany began. Obviously he had bought into the whole macho Harley schtick, and anything not a Harley was a wuss-bike.
Meanwhile I had been through two different bikes since Jack came to Rochester on his NightHawk, the FZR400 and the mighty Cow. I had the mighty Cow when he bought his Harley.
Every one of those bikes was the racing-crouch, except the RZ350, which at first was “sit-up-and-beg.” (That RZ350 was a passel of mistakes, the worst of which was trying the convert it into the racing-crouch. I put clip-ons and rearsets on it, but all they were doing was making you bend over from “sit-up-and-beg.” Legs and arms akimbo; it wasn’t the racing-crouch.
So now he noisily blathers something about my current motorbike, which also has the racing-crouch, being “impractical.”
As if I didn’t ride a so-called “rice-rocket” (the mighty Cow) almost seven years, and over 7,000 miles, including numerous long-haul trips — like to New Hampshire and Bill and the mighty Curve) — and the mighty Cow is after the stroke.
The dreaded LHMB, my most recent trade (and all my bikes were trades — I think the NightHawk got disposed of on eBay, despite being royally pranged from rearending a car), is another racing-crouch motorbike.
The LHMB is #6. Everything but #1 (and #3 originally) was racing-crouch. A GeezerGlide would be going back to “sit-up-and-beg;” which I want no part of. Furthermore a GeezerGlide, or its metric equivalent (which I’m sure I’d hear about), would be too big and unwieldy. —When it comes to motorbikes, the smaller (and lighter) the better; yet still powerful enough to not be a wuss-bike; i.e. a 600.

“Erlton” (a suburb in south Jersey) is where our family first lived; until December of 1957, when we moved to Delaware.

“Newark railroad-station” on the Northeast-Corridor is a tiny commuter-station in Newark, Delaware.

“44” (Agent 44) is my brother-in-Delaware’s onliest son — therefore my nephew; also like me a railfan.

“This here site” is our family’s web-site.

“City/East Newspaper” is the small weekly newspaper in Rochester where I was motorsports-reporter from 1972 through 1974.

My brother Jack noisily insists the kerreck spelling of “Super” is “Supper;” e.g. “Supper-Bowl.”

The original owner of the “Strohmier-bike” was Peter Strohmier.

“LeTourneau” University is where my younger brothers earned their engineering-degrees.

My younger brother “Bill” still lives in northern Delaware. (Jack, who is a year older than Bill, yet 13 years younger than me, lives near Boston.)

The “LHMB” (Lord-Have-Mercy-Banana) is the name given to my CBR600RR, my current motorbike. It’s yellow.

handicap-access catapult

My wife of nearly 40 years has surmised the handicap-access for the Newark train-station — a system that RG would be proud of.

Photo by Thomas R. Hughes (my nephew, a railfan like me).

Southbound Acela booms past the ancient Newark train-station on the Northeast Corridor in Delaware.

A northbound commuter-train pulls up to the Newark station on the track with the southbound Acela visible on it; the crew gets off; and they wheel the handicap-access catapult out from deep within the “bowls” of the station.
A happy wheelchair-patron is wheeled into the catapult bucket, the crew tightens the launching springs, and then let’s ‘er rip, lobbing the patron-and-his-wheelchair high across the blocking railing, across the 5-6 foot gap between the platform and the tracks, and into the car.
Crippled Granny yells “WEEE-HAAA!”
If a handicapped patron is terrified of “conforming” to such a gizmo, there are tidal-flats on the Delaware River filled with ice, and it’s ice-flow for him.
Triumph of engineering, baby. If he can’t see that, it’s ice-flow for him!
Ain’ nuthin’ ya can’t do with the faith of a mustard-seed, and a tanker-load a’ diesel. Yessireee Bobby! It’s a miracle, I tell ya!

The Newark train-station has a handicap-access ramp on the track farthest from the station. There ain’t no handicap-access to the platform. (Commuter-trains rarely use that track.)

“RG” is R.G. LeTourneau, who founded LeTourneau University in Texas, where my brothers got their engineering-degrees. Before the university, RG did a newsletter famous for tree-crushers and similar heavy gizmos. His solution to the ozone-hole was to install large ducts from the Los Angeles basin (where ozone is heavy) up to the stratosphere, and pump the ozone up where it belongs.

My tub-thumping conservative brother-in-Boston loudly insists “bowels” is spelled “bowls.”

The Woodruff effect

Shortly after my stroke (October 26, 1993), my wife Linda got on a Traumatic-Brain-Injury (TBI) e-mail list, to have some idea what to expect.
Traumatic in that the part of the brain denied blood by the clot/aneurysm/whatever dies and can never be regenerated, since brain and nerve tissue can’t regenerate.
As in my case, quite a bit of living brain tissue may still be left, so what’s left takes over for what was lost, and that is recovery.
If what was lost was extensive, recovery may not be possible.
And what takes over may not be what was designed for that function. E.g. my speech is controlled by an area of brain tissue that ain’t the original speech-center, which was apparently destroyed.
As such my speech is somewhat compromised.
TBI e-mails became somewhat irrelevant as time passed, but Linda still gets them.
Lately all the talk is of the so-called miraculous recovery of ABC-News reporter Bob Woodruff, who suffered a severe brain-injury when his military-vehicle was struck by a roadside-bomb in Iraq.
Some of Woodruff’s brain was lost, such that he had to recover from a traumatic brain injury.
So now Woodruff is back, having recovered perhaps 90-95% of his brain-function — i.e. what remained has taken over for what was lost.
So the non-brain-injured people look at Woodruff and decide TBI is insignificant.
This is the same misconception that followed J-Mac. Autism is insignificant — look at J-Mac.
Ex-KYOOZE me, but in the years following my stroke, I came across many TBIs.
Some guy had been hit over the head with a cast-iron pipe; and another guy had crashed his Kawasaki 1000 into a concrete bridge-abutment.
A church pastor tipping over a cherry-picker changing light-bulbs in his sanctuary and crashing into the pews below suffers a traumatic brain injury.
There was a kid in my brain-injury group at Rochester-Rehab with one complete hemisphere of his brain removed to counteract seizures — and it didn’t work.
Another guy had had four strokes.
Another kid was so messed up I had to rebutton his shirt — he had buttons in the wrong holes.
Once my TBI-group decided to hold a pizza-party. The guy who ordered was me — still royally messed-up speech wise, but no one else could do it. (The counselors perceived my success as a triumph — and it was.)
The universal outcome of TBI is brain-fatigue — what’s perceived as slackerdom by the non-brain-injured.
“He has an IQ of 137. He’s just being lazy.”
I get a similar assessment from West Bridgewater, on top of a fevered-agenda to badmouth everything I do or say (ever since I had the awful temerity and unmitigated gall and horrific audacity to dispute his erroneous recollection of where we got off I-80).
I had an up-close-and-personal education in TBI-induced brain-fatigue about two years after my stroke. A guy named Mike was to photograph people marching in a Rochester-Rehab sponsored fund-raiser inside a shopping-mall. Linda and I decided to participate.
Mike made it about one-fifth of the way. He had Multiple-Sclerosis.
My first reaction was to think he was just being lazy. But then I realized he was hitting the same wall I often encountered; that of puking out mentally.
Like me, he had fagged out. —Only sooner. (Multiple-Sclerosis is a brain-disease that can turn you into a vegetable; Mike was not that far along.)
My brother also apparently thinks anyone not as currently-abled as him deserves the ice-flow; that the “brain-injured” and “disabled” are freeloaders. Compassion and understanding don’t seem to be among his virtues.
So I could do the whole bit: dump my MAC for a PC, change to an Ariens snowblower, trade my LHMB for a GeezerGlide, start using Scope mouthwash, toss my Asics running-shoes for New Balance, switch toothpastes, trade my so-called soccer-mom minivan for a Chevrolet cheeruck with a 5mpg SmallBlock — maybe even become a tub-thumping Baptist and a REPUBLICAN (although I think a frontal lobotomy for the last two would be required) — but I still would be brain-injured; i.e. still a lazy slacker.
Plus I don’t think no matter what I did would make much difference. The zealots need somebody to badmouth; so there would probably be continuing bellyaching about something — like the church I was going to wasn’t right, or my politics were suspect. Or, for example, I hadn’t bought the right brand PC, my Ariens snowblower wasn’t the kerreck model, it wasn’t the right kind of toothpaste, my New Balance swim-fins weren’t the right model, and my GeezerGlide wasn’t a Road King.
I hate to be a pest, but so many times I’ve seen zealots badmouthing someone only to elevate themselves.

My current snowblower is an utterly reprehensible Honda — my brother’s is an Ariens.

The “LHMB” (Lord-Have-Mercy-Banana) is my motorbike, a yellow 2003 Honda CBR600RR — my brother’s GeezerGlide is a Harley-Davidson Road-King.

The “so-called soccer-mom minivan” is our white 2005 Toyota Sienna AWD minivan, the best car we’ve ever owned.

re-aimed and zoomed in

The infamous web-cam at the mighty Curve had been re-aimed and zoomed in on the signal-bridge.
I don’t know if this is good or bad.
Before it was zoomed out so far it was also getting the roof of the housing — although better aiming might have avoided the housing.
When I first got it (last February), it was zoomed out, but aimed so that it swallowed all the way down to Track-Snacks — but avoided the housing-roof.
A while ago the users could drive it; and Jack-and-I thought this was great. We would aim it first at the signal-bridge, and thereafter the camera could be re-aimed to supposedly follow a train around the Curve.
Except this never worked: re-aiming was so slow the train always got ahead.
Finally the minions in Altoony got tired of GrandPop spinning the camera madly, and aiming at the retention-ponds, so they dumped the user-control.
Soon after the camera was getting the housing-roof.
Finally someone has corrected that, but zoomed it in on the signal-bridge.
Nice, but all ya ever see of a train is at the signal-bridge.

I wanted to add a web-cam screen-shot of this, but A) OS-X does it as a pdf, which would take hours to rastorize into Photoshop, so........
B) I switched back to 9.2, where screen-shots are apparently not pdfs, but there my Netscape spins-and-spins, and apparently won’t get the web-cam — at least not in the five minutes I have.
I may go to the bathroom and let the OS-X file rastorize; but if it still ain’t finished I’m shutting off. I don’t have all day, and after-all I supplied a link to that there web-cam.

“Jack” is my brother in Boston.

The “mighty-Curve” is Horseshoe Curve National Historic site near Altoona, Pa. (This is an old picture.) It was part of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s crossing of the Alleghenies. It was opened in 1854 and is still used. It is by far the best railfanning site on the entire planet. Wait 20 minutes and a train appears — and going uphill they are wide-open; assaulting the heavens. The viewing-area is in the apex of the curve right near the tracks.