Kelly and I headed out to Darien Lake Performing Arts Center on Monday night – saw Sara Barielles, Maroon 5 and Counting Crows. Without going into too much detail, let’s just say it was filled with awesome.
The light show on the way home was almost as exciting as the one at the show – the summer’s strongest storms yet plowed through Western New York just after the concert let out, treating us to a panorama of lightning and a thorough drenching.
Over the past few months, a dearth of postings here could well have been taken to mean a number of different things – maybe I’ve been swimming in work, or busy around the house, or enjoying a little extra time pedaling, or maybe just lazy or uninspired. But in the case of the last 8 days, it’s meant I’m traveling. Kelly and I just returned home from a whirlwind trip to California for “summer break ’08″, and we had an awesome time.
In keeping with my privacy policy of only blogging about trips upon my return, I’ll be posting some photos (captioned, with any luck) and a few notes and commentary about our experiences soon.
For now, I’ll just mention two serendipitous “grazings” that happened while we were on the West Coast, that are both interesting (due to the “small world factor” they epitomize) and a touch disappointing (because they could have ended up as fun connections had we only known). First, we “grazed” Ken Starks, Larry Cafiero and the rest of the crew of Lindependence 08 on Wednesday and Thursday, making our way up the California coast from Monterey to Napa. If we had an extra day and could have worked out the logistics, I would have loved to have stopped in to Felton and been part of the truly awesome work they were doing there, evangelizing Linux and software freedom. Just a few hours later, we “grazed” Garrett McCord, author of Vanilla Garlic, as he attended and reported from the Taste3 culinary convention in Napa. Though neither he, nor his foodblogger traveling companions, would know me from Adam, it would have at least been fun to meet them in person and gush about how much I enjoy reading their blogs. Sure, maybe they would have looked at each other with raised “who is this weirdo” eyebrows just before calling security, but if their writings are any evidence of their friendliness, my guess is they would have just absorbed Kelly and I into their conversations and counted us as newfound friends by the time we parted company.
All that said, we had a wonderful trip, missed connections or none. We caught up with family and friends, saw some amazingly beautiful places and things, ate more than our share of truly delicious food, took scores of photos, and most importantly enjoyed some quality time reconnecting, relaxing and recharging.
If you’re in the Rochester area tomorrow – Saturday, May 17th – and you’re looking for something to do, consider paying us a visit down at the Honeoye Falls – Mendon Ambulance‘s Open House 2008 from 1PM to 4PM. [Map it!]
Aside from climbing around ambulances and fly cars, checking out equipment demos and (weather permitting) watching a vehicle extrication demo by the Honeoye Falls FD, I’ll be there with a Chevy Equinox Fuel Cell to explore…
If you’d like to meet a group of people whose dedication to emergency medicine and caring for strangers consistently amaze me, come pay us a visit. If you’d like to see how we do what we do, swing down and see us. If you’d like to get involved, there’ll be plenty of membership applications on hand. And if you’d happen to like to get a look at one of the most technologically advanced gas-free vehicles in the world while you’re at it, by all means stop by.
…I opted to spend some time out in the woods:
After 11 hunting seasons spent in the woods, all that practice and preparation and anticipation and frusteration finally paid off! Of course it helps, as shuttle astronaut Mike Mullane put it, to be in a “target-rich environment”! In this case, a friend from work was gracious (or sympathetic? or both?) enough to welcome me to his nothing-less-than-spectacularly-beautiful property for an opening-morning hunt.
On a visit to Germany in 2006, my colleague and I found ourselves with a few free hours on the Sunday following our arrival. We knew that there were some pretty impressive castles dotting the Rhine valley, so we headed out to shake off the jetlag and snap some photos.
Our search led us to the small town of Eltville am Rhein, about 10 minutes from Wiesbaden. Roughly doubling the population of Honeoye Falls – where we work the rest of the year – Eltville weighs in at just under 17000 people. The town is home to two castles, one of which we actually managed to find. (Yes, it took some help from a non-English-speaking shopowner to get there. We’re not too proud to stop and ask for directions, at least in the case that the director can’t understand a word that the directees are saying…)
After checking out the nicely-restored [maintained?] Eltville castle, and the proper English garden contained therein, we hiked toward the town center in search of food. We didn’t find any right away – but we did find a wine bar:
Our initial impression of hmm, neat place quickly morphed into this has got to be the coolest place ever. We pointed to a Reisling on the menu – a good choice given that we were in the Johannesburg region – handed over 2 Euros per glass, and were promptly passed actual glasses of wine. Good wine.
There wasn’t any fence, there wasn’t any sign that said “no alcohol past this point”, there wasn’t any deposit on the glass, and there weren’t any problems. People took their wine, sat at tables or along the river and drank, chatted and relaxed. We opted to walk along the footpath a ways, before turning back to drop off our glasses. More than once, we wondered aloud: Wouldn’t it be great to have something like this along the canal in Pittsford?
Too bad the New York open container law would make it all-but-impossible to pull off. Sadly, this experience will have to stay rooted in Germany…
Not long after I started working at the GM Fuel Cell plant here in upstate NY, I was put on a project that called for some time spent in our engine test bays. I’d spent weeks assembling and fine-tuning a piece of lab hardware that would need to be tested with a real engine – and I was understandably excited. So excited in fact, that after installing my project one afternoon and being told the engine wouldn’t be run again until the morning, I happily dragged my ass out of bed at 4:30AM to arrive at 5:30 the following day.
When I arrived, I found the engine test engineer busily setting up the test and preparing to run. At first, I was sufficiently excited by the fact that I was about to see – for my first time – a real live fuel cell engine run, that I didn’t notice the music playing quietly in the control room. But when we hit a snag – another engineer had locked out the Hydrogen line the day before, and we couldn’t get fuel to the engine – I got a few minutes to sit back and relax. And then I noticed the test engineer’s iPod sitting in one of those little drop-in speakers, playing some seriously good music!
Some quick investigation revealed that the music I was hearing – an addictive half-pop, half-alternative, half-rock blend of the sounds of Coldplay, Radiohead and a pinch of Green Day (on their less-happy days) – was that of Canadian band Fieldguide. The lyrics and tune were catchy enough that the album’s opening song stayed with me the rest of the day, and that evening I ordered Fieldguide’s CD from their now-defunct website (come on, you knew there was a reason I hadn’t linked to it by now).
As it turns out, I probably got one of the last few Fieldguide CDs they made – which appears to be an inkjet-printable silver CDR (a Ritek, actually, according to `cdrecord -atip`) – before Fieldguide disappeared. Fortunately, the CD’s label includes a contact at Key Music Group in Canada… whom we at daverea.com promptly contacted on behalf of you, the loyal reader, not wanting to bestow upon you an episode of Saturday Morning Tuneage whose subject’s music amounts to unobtainium!
Fieldguide is now Drew Smith, and the album I heard (“The Ones You Love”) is now Fossils. You can buy it on CD at Amazon, and via iTunes – but please don’t give Apple your money for tracks that have DRM. So go buy the CD! (You can preview the tracks at Drew’s web site) In the mean time, I’ll try to get Drew to put the album up on CDBaby.
As for the music? After my copy of “The Ones You Love” spent well over a year tucked quietly between DVDs on our media shelf, Kelly found the disc last week and enabled the inevitable rediscovery. Since then, it’s been pulled onto my iPod and has become the chameleon of my current listening rotation… Whether I’m feeling happy, down, contemplative or relaxed, the tunes on [what is now] “Fossils” just seem to fit. Musically, Drew Smith is spot-on: While I often find the “rough edges” of many independent bands and performers distracting, Drew’s music doesn’t give me any opportunity to nit-pick. The vocals are confident and well-rendered, and the accompanying instrumentals are precise, and the production quality is solidly pro-grade – decidedly honest and well-done, not overprocessed or dripping with reverb or distortion. Keeping with the theme of previous issues of Saturday Morning Tuneage, the lyrics are smartly written, but not as esoteric as the bands which have seemed to lend some influence to Drew’s style.
Reading Drew’s bio, it’s clear to see that he and others put a great deal of work into “Fossils”, and it shows in the quality of both the music and the disc. I wouldn’t post it here if it weren’t worth your hard-earned coin, so go give Drew a listen. Or, check out his MySpace page, which has some full-length tracks for your listening pleasure. Or, just head over to Amazon and buy the record.
Come on, what are you waiting for? It’s good stufff!
Ahh, birthdays. We’ve come up with some pretty interesting customs in this country to celebrate them… The cake and candles gig, the balloons and gifts, and of course the greeting cards. It’s one more area of American culture that I wish I knew more about – there must be some reason someone decided to stick candles in a birthday cake – or bake one in the first place, for that matter. Rarely do these things enter the popular vernacular solely out of practicality or aesthetics, so there’s got to be a story.
Guess that’s what Wikipedia is for, but I digress…
For my stepmom’s birthday this past week, we decided to skip the cake and candes, and go for ice cream and music instead. After a delicious dinner at Camille’s, followed by an out-and-out sinful dessert at Coldstone Creamery, we piled into Kelly’s Vue and headed up to the Eastan School of Music (well, more accurately, the Eastman Theater) and enjoyed a positively breathtaking concert put on by the Eastman Philharmonia.
I can’t say enough good things about the music at the Eastman school. Kelly and I have attended experienced at least a dozen concerts there since we met in 2001, and each time we go our enjoyment grows. Every time I sit in the Eastman theater and listen to some of the country’s most talented music students perform, it makes me want to come back sooner and sooner. In our case, the Philharmonia’s concert was spectacular. They played three pieces totalling about 90 minutes’ worth of music, and there wasn’t a single note that wasn’t perfectly rendered or didn’t have a presence all its own.
For those not fortunate enough to attend, here are links to Amazon, where you can buy DRM-free copies of each piece they played:
Wagner, Tristan and Isolde Prelude & Liebestod
Brahms, Symphony No. 3
First movement
Second movement
Third movement
Fourth movement
The capstone of the evening, though, was the Mozart concerto played between the Wagner and the Brahms. Though her name escapes me, and the concert program is presently riding around in Kelly’s purse, the young pianist was positively amazing. She played the theater’s beautiful Steinway grand without sheet music, and without batting an eye. While she was precise, she played with feeling – and whether it be by extensive rehearsing or extraordinary perception on the part of the conductor, the orchestra managed to track her expression with every note. While a recording certainly pales in comparison to the goosebumps that she surely imparted on many in the small audience Wednesday night, you can find the piece here:
Mozart, Concerto for Piano & Orchestra No. 21 in C Major, K.467:
First movement
Second movement
Third movement
Classical music is a lot like red wine – a glassfull a day is good for the heart. If I could wake up every morning to the music we heard this past Wednesday night, I’m sure my heart would fare just fine.
Chuck Kimmerle: An excellent landscape/fine-art photographer:
When I look at Chuck’s photos – especially those of old farm machinery and agricultural structures – I almost get a sense of deja-vu in recalling photos that I’ve taken in the past. Growing up a photo-brat on the dividing line between sprawling suburbia and endless farmland, there were ample subjects to be found. Even though I went to school at a district that would later be the first school in the area to issue a laptop to every student, you could still count on getting stuck behind a combine or a hay wagon bulging with baled straw when autumn came around.
I remember shooting roll after roll of T-Max, exploring the collapsed barns and abandoned farm machines South of our home. The inner workings of these things and places weren’t as interesting to me as their appearance – they simultaneously symbolized livelihood and obsolescense, and juxtaposed the ever-advancing (and moving, and growing, and adapting) agriculture industry with the embodiment of the casualties of progress. I relive the experience every time I smell old grease mingling with galvanized steel, or feel the oddly smooth texture of oil-seasoned wrought iron that has finally yielded to rust.
More recently, a few of my photographs have evoked the same feelings – and seeing Chuck’s “Abstracts/Miscellaneous” section reminded me of one in particular, which I shot as the sun was setting on the first day of Kelly and my recent annversary trip:
Even though many of the windows of the Canandaigua Elks Lodge are boarded up, and the tarnish on the building’s exterior is evidence of the years it has seen, the neon sign presses on proclaiming the endurance of the place – just as the times embodied in images like this persist despite ingenuity and advancement, reminding us occasionally to slow down, and pay our respects to all that has come before us to bring us where we are.
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