Category Archives: Rochester, New York
Okay, now it’s getting ridiculous. Turkeys?
Turkeys.
Turkeys in my back yard.
Here’s the same pic, cropped.
I do not live in the country. I live in an old suburban neighborhood a stone’s throw from the city’s edge.
And yet it’s crawling with woodland wildlife. Amazing.
Deer in the street!
This was taken from my living room window this morning.
Unfortunately I had to run and get the camera so I missed them when they were really close — right in my front yard.
Some years ago I read that the deer population in Monroe County was one of the highest in the entire state. The worst concentrations have typically been in Irondoquoit, a northern suburb where parks like Durand Eastman function as predator-free deer resorts. The consequences aren’t pretty, and include high numbers of deer-car accidents; at such high concentrations, the deer also over-browse the parks which is bad for the native woodland plants that also call them home. And forget growing hostas if you’re a homeowner.
Irondoquoit, to the horror of the pro-deer crowd, responded by culling through a bait-and-shoot program. More recently, they’ve tried contraception, a more politically acceptable alternative. Planned deerhood.
UPDATE: One mama deer in the neighborhood didn’t get the contraception memo, apparently.
Too nice to nap . . . (a possum post)
Too nice to play dead, either!
Spring weather brings out the critters — my daughter spotted this fella “scurrying” across our yard and around to the back of the garage. He paused here, against a brick bbq chimney, long enough for me to get a great pic!
He doesn’t appear to be sick, so hopefully he’s just out for an early spring stroll :-)
A semi-curmudgeonly Wegmans post
Wegmans — Rochester’s iconic supermarket chain — has rubbed me the wrong way a couple times in recent months. First, they completely rearranged their Pittsford store, where I do my shopping. I’m sure they have perfectly good business reasons for doing so. But weeks later, I’m still uncertain where various products are shelved. It bugs me that a chore that ought to be fairly routine was — without my being consulted, imagine — made more complicated, albeit only until I’ve finished learning the new arrangement.
My irritation at the whole-store makeover pales, however, in comparison to how I felt when I discovered they’d changed how they display their organic produce. I’ve been buying organic produce from that store for probably twenty years, and it’s always been displayed in a dedicated section of the store’s produce department. Now all of a sudden they’ve dispersed their organic produce throughout the department. So instead of going to one place to shop for produce, I have to go hunting — not just to shop, but to even figure out what organic produce they have in stock.
My solution: buy less produce from them. I simply don’t have the time to figure out where the organic peppers might be this week. Much simpler to just go to the Genesee Co-op [which doesn’t seem to have a website] or Lori’s [which does have a website but don’t click it if you find their theme song unbearable because their home page blasts it at you full volume] and stock up on produce there.
Anyway. The organic produce thing still burns me, but I was pleased yesterday to discover that the store is now selling reusable grocery bags.
Here’s a pic. I bought two yesterday. Only 99 cents apiece if you’ve got a Wegman’s shoppers club card.
Besides being better for the environment rah rah rah the new bags look like they’re going to behave better than plastic ones. They’re gussetted and have a bit of heft to them. Presumably they won’t be as prone to sliding around in the car and disgorging their contents. They also look like they’ll hold about as much as a paper bag, but have handles like plastic bags, which means it may be easier to lug the groceries from the car to the house. Fewer trips. And less time spent retrieving spilled groceries that have rolled out of reach in the the car. Get back some of the time I wasted learning where the canned olives are now.
It will be interesting to see how things go from a workflow perspective at checkout. Are the grommets on the bags there so clerks can slip them onto the same racks they use to hold plastic bags open while they scan purchases? Will it take longer for the clerks to position the reusable bags, compared to just pulling open a plastic bag from the rack like they do now?
It will be interesting to see how this catches on as well. I expect that at this store, at least, the bags will become hugely popular. I know I didn’t hesitate to switch the first time I saw them.
Making up for lost inches
My patio table. That’s a full-size patio table, not one of those wimpy bistro things.
Snowfall around here was below average in December — waaaay below (total precip was something like 3 or 4 inches, average is 21) but we’re making up for it now.
The Democrat and Chronicle says we passed average snowfall for January last week — and get this — thanks to the jetstream and the Great Lakes snowmaking machine, we could get as much as three more inches a day for the foreseeable future . . .
Yet some people gripe because of a little mud on the golf course!!!
LOL
Another helping of crow a la Rochester
Gee, here’s a surprise. A “consultant report, released Tuesday”
recommends city officials abandon a decade-long push to turn High Falls into an entertainment quarter and instead let private investors continue to steer development toward housing and office space . . .
In its report, the Center for Governmental Research concluded that the city should sell off the buildings it owns, halt its operating subsidies and clean up public spaces it has allowed to languish.
No private property remains available for renovation or redevelopment, the report says — thus turning the focus to the city and Rochester Gas and Electric-controlled land and buildings. The city owns the Center at High Falls/Brown’s Race Market complex. RG&E owns the land below the falls, the Beebee plant and other, smaller buildings.
Since 1992, the city has dumped $41 million of our tax money into the High Falls district. The bright idea: subsidize a bunch of bars because, ya know, that would make the place so cool people would flock to it after work, get real smashed, and, uh, revitalize downtown.
The plan was launched during Bill “Fast Ferry” Johnson’s administration.
Creating a housing and office district was the directive from an initial city-commissioned financial and market study in 1990. R. Carlos Carballada, the city’s commissioner for economic development, said that despite the city pushing in another direction, “the market has sort of evolved itself.”
“The market has sort of evolved itself.” Funny thing, that.
Maybe it’s time for our politicians to recognize that they shouldn’t be risking our money in these schemes.
Ah, don’t hold your breath. The next course is already slowly browning in the oven: buying Midtown Plaza, because what else does the city have to do with our money besides develop 1.2 million square feet of abandoned retail space?
(I’m not just being a crank, here, either. Yes, I believe it’s foolish for the city to own hard assets that it has to maintain, at taxpayer expense, for extended periods of time — particularly when local economic conditions suggest the chances of a decent return are not all that great. But I have constructive suggestions, too. I think the city should focus on making our community more livable and affordable for families, as per this post, and perhaps fund events to attract tourists, because that’s been demonstrated as a less risky way to stimulate economic development.)
Still raining
On and off. But the ice doesn’t seem to be building up any more.
Channel 10 says about 50,000 Upstate New York homes are without power as of this afternoon.
It’s probably a good thing that it was a holiday today — fewer commuters than normal — although I went out at lunch time and the roads had been salted and were fine for driving.
I took this photo looking up my street about 3:30 p.m. I’d been working, glanced out, and was struck again by how winter renders the world in monochromatic colors. It sure is easy on the eyes, isn’t it.
The downside of mild winter weather
If, like me, you lived through 1991 ice storm in these parts — it crippled the Rochester, New York area for weeks — you can appreciate the trepidation I feel in waking up and seeing this.
That’s a river birch in my front yard. I took the picture three hours ago. Rain is still falling, and the ice is building up. Birches are particularly susceptible to permanent damage from this stuff. The only downside to using them as an ornamental.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves;
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
Birches, Robert Frost.
The morning’s paper says we could get as much as 3/4 inches of ice before it’s over.
Let’s hope it warms up or switches to snow.
Kodak sells health imaging division
Here’s the announcement as carried on Bloomberg [Update, link no longer good]:
Eastman Kodak Co., the world’s largest photography company, agreed to sell its health-care imaging unit to Onex Corp. for as much as $2.55 billion to help focus on its transition to digital products.
There’s also this:
The health group’s approximately 8,100 employees will stay with the unit after the completion of the sale, expected in the first half of this year, Kodak said. The transaction includes manufacturing operations and an office building in Rochester.
I know that office building well . . .
The people I’ve worked with at Kodak are, virtually without exception, such great individuals. Salt of the earth, dedicated, intelligent, decent people. I wish them the absolute best as they ride out this new wave of change.
