The Adirondack Park

You see things in upstate New York sometimes.

Things that you know your friends from other states would look at with curiosity:



Things that you're not sure if you should be offended by or not:



Things that make you scratch your head:



"Worms? Ice? Beer? You sure you don't want books? Because we also have books."

You see a lot of really pretty things, too, though.







The week before last I drove home to spend a week with my parents. I usually only go home at Thanksgiving, because summer is a busy time on campus, so I don't usually get to go to camp when I got home, since it's deep in the Adirondack Park, and that's not a place you want to drive to in heavy snow. Since I went home in summer, though, it was warm enough to go up to camp for a few days, something my parents do pretty much all the time since they are retired now.

Our camp is on Long Lake:



which I've always thought is the place where A Place in the Sun is set, but it turns out that's actually Loon Lake. Even more confusing, the actual murder that the story is based on took place on Big Moose Lake, but what it boils down to is that, while our camp is really pretty:



Montgomery Clift never drowned Shelly Winters on film there.

Still, it's peaceful and shockingly cold. I expected it to be a little cold, since we were in the mountains, but the second morning I was there it was 39 degrees Fahrenheit.

In summer.

I packed shorts and t-shirts, and a polo in case we went somewhere nice to eat.

It wasn't that bad, though. Mom turned on the fireplace and Dad let me borrow a pair of sweatpants to get my steps in. I got most of them walking the four mile round trip from camp to Buttermilk Falls:







and then in the three days when we were at camp we went all over the Adirondack Park: Tupper Lake, Lake Placid, Blue Mountain Lake, Long Lake, and some other lakes I can't remember. We went to antique stores, general stores, candy stores, popcorn shops, and out to eat a few times, and one morning I also hiked the grounds of The Wild Center, including the Wild Walk:







which rises to a height of three stories off the ground and includes a giant bird's nest that you can climb into:







The rest of the grounds were really pretty, too:



and I encountered this statue that I thought was of a cat pooping, because I didn't see the rabbit out in front at first:



It was a nice trip, and I may think about doing it again.

If I do, I'll have to take more time, since I spent almost half of the trip in the car.

Tied to New York

I've had a pretty bad cold for the past week, so I haven't gone anywhere, done anything, or cooked anything of interest. I went to work a few times, went to the store a few times, and mostly lay on the couch blowing my nose and watching really awful daytime television.

I'm not kidding about how awful it was.

I watched a TV-edited version of "Burlesque".

I stared into the abyss, and it also stared back into me.

Today I was feeling marginally better, and I needed supplies from the store (in the last five days I have consumed three gallons of orange juice, a gallon of cranberry, and a half gallon of grape; I am full of vitamins, but feel like I'm on some kind of weird juice diet), so I decided to venture out to shop and get the mail. On Saturdays I usually do my rounds of the thrift shops, but today I just wasn't feeling it so I decided to hit the one close to the grocery store. They didn't have any Pyrex, not even the clear kind that I usually don't buy, but I did find an ugly tie that made my eyes glow and my heart sing. It wasn't just me, either. When I brought it to the register, the girl looked at it for a moment.

"Wow. That's... a tie."

"It sure is!"

While I was picking it out, I noticed this other tie:



and thought, "Hey, that's the city seal for Albany!"

I know what the Albany city seal looks like because I used to live there, and I saw a statue of the seal a number of times when I was downtown. Since I will be travelling to New York this week (Long Island, not Albany) I thought that finding this tie today might be an omen, and I was buying another tie already, so I brought this one home, too.

Where I discovered that it's not the seal of Albany.

Here's the tie:



and here's a picture of the statue downtown that I took several years ago:



You can see where I got confused. They're similar, but Albany has a ship above the shield, and the stuff on the shield definitely isn't what's represented on the tie. Even if you consider that the tie has a lower level of detail, what's going on in the center is definitely not a beaver above some sheaves of grain. It's... a propeller? Maybe? What would have a propeller in the 1600's?

Then my knowledge of my home state kicked in: New York was originally a Dutch colony.

That's a windmill.

I googled "New York founded in 1625" and discovered that I was close. The tie is a city seal: New York City.

Where I will be next Saturday.

Possibly wearing that tie.

"What was the weirdest thing about moving from New York to Tennessee?"

After Day 28, I figured Day 29 could stay light, so I've been saving this topic all month. My friend Shannon would like to know:

"What was the weirdest thing about moving from New York to Tennessee?"

This is a good question, because there's a lot of weird stuff here. This, for example, belonged to one of my neighbors when I moved in:



and this was parked next to it:



I moved here during the election year when Tennessee voted to ban gay marriage:



and discovered that there are anti-gay, anti-abortion Democratic politicians.

No, really.

They are farther to the right than New York Republicans. Discovering that they existed was also weird.

None of this, though, was actually the weirdest thing. The thing that freaked me out the most, and kept catching me off guard for weeks after I moved here, was that total strangers talk to you in the grocery store if you happen to look up and make eye contact.

And it's hard not to make eye contact when you're steering a cart.

Every time I came around a corner, someone would look up, smile, and say hi. Sometimes they even added a "How are you?", and for weeks I was constantly offering a tentative, "....Hello....?" while internally thinking, "I DON'T KNOW YOU!" I was from New York, and in New York you don't make eye contact with strangers unless you're trying to intimidate them. And if strangers talk to you, you certainly don't engage in conversation. They might be trying to rob you or get you to join their cult or something.

That was then, of course.

Now I carry on entire conversations with the cashier at Kroger and don't bat an eye. Southern hospitality may be something worth having after all.

New York, in pieces

I spent last week in New York State for Thanksgiving, as I usually do. I didn't really do anything exciting, but it was nice to have a quiet trip where I hung out with family, read books, and played with the dogs.

Here are some random shots of the trip in chronological order:

The Old Port Ewen Bridge

When my grandfather turned the corner and started driving us across the old bridge into Port Ewen, NY, my first question was, "Are you sure this bridge is still open?"

Look at it:



See the rust? The peeling paint? The cracks? According to my mom, this bridge was supposed to come down when she was a teenager and the new Port Ewen bridge was constructed, but apparently they're just going to wait for it to fall down instead.

Books

I wanted to remember to put a book that I looked at on my amazon wish list (linked here in case random people want to send me presents), but I don't have a smart phone, so I do this instead:



I have so many photos of books in bookstores.

Pickens General Store, Heuvelton, NY

Rather than braving the big box stores on Black Friday, my mom drove me into Amish country to go to Picken's General Store in nearby Heuvelton. The building is a former vaudeville hall, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places:



Inside, the store is on the first floor:









and the second floor is a performance venue:





with a small collection of antiques and historical objects:



It was a nice trip, and got us out of the house without taking us anywhere near the crazy rioting people.

Sad Santa



Something about that Santa decoration seemed more bleak than festive to me.

The Globe Mall

Mom and I tried to spend part of Small Business Saturday at the Globe Mall, where there is an indoor flea market and antique mall, or, rather, where there was an indoor flea market and antique mall.

They picked Small Business Saturday to be the weekend when they closed and moved to another building to re-open next week, leaving behind only peeling paint and a collection of broken dolls:







The Globe Mall, like a lot of Northern New York, has seen better days.

Carved Turkey

I found it momentarily amusing that my mom was carefully carving one of the solid milk chocolate turkeys that my grandparents gave us for Thanksgiving into tiny slivers:



It never occurred to me to slice it up. Every year I just gnaw mine, slowly and messily.

The Frosty North

It snowed the day that I was supposed to leave, enough to delay my flight out.



Everything turned out ok, though, and I had a really nice mini-vacation and trip home.