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our new house is better in person
Wednesday, October 30 2024
location: Mulberry Street, Rochester, NY
I slept well last night despite not having taken any diphenhydramine. This morning Maryann was off to see a doctor about a knee that might eventually be replaced (though for now she's getting steroid shots). Gretchen's plan for breakfast was for us to go to a tiny little shop called Crumpets that specialized in just that one definitively British baked good, though, as we found, they also had a good selection of tea. It was within easy walking distance, though was in sort of a "bad" part of Monroe Avenue, across the street from a 7Eleven where young men in the parking lot were giving each other elaborate handshakes. There wasn't much room in Crumpets, just a big table, a small table, and a little section of bar. The woman running the place was meticulous about everything, even setting a timer to make sure Gretchen's tea steeped the correct amount of time. (I drink a lot of tea, but I always just leave the tea bag in it, sometimes for two or three cups of tea.) We both ordered crumpets (which, with the traditional recipe, are inherently vegan) with various vegan toppings, including (for me) some sort of butter with dill and (for Gretchen) a specialty vegan butter with various herbs added in-house. It's not a vegan shop, but it's very vegan friendly. My only complaint was that the french press coffee was weaker than I prefer. We overheard the woman running the place talking about how she'd started as a teacher but quit that just before the pandemic and then ate her first crumpet, after which she became obsessed. Now it is the focus of her nerdy rigor. Her husband, who wasn't there, showed evidence of similar obsession. He's the one who writes on the chalkboard in various meticulously-crafted letters, all lined up using a carpenter's laser.
After our little crumpet breakfast, we strolled southeastward on Monroe towards the neighborhoood of Upper Monroe, the neighborhood of the house we are in the process of buying. Along the way, the neighborhood along Monroe gradually lost its 7Elevens and laundromats. When we got to Upper Monroe, the only businesses of note were Blue Taro, a weird Vietnamese place, and Grass Fed, that vegan butcher where we'd eaten lunch back in 2023. Our new house is on Alliance Avenue, a street somehow even more gorgeous than Mulberry Street, with even bigger trees and, at this time of year, a street filled with drifting piles of leaves (most of them from sweet gums). Part of what makes Alliance so great is that there is topographic relief in the neighborhood, with a hill rising steeply to the southeast and the end of the street rising towards a prominent forested hilltop crowned with a set of radio towers. Then we arrived at our house, and it was absolutely gorgeous, better somehow than it had looked in pictures. It's not usually a good idea to buy the best-looking house in a neighborhood, but this one was up there with the best. Somehow we'd missed that its roof actually includes a central cupola, which is the kind of thing I wanted to add to our Hurley house to make it look less like a 1990s-era mcmansion. Both Gretchen and I were relieved to see that our purchase really was at least as good as we'd thought when we'd bought it for something like $80,000 more than the asking price after a bidding war.
From the house, we continued uphill to Pinnacle Road, which marks the edge of easily-developed topography. South of the terrain becomes too steep, and after a line of whimsicial hobbit houses, it's forested forested parkland. We walked west on Pinnacle, marveling at some of the houses there, and then headed back to Monroe. It was a gorgeous unseasonably sunny day with temperatures in the 70s, and perhaps this was affecting our impression of everything. (We were told that normally Rochester at this time of year is cold, grey, and clammy.)
We ended up having lunch at Blue Taro, the weird Vietnamese place, which is inside an ugly block-shaped building built up against the front of two houses. There was only one other customer there when we arrived, and the waitress woman explained how things there worked. It must be one of those restaurants that came up with a protocol during the pandemic and then decided that was the way to do things permanently. We ordered from a digital kiosk and there was a robot there who would've actually served us had he not been plugged in and charging. So instead the waitress brought us our food. I always like to order Pho at Vietnamese restaurants, and I always spice it up a little too much and then swallow some of that spicy broth down the wrong tube and have to cough. That was how things went for me at Blue Taro.
Back at Maryann's place on Mulberry Street, we had some downtime, which allowed me to do some work on a new feature for my ESP8266 Remote Control system. The idea for this one was to find a way to superimpose a plot onto a temperature graph for a time period showing the temperature from the same time period precisely a year before, perhaps in a muted tone. This would be particularly useful for me to see whether or not some unheated, insulated space (that is, the cabin's basement) is warmer or colder than it was a year ago, which would give me a sense of whether or not it would be on track to freeze. Today's work was mostly on the SQL in the backend, figuring out the DATE_ADD commands necessary to get the year-ago data, which would then also require another DATE_ADD on the recorded column selected, this time to add back the year that was subtracted to find it so that it would fall in the more contemporary timespan of the graph.
In the early evening, Gretchen and I drove into downtown Rochester to have dinner at Squatcho's, the vegan pizza place. When we arrived, we were the only customers, and the music wasn't the hardcore one would normally expect at a vegan pizzeria. Instead it was a series of Billie Holiday songs. (Gretchen doesn't like Billie Holiday; she finds her singing too nasal.) Gretchen ordered two or three things (as she usually does) including cæsar salad and garlic knots but no pizza, while I ordered a mushroom & banana pepper pie, which I managed to eat all of.
Gretchen had actually been planning to be in Rochester on this day for many weeks, as she wanted to be here to see Jasmin perform in a play today on her birthday. We went to see that play after dinner. It was at Blackfriar's Theatre, which appears to be in a building that might've once housed a carwash. On arriving, I immediately bought a cup of wine at the concession table ($8 plus tip) and, after Gretchen was done schmoozing with Jasmin's wife and friends, was directed to my seat. The play was POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive, a bawdy all-women send-up of the modern presidency. I didn't know it as I was watching it, but it's a well-known play that has been on Broadway. In this age of limitless amazing entertainment options, it's not easy to impress me with drama, and I didn't expect to be wowed by what I was about to see, so the wine was very important. But I also hoped it would be better than, I don't know, a community theatre performance of Waiting for Godot. All that being said, the show went about how I expected it to. It wasn't great, certainly, and the jokes weren't all that clever, relying a bit too much on references to things like "assplay." There were a few funny parts, but a lot of what was happening seemed to be lost in on-stage chaos, especially from one of the characters, a slender actress who spent most of the play in her underwear running around with a donut-shaped floatation device (she was supposedly tripping on acid during all of that). There was also a gun on the wall that half-heartedly obeyed the principle of Chekhov's gun. During the intermission, I quickly bought another $8 cup of wine. As for Jasmin's performance, she did the best she could given the reality of the play.
After the play concluded, those of us in Jasmin's contingent milled around until she finally came out from backstage, clearly pissed that there had been technical problems with the lighting. But it was her birthday, and it was time to celebrate.
We all reconvened at Dicky's, a dive bar within walking distance of Maryann's house. Maryann and Jasmin love Dicky's because it's not just very vegan-friendly, but it also goes out of its way to say that members of the LGBTXX community are welcome. I ordered the one IPA on tap (it wasn't very good) from the very nice young woman working as bartender, and I also ordered a soda water with bitters for Gretchen, which was free for some reason. Unfortunately, the kitchen was closed by this point, so we didn't get to sample the wide-ranging vegan options. We all sat at a big table with one of the other actresses from the play and some other couple. Conversation lingered for a long time on the topic of hormone replacement after menopause, and there was little opportunity for me to contribute. When Gretchen asked if I wanted to go, I said I did. But then she ended up wanting to stay. So I walked back to Maryann's house alone, using my phone to navigate. (Maryann herself had already gone to bed.)
Gretchen with our food at Squatcho's this evening.
Click to enlarge.
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