Rochacha Represent!

DougJ has a fun post up on Balloon Juice, "Clinging to bitters," about a local business called Fee Brothers, which I hadn't heard of before now.

From back in the days when I spent virtually every waking hour in a nightclub (for pay, people! While clothed!), I have always had a fondness for bitters and soda. Placebo effect or not, it really does work to settle the stomach, and it tastes good, too. DougJ is already mixing some of his new purchases with booze and liking it, so I hope he picked up some club soda, too, but who knew there was so much more to know about this subject?

And who knew I lived in "flyover country?" If DougJ says it, on the Internet, it has to be true, but this is also news to me. I guess I feel good about it, since I can now be considered a Real American, and like DougJ, I now get to make jokes about the bitters and the clinging without being hated for being a coastal elitist.

Oops

Instaputz let me know last week that the exciting city of Rochacha was due for its very own tea-bagger party! Yesterday! But I forgot to go!

Looks like, uh, that'll be the excuse for the local Republicans, too. Here are some "crowd" shots.

From local TV station WHAM:

From Flickr user simminch:

He has many more -- and the Facebook! and the Twitter! -- if you have insomnia and want to do something about it.

[Added] Instaputz coverage now available.

Another problem solved

I saw somewhere on imdb.com that there's a movie coming out with the title Synecdoche, New York. If you live in Ithaca, Rochacha, or some other fine city up around here, you immediately get this.

For my part, I'll never have to worry about saying "SIN-ek-dosh" again. It's embarrassing when your kid sister has to correct your pronunciation.

New worry: speeping croonerisms.

New Tool

As some of you already know, I have resolved the first quandary, and chosen an electrician. Now it's a matter of waiting for RG&E to issue a work order number, so that my electrician can legally mess around with the riser cable and relocate the meters. Hopefully, this won't take more than about a week. But we are talking about a bureaucracy embedded within a monopoly, so …

In other news, we had a few inches of snow fall yesterday morning, so I went to the nearby hardware store to buy a snow shovel. It is a minor irritation to me that you can't get a straight-handled snow shovel anymore, unless you want the real bottom of the line one, or unless you want one of those ones that only pushes and doesn't scoop. So I bought the second-cheapest bent-handle model. Perhaps I'll look for something better somewhere down the road.

Why would anyone worry about upgrading this tool?

You should have seen the looks that I was getting from the passers-by in my new 'hood while I was shoveling. I couldn't decide whether they were wondering why anyone would care to do such a thorough job shoveling the driveway of a boarded-up house, or if it was more like, "Dude, this is Rochester. We don't shovel until it's at least a foot deep. And then we don't shovel. We have snow blowers."

Signs of the Times

There must be an election coming up or something, because the profusion of lawn signs is out of control here in Rochester. I saw two good ones today:

After about twenty consecutive houses, each with different signs, there was one that said:

CROWDED
For Attorney General

Later in the day, I saw a kid mowing a lawn down the street. He had to repeatedly work around the sign that said:

MAX GREEN

Moving Thoughts

The good news is: the resident five-limbed creature has finally worked up his courage and come out from his hiding place behind the litter box. After only 20 hours in a crouched and (ahem) near-catatonic state, he is wildly running from room to room in the new place. The four-limber (manx) has been exploring since this morning (no surprise).

Both of them are nervously going down and up the stairs to my front door (I live in a converted attic now). They are clearly aware that they are being bad, since the stairs were off-limits in the last apartment, and they always got chased back inside the instant they tried to go down those.

The bad news is: my dad bought me a new phone as a moving-in present, and I packed it, because it needed a 20-hour charge before first use. I packed it in some place so clever that I didn't need to note it on the box. Consequently, it is the only possession that I can't find.

Here's a new experience in fretting. Did you ever tow a car on one of those UHaul trailers, behind the truck? If you look in your rear-view mirrors, you can only see the outside edges of the trailer. That is, there's no way to be sure that the car is still there. I found myself looking for excuses to make sharp turns so that I could look at it.

Well, I'm here in Rochester now. So far, every local that I've talked to has expressed some degree of mystification as to why I moved here.

Maybe it's just me.

Vanity Plates

The two best vanity plates that I read on a recent roadtrip to Rochester (beat that for alliteration!):

BERRYBSH

which I took to be a political statement, and

1XX 1XY

which made me happily think that the geneticists are starting to augment the fount of nerd humor.