Leaving

Austin take note: the Syracuse airport has free wi-fi.

I'm at the gate and the plane should be boarding before too long. Being dropped off by my dad (who does not drop me off at the terminal, but parks and walks inside with me while I get checked in) brings back memories of all those tearful partings when I was a little girl. When was the first time I hugged him goodbye without crying? I guess it's been a while, but it's still sad.

It's been a wonderful visit. Last night my stepbrother and his wife and stepsister and her boyfriend took me out to Buffalo's, in Baldwinsville - or B'ville, as the locals seem to call it. Driving there from Syracuse is roughly equivalent to driving to Pflugerville from South Austin. So I thought it was funny when I asked a guy I was talking to if all his sisters and brother also lived here, and he responded that most of them do, but one lives out of state and another one lives in Syracuse.

Lots of little bitty towns close together in upstate NY, and they seem to adhere to this strong localized mentality. Which I suppose is natural if you stay where you were born and grew up. My stepbrother and stepsister ran into several people last night that they'd gone to high school with in B'ville; the guy I was talking to was one of them.

When I was little, well, you could put a little girl on a plane by herself. You could also go through security and accompany her to the gate and wait for her plane with her, which my dad always used to do. He always met me at the gate, too, when I came to visit. I'd come out of the jetway and he'd be there waiting. What a lovely thing that always was...

I wish I had deeper roots. I love Austin. It's home; and the houses and buildings and accents and landscape and flora and fauna of other places - beautiful though they may be - are a bit alien. Austin looks right; they do everything the way it ought to be done; it's home. But my people are so far away (sigh).

And the Austin airport doesn't have free wi-fi. I hope they'll look into that.

I Has To Go Home?

Not that I would particularly like to live in, say, Oswego, right on the shores of Lake Ontario. The city appears to have seen better days.

But canals are so cool, don't you think? This is a shot of the Oswego Canal, running alongside (and, oh, 10-12 feet higher than) the Oswego River, just before it empties out into the lake.

Yesterday we went to visit the Safe Haven Museum in Oswego. This was a camp that housed European refugees during WWII, in not very much comfort, apparently. Our local (actually, he's from downstate - the accent is different) guide informed us that there was some lack of foresight involved in housing refugees from the south of Europe in uninsulated military barracks right on the shore of Lake Ontario. "Sure, when they got here in August, they thought it was great!" he remarked.

Sarcasm is an essential phonological element of downstate speech patterns.

My dad, stepmother and I drove out - maybe a 45-minute drive - only to discover that the museum days and hours of operation posted on the locked door did not match those posted on the website. But as it turns out, this is okay, because Fort Ontario (on the grounds of which the museum is housed) was open, and it's, omigod, you guys. SO cool!

It's a strategic point, where the river empties into Lake Ontario, and there's been a fort there since pre-Revolutionary times; but the buildings there now date from around the time of the Civil War. The Union feared British and Canadian interference on behalf of the Confederacy. The Canadian dollar was much weaker back then, so the US$4 admission to the fort was a lot more prohibitive than it is nowadays.

The buildings are amazing (there are pictures in my album), but the best part was climbing up onto the high earthen ramparts to discover a door and stone steps leading down into the darkness. (Well - they did put up some lights.) You can descend these into the casemates, where there would once have been cannons poised to fire through slits in the heavy stone walls on any intrepid Canadians daring to venture up from the shores of the lake, waving fistfuls of devalued currency. It looks like medieval catacombs down there, or at least that's what I thought; to be perfectly honest, I'm not really a medieval catacombs expert.

Inside the storehouse of the fort is a gift shop, where you can purchase, among other items, a complete Alamo action figure set. It was $26, or else I'd have bought it and brought it home as a souvenir.

It's been a great visit. Today we're going to have some local delicacies for lunch, so I'll be sure and get some pictures of that, for Jason; up till this point I have not yet photographed any food.

I'll be back tomorrow evening. Y'all sure you don't want to all move up here instead?

Here's the link to the album again, so you don't have to scroll down. Pictures are in chronological order.

Thought for the Day

Don't wear flip-flops to hike on a trail used by horseback riders.

Well, somewhat more to the point, used by their horses.

But I'm glad to be able to tell you that this is an abstract, rather than an object lesson; I only had to pay a little more attention to my footing than to the scenery. The above picture (and, if you click through on it, the others with it - or click on yesterday's link; I've just been adding photos to that album as I take them) was taken from a trail under some powerlines that march up over the hill near my parents' house. Their subdivision sits in a small valley, and was very recently farmland. There are still a few old farmhouses and barns scattered about.

It was an unseasonably warm day, with a high somewhere around 90; very unusual for this time of year. It's enough to make me forget that, come winter, there are likely to be several yards of snow covering pretty much every surface. You might not even be able to go outdoors in shorts!

We went to Thornton Park, to survey Syracuse spread out beneath us from the city's highest vantage point:


We visited the rose garden:


And coming back, we drove up to Tipperary Hill. To give you a very brief, probably wildly inaccurate outsider's description of the story there, Tipp Hill is an old Irish neighborhood, and boasts the *mumble's* only upside-down stoplight. The Irish residents took umbrage at the old red-on-top stoplight because it reminded them of the English, or perhaps because they were drunk; so they threw stones at it and kept knocking it out. And finally they got not only their very own, special, green-on-top traffic signal, but also a rather naffy bronze statue commemorating the event.

That just goes to show you what fierce, alcohol-fueled nationalism can do. Not that there's anything wrong with that: I'm approximately 1/8 Irish myself, and quite fond of wine.


Driving back, we passed so many beautiful old houses, I think the three-martini break group should all move up here and go to work for NYDOT, which probably has a massive budget because they get all of Texas' hard-earned gas tax money and squander it on incomprehensible, very frequently-placed reference markers, of which I have not yet been able to get a clear picture due to the fact that my father insists on driving past them at speeds that won't cause a 15-car pileup.

Some people need to work a little bit harder on their priorities.


Two or three of these adorable places would easily house us all. And if the NYDOT thing didn't work out, we'd have a sitcom just waiting to be filmed. Can't you hear the theme music now?

Every episode would have to end with one of us stepping hilariously into a fresh pile of horse dooky.

Urban Exploration, Part Whatever

The spectacularly breathtaking Niagara Mohawk Power Corp. building in downtown Syracuse.

Why yes, that is 100% chrome trim!

Last time I was in town we didn't visit downtown Syracuse, and I was only vaguely aware that there was such a place. But there is, and it's really pretty amazing.

Austin has some really cool historic downtown buildings from the late nineteenth century, but none of them are very big. Syracuse was a fairly major port along the Erie Canal and so its older downtown buildings are quite large, including several turn-of-the-century skyscrapers. Sadly, the Oswego Canal came to bypass the city in the early 1900s; and while you'd think the original location of the Erie Canal would simply have been redesignated as a business route,* it was actually filled in and is now Erie Blvd.

The weighlock, a tollbooth by the side of the canal where boats were weighed and taxed based on the amount of cargo they were carrying, now serves as a museum, so my dad and I went there today. Then we wandered around downtown for a while.

Here are some pictures!

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*hellllp meeeeeeeeee

Surprise Delivery

This is looking down the hill towards my parents' neighborhood from a little ways up the road.

This afternoon, after a morning spent adventuring with my stepsister-in-law Linda, we arrived at my folks' house with the cake Linda had made (she does beautiful work, and bakes and decorates them professionally as a sideline), presents, and a bouquet of balloons. Kris and Linda went on in, and I hung back in the car for a couple of minutes before bringing the balloons to the doorstep and ringing the doorbell.

My dad was surprised.

So here I am, and it's just as beautiful as I remember from last time, even if the local major grocery chain is called Wegman's, which is a pretty silly name for a grocery store, if you ask me. Also, the highway reference markers make no sense at all. I'll be sure to get a picture of one of those too. The weather is cool, it's breezy and bright, and the cake was delicious, or at least as much of it as we were able to consume; Linda appears to have been expecting 30 or 40 more people than actually exist in my parents' immediate family. But leftovers never hurt anybody.

My parents are very bad influences. My seventeen-year-old step-niece, Taylor, brought a Jehovah's Witness friend. He might not have been supposed to be at a birthday party. He kept insisting he wasn't going to get into any trouble, but when his mom called to check up on him we all tried to be very quiet, just in case. Grandparents these days!

I plan to take a lot more pictures once we get out and about; but for now I'm just very relieved the sneaking-around-and-surprising part is over. I was terribly nervous. I had to apologize to my dad for the shock. But he seems so pleased that he hasn't even hinted at wanting to send me back home, so I think this is going to be a good visit.

He did inform me, though, having a little better memory of the events of 1969 than I do, that my porn name is actually Sambo Sandstone.

Surprise!