Long Weekend

"Once a year, go somewhere you've never been before". 

-The Dalia Lama

Finding myself trying to recount how we spent this long weekend, and it's all in soft focus this lovely Monday midday on the lake.

We arrived Friday evening after Peg got off work, and after a cocktail on the porch enjoying the view,

made our way to the CYC for supper (inside because it was too cold to dine on the patio!), then home to fall dead asleep.

Saturday I was irrationally excited about the beginning of college football, per my previous post, while Peg was trying to find a way to get away from the boob tube before I trapped her there for the day. Why not go look at soapstone fireplaces? Sure, why not.

Except that everyplace that sold them seemed to have taken the weekend off. After we struck out at the big store in Avon, a fifty minute drive through the prettiest farmland you'll ever see, we called ahead to the Cricket on the Hearth to find they'd closed up for the weekend as well. Finally we found a fireplace store open in the commercial sprawl right below Rochester, but their selection was wholly unsatisfying so we left without talking to a salesperson.

The genesis of this search was the discovery that the chimney insert is falling apart and has to be replaced, found in the course of trying unsuccessfully to permit this place as an AirBnB. The Association is going to replace the chimney, but when the board heard Miss Peggy wanted to replace the old firebox with something more aesthetically pleasing, they suggested maybe we go ahead and buy a new fireplace and the Association would likely pay less for the chimney if it's a package deal.

But we didn't make any progress Saturday on that front.

Realizing there was still an hour to get back in front of the TV for the kickoff of the Texas game, Peg asked if perhaps we could look for a new couch to replace the greasy leftover from the prior owners in our TV room in Corning. That led us a few blocks up through the sprawl to the Ethan Allen Gallery, where Peg made a new best friend, a young lady designer who could wax rhapsodic for hours about how our Parisian Rain wall color would complement the pattern on this $3,000 sitting chair. I survived, and the chair really was quite nice. I think we're ordering two.

We'd planned to go to lunch, but the idea of a sports bar didn't resonate with either of us, so we swung through the crowded hell of Wegman's then back down through all those farms to the condo on Canandaigua, where we ended up listening to the FSU game on the radio on the porch because it was just so damned beautiful outside. Georgia also thumped Marshall, the latter of which had lost pretty much its entire team to the portal in the offseason. The rich get richer.

After dark were were startled as the entire shore of the lake was illuminated red, and our neighbor across the lake began shooting off fireworks. Turns out that the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, since the 1950s, the residents here create the "ring of fire", with all putting out strings of red lights along their stretch of shoreline, supposed reenacting a Seneca tradition that marked the end of summer. I was afraid it was an impromptu MAGA thing (they're up here, too), and was relieved to hear it was something more benign.

Sunday morning we rolled out of bed, dressed, and dragged ourselves back up to Rochester to the White Lotus Tibetan Buddhist Center, to get a little taste of how they do their thing. We concluded it's not our thing. Peg found herself horrified by the aesthetics, with lots of gaudy wall hangings depicting various boddhisattvas and variations on nirvana. The schtick was sort of a painful Johnny Carson routine with a Tibetan monk rambling through whatever was on his mind in marginally understandable English, while his Ed McMahon sidekick, a nice retired guy with a bad combover, laughed loudly and inappropriately at every unfunny witticism our Tibetan friend mumbled. And they ran a half hour over schedule, an unforgiveable sin among two old Anglicans. We didn't stay for coffee, hips and knees aching from 90 minutes of sitting on the floor.

Afterward we went to the Gate House, our favorite cool lunch place in Rochester, for a little hummus and rose. This lifted our spirits for the drive home for a quick change so I could squeeze in nine holes of golf before the annual end of summer picnic for the Association, with a bad live band and probably a couple hundred folks eating hamburgers and dish to pass. Our table mate was a retired Corning, Inc. guy with a degree from MIT. Not your typical Panama City acquaintance.

After that we turned on the Notre Dame game for just long enough to decide we were exhausted and needed to go to bed. I crawled in with a book, and Peg just crawled under the covers and passed out. The perfect end to a very good weekend.

Now off to look at a neighbor's pellet stove. They all swear by these things up here, say they save hundreds in heating bills in the winter. But Peg wants burning logs. I'm not giving this much chance of changing her mind, but we'll see.