Results tagged “Buffalo” from V2

Went to Niagara Falls and took lots of photos (to be uploaded later), went to another Sabres game (they lost), and now went to bed since we're leaving the house tomorrow at 5:30 am.

Another Christmas has come and gone (well, in ten minutes it will have gone, at least from this coast.) Having missed the past two family Christmases I can't necessarily judge this one as being abruptly different, but people have slowly drifted off either due to death or work, and slowly people have grown older and the excitement surrounding the event has abated. Gone (at least for now) are the days where the kids clamored to open their gifts at the crack of dawn and a separate table was set in the kitchen to contain the mess. Now everyone is either exhausted after a few hours, or has additional family obligations at other houses and has to skip off quickly, leaving a dwindling crowd to pick at the remains of the meal and socialize.

On the plus side, most gifts these days are the cash/gift card variety, which also means gone are the days of waiting in mile-long lines at the returns counter.

One more full day for me in Buffalo; one more full day of recollections and memories; one more full day of the ghosts of familiar sights and sounds; one more full day of old haunts and old patterns; one more full day of flashbacks to my 21 year-old self.

One more day of living out of a suitcase in a guest bedroom in a house I once knew. I'm ready to go home.

My parents' church now shares its space with a Korean church, and tonight they held a joint candlelight service, with the groups trading off parts.

By far the strangest moment came when the Korean choir performed part of "The First Noel" in Korean.  Consider that -- a French carol, partially translated first into English, and then on into Korean.  I had a momentary flashback to my time on the boat, and the Chinese wedding band doing strange Engrish covers of Western songs.

Less than twelve hours until the Great Voght Clan Christmas Dinner Extravaganza (or at least what remains of it.)  It's my first time back for it in three years.

Attended an organized religious service ths morning with my mom, for the first time in about oh... three years?  (Aside from my grandfather's funeral service, but that's a whole different kettle of kippers.)  Needless to say it reinforced my feelings about most oranized religion , thouh I'll be back yet again tomorrow for the candelight service with the family.

After that we got a surprise phone call that my grandmother had been taken to the emergency room with chest pains, although after many hours there and a few tests they decided it was some issue with her sternum and not her heart, and a few doses of vicodin were in order.

Tonight the temperature has plunged from a high in the mid 50s at about 1 pm down to the mid 20s, and the winds are in the 40 mph range with gusts over 60, and changed from a steady downpour that melted all the snow into new lake-effect snow blowing every direction except straight down.  Nasty weather, and a ood niht to stay in and avoid the sure-to-be slick roads.  I guess it just wouldn't be a December for me without a wind storm or two!

Karen was in town for a few hours so we had an in-house family dinner for the first time in years.

Beyond that not much but I will mention this aside -- only in Buffalo would every bar in the Arts district switch from their regular activities to broadcast a hockey game, and not be met with derision.

The one hassle with Christmastime visits is that everyone else is doing likewise (and/or swarming into shopping centers), making it a challenge to find places to go that aren't swamped with morons.  Thus, lots of movies, and last night also the Sabres game (first hockey game I've been to in nearly two years!), which was a grand and raucous affair which they came from behind to win against Philadelphia.  Though there was only one fight (and a fairly disappointing one at that), it was a hard-hitting game and the crowd was into it the entire time.

I also caught a very late showing of Sweeney Todd, which was a fine mixture of Tim Burton and musical silliness (though quite macabre and full of blood, so be forewarned.)  I haven't seen the musical it was derived from, but the two people I went with did, and they both gave it good reviews as well.

Apparently it's now the weekend, though with my presently warped sense of time and space it might as well be June.

It's very strange walking into the two major grocery stores by my parents' house and discovering there is one brand with a grand total of four bulk coffee bins in either store: dark roast, light roast, espresso roast, and decaf.  Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in Seattle anymore.  Well, when in Rome drink like the Romans do, which means mediocre coffee and a lot of Labbatt Blue.

Today was fairly uneventful beyond the culture shock of returning to the grocery stores that sustained me through young adulthood.  Drove to the Southtowns with my dad, then drove twice across town with my mom to et something notarized by a family friend, and the annual family dinner since Karen is flying out tomorrow and who knows how her schedule will go with wild weather and reroutes being the norm rather than the exception in winter flying.  I guess the next few days are the real 'vacation' part of this trip, and then all the craziness resumes.

Nothing like starting a vacation like this.

Me (after the dog awoke me at 9 am): "Ugh, I need some coffee."
Mom: "Oh, I can dig out the coffee maker, I think there's some coffee still in the pantry."
Me: "You have coffee? How old is it? I can just get some at Tim Hortons."
Mom: "Well, I have some Folgers here somewhere, and it's on my grocery list."
Me: "So we don't have any coffee."
Mom: "I have Folgers."
Me: "So we don't have any coffee."

Anyway, it was good to hit up Timmy Ho's and get some cheap, strong coffee (and not have them look at you strangely when all you want is a drip), and then Karen and I headed to the Walden Galleria, a plan apparently shared by the entire rest of the city and half of Toronto. On the bright side, we were quite successful and took care of everything we needed in about three hours, but it still reminded me why I hate malls and the general greed and commercialism that has come to symbolize the American Dream. This year's big trick is apparently the "Buy one and get the second half-off" sale, because after you've spent $50 on a tie it helps to justify the insane cost by instead spending $75 on two, so they really only cost you $37.50 each. What a bargain!

From there I took a walk around the neighborhood. Although very little has overtly changed in the twenty-one months since I last set foot in the region, a massive and unexpected October 2006 lake-effect snowstorm wreaked devastation on the trees of the region, which had not yet lost their leaves for the year. The event was initially dubbed "the night the trees wept" by the Buffalo News, until it was pointed out that you can't weep when you're dead. Somewhere along the way it was re-christened "Arborgeddon" and that's the name it is now commonly known by, and yet somehow that is still an understatement. Some areas were without power for several weeks (my parents were among the lucky ones -- no damage to the house and only a week in the dark.) For a town that once prided itself on its tall, mature maples, elms and oaks, this set Tonawanda back decades, with many streets and neighborhoods looking like brand new developments -- only tiny saplings and shrubs now standing in place of the mammoth trunks that were violently hewn from the earth. Though the thousands of tons and millions of dollars of damage have been cleaned up and the power lines re-strung, the remaining trees stand like silent amputees, with broken and twigless boughs pointing up with angry jagged fingers toward the source of their lacerations. I did my best to capture a sense of these silent sentinels to last year's fury, although as is often the case, small photographs simply cannot convey the magnitude, both in severity and scope, of the event. You can view the shots (and find some links to sites with pictures and stories from last year during the cleanup) here.

Finally, I saw Beowulf in 3D this evening, which was quite entertaining from a 'check your brain at the door and enjoy bright shiny theatrical effects with scary monsters' standpoint. A few of the extreme close-up effects made my eyes water, but overall the 3D effect was quite impressive and it's come a long way from the crummy red-and-blue glasses of yesteryear.

As the jetway pulled away from the 757 at SeaTac (only an hour behind schedule) the pilot came on over the PA system announcing "Well, folks -- looks like we've got another brief delay."  (Groans from the cabin.)  "Seems they just found another cart of baggage that needs to be loaded onto the plane."

What an auspicious start to my eleven day journey!  Thankfully, aside from being absurdly cramped due to weird seat design on the plane, the flight itself was uneventful.  Delta has a nice new in-seat entertainment system with touch screens and live Dish Network television, so I was able to watch some news, catch a few interesting programs on the Discovery Channel, and listen to some good music (they even had the new Arcade Fire album!)

Strangely, the CRJ900 that I was on from Atlanta to Buffalo was not only much roomier than the 757, but also much more comfortable.  As an added bonus a heavy-set man sat down next to me carrying a large box of Kleenex and a big bag of Halls, and started coughing up a storm and groaning immediately, along with generally wriggling around.  Always a promising sign, but as abrupt as his arrival next to me was, he got up again and headed to the rear of the plane and never returned, so I had an entire row to myself.  Thank you good karma.  We'll skip the insanity that was the Buffalo airport (and the already-occupied landing ate and broken-down baggage carousel...)

Anyway, Buffalo seems to be covered in a mysterious white powdery substance, and I'm still trying to verify that the city itself is underneath there.  More excitement to follow, no doubt.