Ali and I stopped by Paola's Burrito Place (1921 South Ave., formerly Big Dog's Hots) for dinner. There's only two weeks left before they close to move back home for personal reasons. The good news, though, is that the owners plan to return to Rochester and open a new restaurant by next year. The new place will have a slightly different theme and — hopefully — more hired staff so they don't have to spend every waking hour doing all the work.
Ali and I took the 50-mile drive to Chimney Bluffs State Park (7700 Garner Rd., Wolcott) for the afternoon with our dog, Lucy. The park is really nice and interesting: a moderately challenging [and, at this time, incredibly muddy], 1-mile trail that climbs to the top of alien-looking "earthen spires". It's a peculiar treasure around here: I have yet to mention it to someone who already knew about it.
On the way back, we stopped for dinner at Orbaker's Drive-In (4793 State Route 104, Williamson) which is this great burger joint that's been there forever. Ali knew of it — being an aficionado of sauce-laden burgers — and rates it very highly. While not quite worth a trip from anywhere, it's not that far if you're already out 104 on the east side.
Ali was really sad she couldn't make it, but Christina and I forged on to The Bug Jar
(219 Monroe Ave.) to see The Lobster Quadrille play. Opening up was Daryl Fleming and the Public Domain who did a fine job. They spun some lyrical, interesting, groove-rock-ish country/folk/rock … if that's any help at all. The Lobster Quadrille really did a great job too. They brought their Gothic satirical gospel back to the Bug Jar, and even had a bunch of toy instruments so the audience could join in too. Their new CD is — like many bands CD's — an idealized studio form of their live work, but it gives us fans a chance to learn all the words.
Ali and I went to The Stay Bridge Suites (1000 Genesee St.) to participate in the Fight Against Violence 5K Run/Walk. There was a good turn-out — I guess quite a bit more than the organizers had anticipated. The race headed south along the River Walk through Genesee Valley Park (Hawthorn Dr.) then back through The University of Rochester (Elmwood Ave. at Intercampus Dr.) and finally returning to the hotel. I joked that if it were closer to the heart of the 19th Ward, far fewer white people would have showed up.
Anyway, Ali ran it in 36:11 and won 2nd place for her age/gender category out of 6 other runners. There were 6 men in my category but I came in 4th among them with my time of 29:54. It's "officially" listed as 9:39/mile on the PCR Timing site which surprised me because that's slower than my 9:33 pace at The Medved Lilac 10K and 5K Family Fun Run [and this time, I think I was the only person running without shoes … people sure seem to like buying those over-the-counter orthopedics]. According to USA Track & Field (USATF), the course is actually 5.20 km or 3.23 miles, so my per-minute time based on that is 9:11.
I was a little disappointed that the promise of a gift bag from UofR and other post-race items were not available, but I can't fault them too much because the turnout was so high they didn't even have enough shirts for everyone. But you know, it doesn't really matter because we had a great time.
Ali and I headed to The Constellation Brands Marvin Sands Performing Arts Center (CMAC) (Lincoln Hill Dr., Canandaigua) to see David Byrne and Ani DiFranco. She bought me the tickets for our anniversary last month and I gotta say, I had a great time. Oh yeah, and we saved the $10 on parking because Ali has friends who live about a quarter mile from CMAC and they let us park there. That savings paid for all of about 1 beer, though.
Anyway, Ani DiFranco — although I don't seek out her work — was very good. I imagine she's incredible to see in a small venue, but it's terribly difficult to pull off that kind of personal connection among a thousand people. Since I'm not all that familiar with her, I wasn't nearly as excited or interested.
David Byrne, however, has been consistently great in my book. I liked his PowerPoint-based art in Trees, Tombstones, & Bullet Points when I saw him present it in October, 2004 and I've enjoyed what he's done with music. In this show, he didn't use as much multimedia as I'd seen before, but all the performers were dressed in white and changed appearance considerable with the use of stage lighting and the lighting on the back curtains.
I'll be sure to look for the new album because it has the power and pop-rock feel of old Talking Heads stuff while still feeling current (as if old Talking Heads heard by fresh ears doesn't sound modern enough). We were about to leave after the second encore, but he and his band were coerced into a third encore so Ali and I headed to the front row. The security guards eventually even let the stairways fill up with people.
Overall it was a blast and I had a great time. Thanks, Ali!
If you recall, I've been doing some running to work up to the 5 kilometer race in The Medved Lilac 10K and 5K Family Fun Run which was today.
I ran a "long" 5K run on Monday and Tuesday, then a "short" 2 mile run on Wednesday, and another "long" 5K run on Thursday [hmm … like a train whistle warning a crossing] before resting up for the race. Well, I did it. And yeah: barefoot. And I even beat 30 minutes, finishing in 29:35 according to the PCR Timing Official Results for this years race (which placed me 397 of 864 overall and 21st among the 31 male 35-39 year-olds). This is great because I beat my 35:58 official time for the Corporate Challenge in 2001.
Ali ran too and, despite admitting not training enough, ran for the whole race and finished in 37:31.
But the remarkable serendipity of our runner numbers was the amusement of the day. We were each given random numbers and she got #123 and I got #321. The odds that I would get the same digits as her number in the reverse order was (given 864 runners) about 1 in 863. If you figure on the specific combination of 123 and 321, that's something like 1 in 745,632. Pretty neat.
I've been working on migrating my travels to alternatives to the car — as you'll recall, I took my Civic off the road (so now I've got our Buick Roadmaster Estate Wagon and Ali's Saturn, neither of which I want to rely on for day-to-day tasks). Tonight was The Rochester Speculative Literature Association (R-SPEC) meeting at Barnes & Noble (3349 Monroe Ave.) so I thought I'd try taking the bus. I've used the buses on rare occasions in the past, but this was the first trip that required a transfer and that I didn't really have a backup plan (aside from calling Ali, even though she loaned her car out to our friend Christina for the day).
The meeting was at 7 p.m. so I wanted to get there a bit early. According to The Rochester-Genesee Regional Transportation Authority (RGRTA)'s trip planner on the website, I should take the #24 bus at 5:56 p.m. downtown to Court and Clinton, then take the #7 bus to Pittsford Plaza at 6:40 p.m. — total trip time: 43 minutes. I did my own analysis of the schedules and decided instead to take the #19 bus at 5:38 p.m. to 12 Corners then take the #7 bus to Pittsford Plaza at 6:09 p.m. — total trip time: 31 minutes. I arrived early enough to get some dinner at Benucci's (3349 Monroe Ave., in the Pittsford Plaza) … nothing particularly exceptional, but still perfectly fine.
So after the meeting, the RGRTA trip planner suggested I leave on the #7 bus at 8:54 p.m. (or a similar trip starting at 9:38 p.m.) and take it to — get this — Irondequoit Plaza (2133 Hudson Ave.) to get the #5 bus back to my house at 11:51 p.m. — total trip time: 2 hours, 57 minutes. I analyzed it myself and determined I could take the #7 bus at 8:54 p.m. (or an identical trip starting at 10:02 p.m.) to Clinton and Main then hurry to meet the #5 bus going south at St. Paul and Main and get home by 9:37 p.m. — total trip time: 43 minutes.
As it turned out, the meeting ran a bit long and I stayed to try and find that book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbuilt which they did not have. I took the 10:02 bus which arrived pretty much on time. I made it to the #5 which didn't leave for a few minutes anyway and made it home fine.
All told, it worked out okay. I bought a "Freedom Pass" which gets you rides for a day for $3 (as far as I could tell, I would have had to pay $4 for the 4 bus trips … there's probably a secret to transfers or something, though). The bus stop nomenclature is confusing — for instance, the stop nearest my house for the #19 bus is "Crittenden and East" which identifies an intersection. There are 2 stops within 20 yards of that intersection and I wasn't sure which one was right. The trick is that the first street is the main street and the second is the cross street, so it would be much clearer to say "Crittenden at East" but once you get used to it, it makes sense. You also have to know which direction your bus is going — for instance, there are 4 stops at the Elmwood and Mt. Hope corner.
It's also annoying that the stops have advertising on them rather than information: the bus stop signs only specify how much the trip will cost. If only one route uses a particular stop, the sign will identify the route number, but if the stop serves multiple routes, it will just say that it serves multiple routes and not specify which ones. There are no maps or clues as to where to go or when.
But it's that routing system that is the worst. What good is it if you can do it yourself and get better results — and with relative ease at that? The biggest obstacle is to get the bus route information from the site as it is no longer available as tidy PDF's of the route tables, but as dynamically generated pages where you can specify your stops. It would make much more sense to, say, get all the bus route tables for stops within a few blocks of your starting and ending points and figure it out from there.
It's too bad that RGRTA has a government sponsored monopoly because with a little competition, it wouldn't be hard to come up with a better system. One thing that I've been toying with is the idea of a "superway" — a system that's like a subway, but instead puts buses on the network of highways to cover the large distances quickly. So, for instance, there would be stops along each exit on 490, 590, and 390 with buses running frequently along those routes. I could walk 15 minutes to 390 and East Henrietta Rd. then take a bus to the Monroe Avenue exit off 590 in 3 minutes (maybe more like 6 minutes counting a stop at Winton), finishing up by walking the remaining 19 minutes to Pittsford Plaza. All told, it would take about about 40 minutes but I could do it pretty much any time I wanted to; the walking time on my trip out there added 10 minutes for a total of 41 minutes on the way out and 53 minutes on the way back and also limited to the whims of the bus schedule. Throw in a few extra routes to cover the parts of the city farther than a mile from a highway exit, and you're in business.
Anyway, the bus is now an alternative for me to use. But once I get a bike ready, I can cover the 5 miles to Pittsford Plaza via the canal path in about 20 minutes or so. And do it any time.
Later that night, Ali and I headed to The Bug Jar (219 Monroe Ave.) to see the bands. Starting off, Stone Baby did some pretty good ambient noise although I got tired of it before they had finished. Likewise, the last band was Mountains who did also performed some good ambient noise — somewhat different and somewhat more engaging than Stone Baby.
Autumn In Halifax played in the middle. I was impressed when I first heard Dave Merulla's solo presentation, but have grown to love the band with "the Leaves" — a semi-rotating group of backup performers. On this particular night, I made a note that they "uncork my dreams and inspires me to create". The meandering melodies and the ambiguous lyrics lead my mind to a place where I contemplate my dreams, goals, and projects in life. It's really a treat.
Today is the day Ali and I first met three years ago … who can believe it? Huh? You?
Anyway, we went to the new Italian place Rocco (165 Monroe Ave., formerly The Olive Tree). I saw some notes on RocWiki on challenges in getting reservations [yeah, I know — in Rochester] so we set up ours two days earlier. As it turned out, the relatively small establishment was not completely full at any time while we were there.
The food was very good. Both of us were more impressed with the lasagne that Ali got than with the penne with pepper and spinach that I got. The tomato sauce on the former was the best Rochester has to offer. We had a nice bottle of wine (off the slightly confusing page of "everything is $25").
We decided to try 3 desserts, expecting them to be quite modest in size. My favorite was the maple and almond dish, sort of like a crème brûlée, minus the crisp top. The hazelnut gellato was great too. Although the canoli's were merely tasted (before being stored at my house, and consumed before they lost their freshness on Sunday), the nice lemon zest flavor was perfect.
I borrowed a Zipcar with Ali and Christina today.
I heard about the program a couple years ago and was quite excited about it. In 2006, they introduced some cars at The University of Rochester (Elmwood Ave. at Intercampus Dr.) and I jumped at the opportunity. Unfortunately, it was only for people affiliated with the university. The other week I was listening to Car Talk and they mentioned Zipcar again so, on a whim, I checked out the site.
The cars were indeed still at the UofR and I clicked to join. This time, I got as far as the page where they asked for my credit card information and noted that I had not been asked about working for the UofR. I called and they confirmed that the program is now open to anyone so I finished signing up.
Zipcar is a car sharing program. It costs about $50/year to be part of the program. In Rochester, there are 5 cars (4 parked at the UofR river campus and the other parked at The Eastman School of Music (26 Gibbs St.)) Each one costs $7 per hour or $60 per day to use — insurance, gas, and 180 miles for each calendar date the car is reserved are included.
I decided to crunch some numbers to see if that's reasonable. I've owned my now-dying Civic for 15 years now. Figuring everything I spent on it, it's cost $0.26/mile for its 170,434 miles or about $3,000 per year. On average each year, it's been about $500 for gas, $500 for insurance, and $650 for repairs and service. However, I've changed my driving habits and last year I only drove about 4,000 miles, so that works out to an ongoing cost of about $0.41/mile. If I estimate an average of 40 miles/hour overall, I only drove the Civic for about 100 hours last year.
Taking the $1,650 annual cost against the $7/hour cost of Zipcar, that's about 235 hours; the daily rate works out to 27 days. In other words, if I get rid of the Civic altogether, I can break-even with Zipcar as long as I stay under 235 hours in a year. As I said, I changed my driving habits and try to do as much as I can by bike — or avoid trips altogether — so it doesn't seem particularly difficult.
The idea behind car sharing is that you don't need a car per se. Almost all the time it's just moving people from one place to another — you only really need a car if you're hauling things. Of course, if you have small children, it's much more convenient to have a car, but you might be able to get away with one car instead of two in a household.
So anyway, I tried it out. I reserved the Honda Element named "Eastman" for a couple hours. Since it's generally used by college students, it was … well … a lot like a college student's car: kind of a disgusting mess inside, what with a McDonald's bag, garbage, and food all over the place. I suspect it was as bad as it gets because nobody wanted to clean it all winter.
But overall it was a pretty easy process. In the future, I'll bike to the pick-up location rather than take the 20-minute walk and just lock my bike nearby for retrieval when I return the car. (That's another thing: you can't do one-way trips — you have to return the car from the place you found it when you're done.) For now I'll hold onto the Civic (and don't forget we also have the wagon) until it fails to pass inspection later this year.