Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Tuesdayoff

I'm doubtful that today's day off couldn't've gone much better.

After making my initial posts here for the day I went on to finish reading the book, Jailbird, I had started a few days ago. From there, very restless with the amount of free time I had on my hands, I went for an hour and a half bike ride.

For whatever reason, I have long accepted the notion that Buffalo is a small city and that the only healthy areas it has are Elmwood, Hertel and, to a lesser extent, Main St.

The truth is that Buffalo is a small city relative to the many other cities on the planet. And 280,000 people is still a lot of people unless compared to the 6,500,000,000 of us funny little creatures running around on the same planet. A planet which we also accept as small, but this is true only when compared to other known planets.

But to me, on a bike, the planet is fucking enormous. And even Buffalo is big. Big enough even to house neighborhoods I have never been in. Thankfully, I found a few of them today. In fact I went down eleven streets I had never been on before: Florida St, Hedley Pl, Hughes Ave, Blaine St, Beverly Rd, Meech St, Oak Grove Ave, Loring Ave, Burbank Dr, Meadowview Pl, Agassiz Cir that lead me to the previously unvisited Medaille College that anyone who has ever driven on the 198 has been next to while waiting at the light at Parkside.

Some of the views include:

Beverly Rd, which with its consistent row of houses with the median in the road and those seemingly ancient street lights rotating direction gives me yet another street scape that makes me immediately think of Buffalo:
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Trees on Hughes Ave, right behind Canius College, that I didn't think grew that tall in Buffalo. Or survived the October storm for that matter:
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Florida St, where I see five distinct Buffalo characteristics in this view:
1. Parking Lot Front property (though that may be more of an American characteristic than specifically just a Buffalo one)
2. An empty parking lot
3. Sparse, unhealthy looking trees
4. A boarded up attic window
5. A plastic covered window
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From there I slowly made my way through Forest Lawn Cemetery for a few pics:

Death Front Property:
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Once I returned home I caught up with a lot of the small daily distractions that I tend to put off in the name of not annoying myself like straightening up my room, catching up on emails (I'm still behind) and continuing some other things I've been meaning to spend some time working on.

I did catch a couple of brief naps, as well as a brief Seinfeld for my only TV (as opposed to those long Seinfelds). By the end of the day I did take one more bike ride after making dinner and am now winding up the day with a little bit of posting here and the hopefully some reading before I go to bed.

All in all, not a bad day. Seeing what I can do with an entire free of drinking or a hangover it almost makes me wish I didn't drink.

Almost.

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