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Balsam Bagels
Friday, November 1 2024
location: Mulberry Street, Rochester, NY
This morning we hung out for awhile with Maryann in her living room with Lulu the dog (who was still limping). I drank a cup of coffee she'd made for me and don't remember what all we talked about, but Maryann was in an unusually chatty mood. But at some point Gretchen said we needed to get on the road and begin making our way back to the part of the state we normally frequent. We'd be spending the night at the cabin, which would break up what would otherwise be a four hour drive to Hurley.
On the way out of town, we stopped at another amazing non-vegan bakery with great vegan options: Balsam Bagels. We pretty bought two sandwiches (a vegan bagel lox sandwich for me!), six bagels, and several fun vegan foods they had on hand: vegan bagel dogs (vegan hotdogs cooked in bagel dough), mushroom & potato knishes, and some sort of curry-filled filo dough creation. I also got a cup of coffee of course. Initially Gretchen wanted to taste things to be sure she wanted them, but that was too logistically complicated, so she had to have some faith. And it turned out that the pumpernickle bagels without caraway seeds were everything she'd hoped for. I should mention that the employees at Balsam were very kind, never getting flustered as we tied up the line with our questions and rambling ever-growing order.
Eating bagels on our way out of town ruined our appetite for Strong Hearts, so we skipped Syracuse completely and didn't stop until we got to the Indian Castle rest area on the Thruway, which was only forty miles or so west of the cabin. I'd installed the app allowing me to charge with AppleGreen fast chargers (which only seem to exist at New York Thruway rest areas). The electricity is about 30% more expensive there, but this means there's usually less demand for the chargers, and the rest areas are more pleasant places to hangout than, say, a Walmart. So it seemed worth it to pay the extra to charge at Indian Castle. This particular rest area wasn't as nice as one we'd stopped at briefly on our way westbound, and we found ourselves sitting near a Popeyes watching people blithely buying pieces of deep-fried birds raised under horrifying conditions as we played Spelling Bee and otherwise fucked with our phones. I should also mention that AppleGreen chargers aren't necessarily more reliable than those provided by Electrify America; the first one I tried refused to communicate with the Bolt, but the next one over worked just fine.
Once we had about 160 miles of range in the battery, we continued on. At this point I was driving, and I left the Thruway at the Fonda/Fultonville exit, and from there it was as if we were coming up from Middleburgh. Hearteningly, there were more Harris/Walz yard signs since I'd last been through this way, and one of those was handmade.
Temperatures were down in the low 50s at the cabin, though there was still warmth from the recent warm spell trapped inside the cabin. I started a fire in the stove, and soon things were cozy.
While the cozy conditions were still developing, Gretchen helped me drag the outdoor unit of the new minisplit around to the back side of the cabin so it would be there when I needed to install it. I also unplacked the air handlers in a fruitless search for an installation manual that turned out to be inside an envelope I'd overlooked.
Gretchen wanted to help out with the porch ceiling project, which only needed four more clapboards to complete. So she carried some clapboards from the pile over to where I was cutting them to length. She clearly wanted that project completed, so I busted out all the tools and did just that, struggling a bit to bang water-swollen boards up against ones that were drier and apparently somewhat smaller. Though I had room for what I thought was four clapboards and one that I would have to rip down to a narrow ribbon, in practice the ceiling was finished with the fourth. Gretchen was delighted by the results saying that the porch was now a totally different space from what it had been. Sadly, though, it won't be getting much use until next spring.
For dinner, we had various pieces of the fun things we'd gotten this morning at Balsam Bagels. The weakest item was probably the filo curry dough thing. But the knishes were great, especially with sauerkraut and mustard (the way Poles probably ate them in the middle of a bleak Central European winter). At that point I started drinking booze, but a 150 mg dose of diphenhydramine kicked in before I drank too much.
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The strangely human-faced sheep in a painting on the wall in Maryann's guestroom this morning.
Click to enlarge.
These plump kids near where we were hanging out in the Indian Castle rest area reminded me of kids Maurice Sendak has drawn.
Click to enlarge.
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