July 12, 2011: A Day in Rochester

Medifast Status: Day 71, Down ~38.5lbs

Danielle picked me up at seven this morning.  That is six Texas time.  Way too early for me.  I was struggling to be ready when she got there.  And, in fact, I was not.

We drove up to Greece, stopping at Tim Horton’s for coffee of course, and met up with Craig, Brian, Richard and Jeff.  This is the first time that Craig and I have seen each other since about four years ago in Newark at the Key Club.  Richard and I were probably more like six or seven years from before I moved to New Jersey at all.  Jeff has been at least a year and a half.  Brian only several months.  Still, a lot of people that I have not seen in a very long time.

We spent the morning at Craig’s house out in his garage patio area.  Boy was it hot.  There is a heat wave hitting New York and there is no air conditioning in there.  Sitting with my laptop on my lap all morning in the heat really made me warm.  I did better than most everyone else, though, being the Texan.

For lunch we went to Chili’s.  We thought about staying there all afternoon but they had no WiFi nor available electrical outlets so we abandoned that idea.  We went to Richard’s parents’ house instead where they had a nice, air conditioned basement.

After the work day was over and I was free to roam we went to Rochester’s downtown Dinosaur BBQ.  I’ve never actually eaten there – I don’t like their BBQ sauce and the place is not my style.  It was pretty packed and I learned from Ryan that Dinosaur is opening a location in Newark, New Jersey of all places.

I skipped eating even though there were some items on the menu that I could, in theory, get away with eating.  The food sounded good but once I had time to think about where I was I decided against it and was very happy later that I had not cheated on my diet for Dinosaur BBQ, of all things.

From Dinosaur we headed over to Alexander Street and had a round of drinks at the Old Toad – my old stomping ground in Rochester from the late 90s.  Long ago, around 1997, I was a music management intern at Pilato Entertainment when Pilato was stilling doing well enough to have an actual office – located in the Medical Arts Building, the same building as the Old Toad.  Some time later the office moved to downtown (when the rents fell with the collapse of Kodak) and now the office appears to be home-based, if Pilato Entertainment is still around.  The web site looks like it was made in my era and I can’t find anything today on the site later than 2001 so I suspect that the site lives on while the company itself may not.  The email listed is still AOL and the site is HTML 4.  Both signs of a long since dead enterprise.  A website that has not been updated for an entire decade is a little crazy.

Back in the late 90s when I lived and worked in Rochester – first in Rochester proper near Durand-Eastman and later in northeastern Greece at Greenleaf Meadows near Charlotte – the Old Toad was me and my friends’ place to hang out.  They had, and still do, the best beer around.  The Old Toad is the only place to get genuine real ale in the area.  It remains the only place in the states where I have ever found it.  Back in the late 90s Alexander Street was a hopping bar district.  Today that appears to no longer be the case.  Half of the bars are gone and across the street from the Toad is a tea room and bakery.

I treated myself to a bitter tonight.  It has been far too long since I was able to have one.  That was yummy.

After that Danielle and I headed back towards home.  We had barely made it a few blocks to a FastTrac when the car overheated and we had to stop.  It turned out that there was a blockage in the radiator but we were stuck for half an hour or more at the gas station waiting for the car to cool and for Richard to swing by and look at it to determine what might be the matter.

The original plan had been to go until midnight tonight which would have put us home closer to one in the morning.  Fortunately we broke early, especially considering the car issues, so it was closer to eleven when we got back down to dad’s house.

My girls were already asleep.  I didn’t get to see them at all today.

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