According to the cadillac commercial I just saw, cars come with hard drives now. I realize my car does not have any hard drive so I can't say much but when they started bragging about how their car comes with a 40gb hard drive, I just couldn't get excited. I feel for something car size, it should have a TB or something, right?

I seriously still have a large bushel of green pears and a regular bushel of yellow/red pears and a lot of pears still on the tree. I seriously worked 3 eight hour days on pear processing. Thankfully this happens only once every two years and thankfully pears are one of my favorite fruits and one I am not alergic to.

I love this organic pear juice. Unfortunately, it is so expensive. More unfortunately, Wegman's stores it right under display lights, so close that the bottles get hot. I refuse to pay almost $4.00 for something cooked by a display light. Fortunately, I am a pear baron and can make as much as I want.



Here is one of my cute jars of it.


I started picking more pears at noon and I just stopped processing pears 10 minutes ago.

Okay, I look very special ed here, but it was scary with the pears falling on my head. (e:terry) didn't wear a helmet and one hit him in the head. Its like a twenty foot drop for some of the pears. I knocked a lot of them down using an old branch that fell off the tree during the wind storm. I kept thinking it is like having your arms ripped off and then being beaten by it.



Today, my mother joined us and the four of us peeling, cored and slices pears for the entire afternoon.


Boiling the jars is time consuming but so worth it. People say you can just make them for the freezer but what is the point of using energy and space all years long when you can just spend an extra 20 minutes and boil them. Preserving stuff is so worht it. Next year I am going to build a preservation cellar room and jar a ton of stuff, not just tomatoes and pears.



Here we have 3 bushels of sliced pears in sugary yum, yum syrup.



I made more pears sauce with the iregular ones. This time it was a little more pureed like baby food. I like it both ways.


The sauce is really good with pork chops. They were so cheap for some reason. Eight of them for $9.00 which is way better priced than the lame chops for which I got 8 for like $20.00.


The pork chops were really good cooked.

I started with 15 lbs of pears. Which is only one of four bushels and decided to make pear sauce. This represents about another 5+ hours of work. Not including the 4 hours I picked and shook down and collected the pears yesterday.



I decided to use the bushel that was all broken and smashed. The ones that hit rocks when they fell or that hornets had eaten holes in.


It stakes so long to peel and and gut them. Not as fun as gutting fish as there is not much fight.


Here I am hiding behing them trying to pose. Its really ahrd to do self pics with the iphone.


That is only half of them, I had to upgrade to a bigger pot.


Cooking them. About 15 pounds of pears with one cup of water. I added a little bit of lemon juice and some sugar. Seriously, it did not really even need that much sugar.



The cook down a bunch. The juice I strained out and made s delicious pear juice drink.


After burning my hand severly, get electrocuted and breaking the vacuum I managed to get he pear sauce in the jars. I cannot believe that no one even heard me as I screamed while being burned and electrocuted. Sometimes, I think that having a big house can be a bad idea.



Here I am looking cute with my favorite jar.


And then when boiling the jars one broke wasting 1 quart of pear sauce which consitutes like 20 pears and like 2 hours worth of work. I was so mad. unfrotunately, when (e:terry) put them in the boiling water he forgot that you have to boil the jars with the water and not just drop them in the boiling water.

Basra and the bees are both fighting me for the pears. Plus I fell
out of the tree and smashed my mousing arm. I wish I could just go to
home depot and pick up some migrants. If only we lived in California,
LOL. The pears smell so yummy.


Look how crazy this pic is. It is like that jesus pic where he gets shined on by light from heaven that used to be in Nonna's bedroom. But instead with basra as the central figure.



It was hard to keep him away from the pears.



I ended up filling all three bushels and there are still a lot more on the tree and so many rotting ones on the ground. Unfrotunately, I cannot get to the ones that are high up and I shook down all the ones I could.



I was also battling these hugh bees that could eat right through the skin of a pear. I watched them eat one in about five minutes as a swarm. Then the little bees cam ein and finsihed it up. The big bees got made and i saw a big one pick up a little one and throw it, I swear.

Apparently, no one cares about schools in buffalo, lol - e.g. last post.



Anyhow, I was reading google news this morning and I saw that 6000+ chinese babies have become ill aftre consuming formula that has the same toxic compound that killed pets when consuming chinese pet food a while back

Melamine, a white crystalline powder used in making plastics and tanning leather that was found in the infant formula, was at the heart of China's troubles last year, too.

That compound is melamine. Here is the wikipedia article

I really don't understand how it ended up in the infant formula after it was known to kill pets but it did, and now the babies are dying.

The crazier part is I noticed these really pretty hard plastic bowls and kitchen wares are showing up everywhere and are actually just called melamine bowls.

You can get them just about anywhere that has kitchen supplies and goes from fancy to more common ones at target

So my question is who uses these and why. Clearly over time, either through heat or scrapping, litle peices of melamine end up in your food.

(e:matthew) came home form work all riled up about the Buffalo public school system, which I assume is due to the ladies he works for talking about it as we have no kids.

Anyhow, I didn't believe him how bad it was because the people I know who went to Buffalo public school seem okay. I figured it was just private schooling parents freakin out about how bad the schools are.

Then I tried looking up some info about the schools in buffalo and happend upon schooldigger.com's entry for Buffalo. Apparently, Buffalo is 818th out of 829 cities reviewed. Yes, that puts it at 0/5 stars.



Omg, look at Buffalo Elementary School of Technology over at 313 South Division Street - It is 2273rd/2278 public elementary schools in state ranking. Can it be worse? Yes, but only 5 places worse ;(.

Clearly it is a economics issue as that school has 97% of students on discounted/free lunch.

It seems like all the white people are leaving. Looks at the stats. Its interesting that this site offers so much information about each school. Sadly, there is not much info for the private and charter schools.



Same with Bennett which was 750th out of 776 public high schools.



Same with Buffalo Traditional School which is now close


Where did all the whities go, this is during the 90s and early 2000s that it all changed? Did they used to have forced integration that ended. Just look at the numbers that dropped since 2000.

Hutch Tech got great reviews. Is there any hope for buffalo with such a crappy education system in place? Is there even a solution?

This morning I was reading (photos there) and seriously, I cannot believe how cheap Our Lady of Lourdes went for $25,000

These pics are from fixitbuffalo's Flickr collection



Then on Buffalo Rising I saw in the comments that WGRZ said it didn't actually sell because the price was too low.

What I want to know is where is Roswell/Kaleida on this one. It is liek one block form the medical campus and has a huge ass parking lot. COnsidering that some Roswell employees park at HSBC Arena you would think that this would be an awesome preperyt purchase. The building itself could be rehabbed into an auditorium like montante. I mean for such a low price, they could invest into the building.

Wow, this is a long journal but the videos are funny. The music is art festival turned out to be pretty great despite the rain. Lots of people showed up.



Here was the electronic music stage on the side of the building. It was a great stage, speaker setup, location - except that it was on a hill and the grass was wet.



We were there during the day with (e:matthew)'s sister Mary, (e:jim) and (e:james) but it was pouring. At night we went back with (e:mike) to go see Dharma Lab . I didn't take any pictures because it was dark out and I was busy dancing, oh - ya and it was pouring but here is a pic of Chris from Dharma Lab, we went to high school together.



Everytime I see him, I always promise him I will go see them and something comes up. This time I actually was able to make it and the venue and music were both awesome. Another member of the group is is (e:soma)'s brother. I saw (e:soma) dancing in the crowd.

The set was amazing. I had not had so much fun dancing since a goa party in germany that (e:terry) and I attended oh so many years ago ;( I saw people taking pics I wonder if anything is online yet.

I danced like mad. In fact I am so curious to see what happend to the poor lawn at the Albright Knox after all the people dancing and stomping everywhere in the rain. I have a feeling they did not think it out very much considering the time of year and the amount of people. That grass is going to seriously look like shit for a good long while.

Afterwards, the evening did not end. We saw Kristina and Rocky there and then went back to the house to hang out and play risk - oh and drink milk shakes. It was nice to see Kristina who I hadn't seen in so long.







I actually didn't play risk but the rest of them did. I think rocky and (e:terry) drank a whole case of beer. Then Rocky wanted to go out dancing at Ms. Kitty's the lesbian bar turned dance club OHM. As with the rest fo the day - it started pouring so we sat on the porch and watched the storm as (e:Terry) and Rocky babbled nonsense back and forth to each other. Kristina said he usually doesn't have anyone to go on with liek that so it stops and I thought the same about (e:terry) - they started to sound like two insane asylum patients - it was pretty funny.

Kritina decided to go home - Kristina got off easy, lol. I baby sat the beer boys with (e:mike) to make sure they didn't get in too much trouble, drinking water the whole time.

OHM is not a dance club - it was fucking Country Western - everyone had cowboy hats and bolo ties. Rocky was drunk enough to ask if they could change the music, lol.

So we spent the rest of the night at Cathode, just (e:mike), (e:terry), Rocky and I having a guys night out at the gay bar. Sadly, we were the only people there and we danced the whole time to the video screen and Videos of Robyn . Apparently, rocky really likes to dance too. He and (e:Terry) play fought, then (e:mike) and (e:terry) and rocky and (e:mike), eventually a bottle of beer spilled.

The vjay played some political videos which were pretty funny:
A cartoon called Campaignin'


A video of george bush fucks america, it is so funny


And then the gayest video I ever saw ended the evening



When we got home I showed Rocky to his room but he kept going down stairs and trying to walk home. I was like dude, "How do you expect me to explain to your wife that you walked home to amherst and I didn't know where you are?" He refused to sleep so (e:matthew) had the brilliant idea to put on some looney toons DVD and like in ten minutes he was snoring.

In the morning when I work up, it looked like he couldn't figure out the door and tried to escape out the window in the vestibule. Oh beer.

Music is art, clothes are 80s.