nawl

Somehow everything around Tobin just becomes that much more surreal.

He picked me up at the airport. "Oh, uh, the passenger door doesn't open, so you'll have to crawl in through the driver's side." Highly amused. In the *old* car the driver's side had been slammed into by some sort of park ranger truck in (I think) Yosemite, and one had to crawl in through the passenger side. The window crank was in the glove compartment, so I stuck it back on to roll the window down.

Rochester is very flat. Tobin is very proud of the fact that his house is on a "hill", known locally as "Mount Pleasant", which he boasted, with obvious relish, is "literally *feet* in height!"

He's been hard at work creating a Berkeley-style co-op community. It now involves two houses, nine or eleven people depending how you count, two gardens, actual workshift descriptions and a rotating shift schedule, an attempt at incorporation, and a summer population that just happens to be entirely male. The houses are pretty fabulous, big old Victorians in a neighborhood of big old Victorians, which is apparently the bad part of town because it is, er, "diverse".

Lovely pictures of house and garden.

I got a tour of the houses and environs. An older woman working on her neighboring garden complained to us that local hooligans were stealing all of her vegetables. A house across the street was recently auctioned off for $3000, the cost of the taxes owed. We went by a large warehouse, to all appearances either abandoned or for lease, until you get around to the other side and see a lamp through a window, because someone has converted the interior to a multi-story personal apartment. The sun set over the river.

At the co-op, we made an all-american dinner of corn, broccoli, and oven-baked penne and cheese, and sat around trading stories. The mayoral election is coming up, and one of the Democratic candidates is a 23-year-old ex-student running on a platform that the city should annex the suburbs, a party description of "combination libertarian and green; just go with it" and whose entire list of endorsements in the local paper consisted of the Cannabis Club, which he founded. Lots of talk about how people from the suburbs are paranoid to come into the city because they read about the non-existent enormous crime problem in the paper.

There are crazy things in the basement: chemistry lab equipment, brewing supplies, old-old bottles, a box of records, kegs, dismembered bicycles.

It must be a real co-op because after walking around barefoot I got blackfoot.

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The next morning, we packed in a car with two more Rochester grad students, Ryan and Stefanos, and drove to Canada for Meg's annual cottage weekend. Small world: I had no idea that I had first met this Megan when she visited Ping in Berkeley four years ago.

There was some discussion of whether we should prominently display on the dashboard the current copy of the Rochester weekly paper, whose big headline was "Hey, Bud: Getting stoned and laid in Toronto" when we passed the Canadian border. If it was visible at the time, the guard didn't say anything. He didn't even want to see our passports once we said we were American. The article was about as amusing and informative as its headline, but we did learn from it that the old-news slang for Toronto is "T-Dot", which we were told later by actual Torontonians is short for "T dot O dot" which is short for... "T. Oronto."? (Proposal for new slang for Toronto: 'Ronto.)

And that was that. The rest of the weekend involved the ingestion of massive quantities of junk food, lounging in the sun, reading, wading into Lake Huron and speculation as to what exactly the black manure-like sludge on the beach really was, naps on the couch, laughing at the tractors people hauled their boats with, playing silly board games ("Pride and Prejudice: The Game"), roasting marshmallows over the campfire, and general fraternization with lots of awesome Canadians.

Cottage!

Lounging in the cottage yard.

The beach, and cars and boats on the beach.

The sun set pinkly over the lake on Saturday. The family to our left was skipping stones in the water. The family to our right was bickering constantly: "Mom, you know how you said you never get drunk? I think you just proved yourself wrong."

A random kid sitting in the water at dusk.

All in all, a fabulous weekend.