Category Archives: Home

Not much of a day for gardening, but a very good day to be a flower.

All these years later, I can’t help but scan the sidewalks of Albany on Sunday night and early Monday morning. Why? Because Sunday night is garbage night.

When I first lived in the city, during the summer of 1983, I discovered that there were treasures to be harvested, especially around Center Square, where people were always throwing away quality items.

When you have barely any furniture anything looks good, and whatever we could carry or stuff into the back of a car we’d haul off to our apartment. If we later decided we didn’t want it — or found something better — it would just go back where it came from, the curb.

Old urges die hard. On just one block, I recently spied a desk and chair, a couple of lamps, and a bookcase. That’s like a whole room worth of furniture.

But when you practice the art of garbage picking things sometimes end badly. Several items were hastily discarded when they began to emit the unmistakable aroma of cat urine — and there are some things you should never take off the sidewalk.

I learned this the hard way after dragging a queen size mattress and box spring up into my apartment in Plattsburgh. My big new bed was the envy of my roommates — until mysterious bug bites started showing up all over my body.

Those things went back onto the street, of course. Both were gone within hours, off to another apartment where someone else would discover that sometimes garbage really is garbage.

Estimable Times Union blogger Roger Green wrote this week about bats bringing chaos to his home sweet home. If you’ve ever had a bat in the house, you know how disruptive it can be, even though they are just tiny, little, winged insect eating machines.

People are afraid of bats on a visceral level, but the truth is that you should be wary because they may carry rabies. How do you know a bat is rabid? You don’t, so it’s best to get them out of your house — even if it is fun to watch the cats chase after them.

The New York State Health Department made this video to show you how to catch a bat in your house. Watch how this woman fearlessly takes on the bat, presumably after her husband ran from the room screaming like a little girl. That’s him standing outside the door handing her bat catching supplies.

Gentlemen: if you find a gal who can catch bats, she’s a keeper.

Well, maybe Thomas Wolfe was wrong; you can go home again but you may not recognize the place.

I took a detour on a recent trip to Long Island to have a look at the old neighborhood, Carle Place. Many of the houses in town were among the early phases of Arthur Levitt’s building blitz that changed the landscape of Long Island. It was 19 acres of Levittown before there was a Levittown.

In my day Carle Place was fairly uniform: small colonials and capes with wood shingles and big sturdy trees. Now every other house has been renovated beyond recognition in a style best described as Nassau County Italianate. Think the house in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

It’s a riotous melange of stone, curved driveways, and strangely elaborate landscaping with a heavy emphasis on weird poodle shaped bushes. It’s like the kids from Growing Up Gotti were hired on as the official architects. The tidy little houses have been dressed up in a velour tracksuit, heavy gold chains, a pinkie ring.

You can’t really codify good taste, and if you tried to explain why it all just doesn’t work you wouldn’t get far. You’d best just turn away and fuggedaboutit.