A Scenic Eatery in the Heart of the Finger Lakes Wine Region

Atmosphere

Bully Hill Restaurant is situated in the heart of the beautiful Finger Lakes wine region in upstate New York.  The area is becoming increasingly well-known for its local award-winning wines, beautiful scenery and temperate summer climate.  The restaurant is a part of the Bully Hill Vineyard on Keuka Lake, and it offers spectacular views from high atop the steep Western slopes overlooking the lake.

Bully Hill Restaurant offers both indoor and outdoor dining, and a spot on the patio offers quite possibly the most beautiful spot to dine in all of upstate New York.  The atmosphere is casual, and during the summer months, it is a popular spot for vacationers who own cottages on the Finger Lakes, locals, and wine tourists alike.

While stopping up at Bully Hill for a delicious meal, you can also take part in wine tastings, visit their gift shop, museum, and enjoy their beautiful summer gardens and vineyards right on the grounds.

Menu

Bully Hill Restaurant prides itself on offering a menu based on fresh seasonal ingredients, which results in savory, unique entrees.  You can order anything from smoked Mediterranean lamb salad to authentic southern barbeque straight from their new smoker.

Additionally, they have vegetarian options and a Kid’s Menu, not to mention a wonderful Bully Hill wine selection.  Check out their full lunch, dinner, and special menus at the website: http://www.bullyhill.com/restaurant/restaurant.asp

Service

Service at Bully Hill is warm, helpful, friendly, and prompt.  This is remarkable considering how busy they can get during the peak summer months, but it is highly unlikely that you will leave this establishment neglected or unsatisfied.

Price Range

Moderate.  Lunch entrees range from about $8 to $15, and dinners range from $9 for sandwiches all the way up to $25 for their twin beef tenderloin fillets. Make sure to allow room in your budget to sample a glass or two of their very own wines grown on-location, which never fail to satisfy. Wines are available by the glass or by the bottle.

Hours

Bully Hill Restaurant is open throughout the Finger Lakes tourist season, May through October.  They serve lunch daily from 11:30 am to 4 pm, and they have recently expanded their hours to serve dinners on Saturdays from 5-8 pm.

Location

Bully Hill Restaurant and Vineyards is located on the west side of Keuka Lake, very close to the South end of the lake and the charming village of Hammondsport, N.Y.  Please visit their website for detailed directions from a variety of source locations.

8843 Greyton H. Taylor Mem. Dr. Hammondsport, New York, 14840.

Contact:

Call to confirm pre- and post-season dates and hours at the restaurant phone line: 607-868-3490.

For an extra treat, you can visit their website at http://www.bullyhill.com/restaurant/restaurant.asp.  Here you can find complete menus, more information about their vineyard, restaurant, gift shop, and museum, as well as recipes for their singularly delicious entrees.

Of course the preferable option for getting a good dog is to buy from a reputable professional breeder. The drawbacks of this approach are that supply of puppies can at times be limited, as respectable breeders will not over breed their dogs, in addition to the cost, which can be astronomically high if you’re looking to get a pup with show-worthy bloodlines. Even average purebred puppies can run upwards of three or four hundred dollars. As a student fresh out of college, this route simply wasn’t an option for me because of monetary restrictions.

It was at this point that I began to look into pet adoption agencies. There are SPCAs across the country in both rural and urban areas in addition to smaller independent nonprofit organizations that foster, treat, and rehabilitate pets. On the internet, one of the most useful resources that I discovered was the website www.petfinder.org. You can search your local area, region, or the entire country for the type of pet you would like to adopt, with search options such as pet type, breed, size, and age. Most postings come with pictures and the background for each animal, and petfinder.org features animals from different shelters all around the country.

On this website, I discovered a Great Pyrenees in a county animal shelter that was scheduled to be euthanized in days. My next free afternoon, I rushed to the shelter, an hour away, to find with some relief that someone from PyrRescue had removed the dog from the shelter and that it would have a foster home. Rather than turn around and go back home, like any person with an ounce of sense would, I looked at the other dogs in the shelter, which was run largely by prison inmates. I was taken by a small, sweet-looking female terrier mix, which, as you might suspect, ended up coming home with me. The adoption fee was $45, and I signed a contract promising that I would have her spayed within the next six weeks. Having her spayed was not an entirely pleasant experience, as she was very sick when she came home with nausea and vomiting. Within days though, she recovered, and she has been a wonderful, affectionate pet.

Many people express hesitation about adoption because many dogs in shelters have been mistreated, abused, or have other serious behavioral problems. However, it has been my experience that with a discerning eye, you can tell if there are problems. This isn’t to say that if a dog has problems associated with having bad owners, you should not adopt it. Most problems of this sort can be worked out with the help of a good owner who can show patience, persistence and affection to the dog. However, more serious problems that should rightly give reason for pause might be aggression, particularly if you have a family with children.

Another way to circumvent the potential problems of dogs that have been in shelters and/or abandoned is to adopt a young dog or puppy. They tend to be more impressionable, and rebound better from the traumatic experiences associated with dogs that end up in shelters. I adopted a Golden Retriever-Great Pyrenees mix when he was about 8 weeks old, and I have had no problems with him whatever (barring the typical puppy housebreaking and chewing issues, of course!). His adoption fee was around $100, but this is because he was already neutered at the time I adopted him.

Another thing to consider is that a lot of dogs that end up in shelters aren’t abused, mistreated or neglected at all. I have seen innumerable dogs listed on petfinder.com whose owners had to give them up for various reasons: divorce, allergies, owner death, new babies in the family, moving to a foreign country, etc.

In light of my experiences with pet adoption, I would strongly encourage any person considering getting a dog or puppy to seriously consider adopting rather than buying from a store. There are hundreds of thousands of good pets out there in our country without homes. Why support the demand for animals bred for store sale? If you put in the time and energy to research, spend time with, and adopt a shelter animal, you’ll have a great companion, and quite possibly save a life in the process.

Additional Resources:

www.petfinder.org http://www.hsus.org/

I’m writing this post because it horrifies me that the obsession with extreme thinness is still so prevalent–not just in the fashion industry but in the popular opinion in general.

The most popular dress size in North America is a size 14. And let’s face it; a lot of these women are beautiful. They’re your mother, your sister, your wife, maybe even your daughter. Why support an unhealthy and (for most) unattainable image of beauty?

Luckily, there’s a countermovement in the works. The majority may not know it, but there is a burgeoning “plus” (read: normal) sized fashion and modeling industry growing around the world, and particularly in the United States. Even major modeling agencies like Ford are establishing Plus divisions throughout the country.

http://www.walkthecatwalk.com/ offers insight into the fashion industry and their demand for size 0-4 models, and puts forward a challenge to print magazines and designers to begin to subvert this. Turn on your speakers–there’s an introductory inverview with Liis Windischmann and Diane Pellini, both phenomenally beautiful models that challenge the standard definition of beauty.

If you have any doubt that normal sized women can be both stunning and beautiful, I suggest you check out the Fenomenal Calendar online. Click the corner of the calendar to turn the pages and see a year’s worth of beautiful, average-sized women.

Plus models are also beginning to be featured occasionally on the covers of prominent fashion magazines. A handful are starting even make a name for themselves. Fluvia is a perfect example. Check out this stunning latina model’s website here.  Just so you know, she’s a U.S. size 16.
Here are some others:

DLo, with Elite

http://www.suzlyons.com/

a photographer who does a lot of plus work-you’ll notice how alarming the occasional straight size model looks thrown into the mix

Isn’t it time that beauty of all sizes is acknowledged equally, particularly in the fashion industry?

“Struggling Ford Motor Company, which posted a record $12.7 billion net loss in 2006, gave its new CEO Alan Mulally $28 million for four months on the job, according to a statement filed Thursday. The details were made public as Ford moves ahead with plans to close plants and cut more than 30,000 hourly positions from the company in an effort to stem losses.”

http://money.cnn.com/2007/04/05/news/companies/ford_execpay/index.htm?cnn=yes

According to the poll on the article webpage, 20% voted that this $28 million, 4-month compensation package is “appropriate if he can turn Ford around” while a staggering 77% thinks it’s “inappropriate no matter what he does.”

If this is truly the case, why do obscenely large corporate bonuses/salaries still remain standard in American and international companies? If the common workers don’t like it, shouldn’t they try to do something? Mobilise? Anything. I mean wow, that’s horrendous. These people at the very top of corporate hierarchies are largely figureheads, and not a whole lot more. What do you think can be done?

“Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”
~Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

“‘We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard … and too damn cheap,’ he once suggested carving into a wall on the Grand Canyon, as a message for flying-saucer creatures.”

Read the full obit on CNN (though I’m sure there will be far better ones on other websites quite soon): http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/books/04/12/obit.vonnegut.ap/index.html

–H.H. the Dalai Lama

This seems like a very simple thing to do–to at least not harm others. How simple is it in execution though? Can one live a life without hurting others (and to Buddhists in particular this includes all sentient beings)? What changes would you have to make to even live a life in which you minimise your harmful impact on others?

Another quote by the current Dalai Lama that I rather like follows:

“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

I took the time a couple of weeks ago to help out with a small, startup nonprofit that teaches refugee children about photography, and this second quote reminds me of the experience with stunning accuracy. I helped a group of kids learn how to use disposable cameras, how to identify a subject, how to frame shots, basically how to look at the world through a camera. They were all practically jumping up and down with excitement at the prospect of taking a disposable camera home and using a whole roll of film for their first photo assignment, which was to take pictures that represent happiness to them. The following week, in return, I got to develop their first set of photos and see the world through their eyes. It was just about the coolest thing ever.

It’s about time something like this happened:

San Francisco is banning plastic shopping bags that are made with petroleum products. The move is predicted to save 450,000 gallons of oil per year and eliminate 1,400 tons of waste otherwise sent to landfills. Just imagine if this caught on in other major cities…

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/03/27/environment.baggs.reut/index.html

Like the article says, it’s not at all uncommon practice in other countries to ban or at least discourage the use of plastic bags by charging for them. When I spent a semester in Ireland, this was just the case. Rather than shell out extra money for plastic bags, I brought along my hiking pack and carried my groceries the mile to my dorm on my back each week. It was a good arrangement for both parties–it provided extra exercise for an otherwise Guinness-imbibing student, and cut back on a wasteful and largely useless product. (Unless you consider the good they can do when placed securely over the heads of idiots. Hmm, shouldn’t have said that…)

No, not Iraq–Africa!

Tonight I came across a great nonprofit program called Scenarios from Africa that gives children and young people in Africa the opportunity to educate themselves and others about AIDS by collaborating with directors to produce educational film shorts.

While the aim of all the films is quite obvious when you watch them, the many videos that you can view directly from the website are also very telling of the situation in Africa and what daily life is like there. Some are sad, some are quite funny–watch a couple if you have a few minutes; you’ll be glad that you did.

http://www.globaldialogues.org/homeEng.htm

“It turns out to be a frustratingly layered choice, one that implicates many other questions: What’s the most efficient way to grow food for all? Should farms be big or small, family- or corporate-run? How do your choices affect the planet? What tastes better? And then there’s that little matter of cancer.”

From: Eating Better than Organic, Ben Stechschulte / Redux for TIME

Stechschulte dives into the issue from a simple situation all of us might face in the grocery store: two apples. An organic from California and a local nonorganic. Which to buy? And for what reasons?

I’m an enthusiastic proponent of selective and informed consumerism. There’s great potential to affect change for the good of both consumers themselves and larger causes. So, without further rambling or preaching, here’s the article. It’s a good read and discusses some really important issues:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1595245,00.html

“As economist David Ranney writes, “There is a strong interconnection between capital mobility and the cheapening of the costs of production.” Mobility offers the opportunity [for companies] “to move to low cost areas” and “pit the peoples of different nations against one another.” By using the threat of moving as a club, “corporations can extract wage and work rule concessions from workers in their home country.” And mobility allows companies to challenge or escape such claims on value as “health care, welfare, and subsidized housing programs; worker and consumer safety standards; and environmental regulations.”"

-from Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up, Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, p. 52.

What are your thoughts or experiences with this?

Think it’s valid logic? Maybe not?

Do you see this happening in the company you work for? Are labor unions enough to counteract this trend? (I’m thinking not…)

Is this just “first-world” economic protectionist rhetoric?

Just tossing some ideas out there….I want to know what you think!