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makeshift arbor
Saturday, June 18 2005
Last night I'd noticed a wild grape vine was growing beside the path leading up to the farm road, so Julius the cat and I had gathered a number of down tree trunks to fashion into a quickie arbor. This morning I completed that arbor as just a simple tripod with a crossmember, all held together with stout pieces of wire and a screw.
Later we went on a walk down the farm road. As usual Clarence came along and (being a cat lacking the endurance of a dog or a human) had to be carried much of the way. But this ended up being a two mile hike where we missed an important turn in the trail and had to bushwhack through the forest. Then it began to rain.
Thankfully, though, it didn't rain for long, because this was the day of Catskill Animal Sanctuary's annual shindig. It's a fundraising festival featuring live music, face painting, hayrides, animal tours, lectures, etc, and Gretchen had been responsible for its publicity. I went for a couple hours in the early afternoon and spent a good amount of that time trying to put together an improvised PA system using a regular household stereo and a computer speaker as a microphone. It worked, but the distortion was so bad it couldn't be used.
As I was buying a waxed paper cup of wine at a table staffed by the father of the sanctuary's director, I asked, "Is it for a good cause?" "That's what they tell me!" he said.
Despite the threat of rain, this year's shindig seemed to be going better than the two previous ones I'd attended. I could tell something was going right when I'd found myself inside a chain of cars entering the grounds as I'd arrived.
On the way to the shindig I'd stopped at Lowes to pick up some paint and a few tools for ongoing projects. Gretchen has a plan to paint one of the triangle-shaped teevee room walls sage green, so I'd mixed the appropriate color using acrylics and painted it on a scrap of cardboard before setting out. It would provide a much more trustworthy sample than, say, a photograph.
At this point I suppose I could write about how we dined at the Spillway House, which is in the former residence of the Terrapin (out in the wilds of West Hurley). I could write about the surprisingly delicious tempura-style sushi or how I managed to snag the check out from in front of Gretchen's father, denying him his customary role of paying for everything whenever he's in town. Or I could write about how most of the others in the restaurant looked somehow strangely Republican.
Me and my arbor.
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