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go for it policy
Wednesday, October 26 2005
Gretchen caved in last night before bed and turned on the heat so we wouldn't have another night filled with exclamations of the neologism "chillsburgers!"
There was a little sun this morning so Gretchen and I decided to take the dogs for a walk at Onteora Lake. When we arrived, we found only one other car in the Onteora Lake parking lot, and Gretchen looked in its window to look for evidence that this person might have a dog. Sure enough, there it was: doggy biscuits! About a half mile down the trail we ran across Tucker, an English Cocker Spaniel who liked to bark as he played. Eleanor isn't normally much of a barker, but if barking floats your boat, she can bark with the best of them.
The nearest business to the Onteora Lake entrance road on Route 28 is Catskill Mountain Coffee, one of Gretchen's favorite coffee places even though she doesn't drink coffee. She often goes to Onteora Lake with somebody like CAS Kathy to walk the dogs and then grab a snack and do a little light reading at Catskill Mountain Coffee. It's a unique snacking place because it generally allows well-behaved dogs to hang out inside (but don't tell the health inspector).
As we were coming back from our walk, the air along the trail was filled with fragrance of carmelized sugar. But where could it be coming from? There are no actual bakeries in the strip zoning along nearby Route 28. Then we figured it out, based on the huge clouds billowing from Catskill Mountain Coffee. Wednesday is a roasting day, and what we were smelling was diluted roasting smoke. Up close, the smoke of roasting coffee is acrid enough to put you off coffee for a couple days, but when mixed with plenty of air it smells like carmelized sugar.
We hung out for about an hour in Catskill Mountain Coffee, spending most of our time in a cozy place in the corner with a big couch, lots of reading material, and a couple of huge south-facing windows whose greenhouse effects put the entirety of my solar project to shame. I took advantage of the presence of a recent copy of The New York Times to read the Op-Ed page, the only part of the paper that you must pay for to read online. Unfortunately, there was no Paul Krugman on this particular Op-Ed page, and I've been suffering from a mild case of Krugman withdrawal ever since Times Select began.
After that I flipped through a Time Life coffee table book documenting the Soviet Union in the year 1987. Ah, now that was a good year, smack dab between Chernobyl and Glasnost.
At one point I asked one of the employees what their coffee refill policy was and he said "go for it." Then he elaborated, "Drink it 'til it comes out your ass, that's our policy."
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