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warm rains of late November
Tuesday, November 29 2005
Today came as a wonderful vacation from autumnal chill. Temperatures rose into the sixties and it was possible to throw the doors and open and let in fresh air. Such weather is too freakish to not be accompanied by precipitation, so the sun never shone and rain fell on occasion, sometimes fairly heavily. But it was a warm rain, the kind that is delightful to walk around in (though, were the same conditions to appear in July, they'd be construed as miserable).
I used the day mostly to further insulate sections of pipe connecting the solar panel to the basement. I stuffed a bunch of insulation between the joists above the boiler and then wrapped the pipes passing through the first floor office with fibreglass insulation, tin foil, and clear plastic. They're starting to look like the details of a set for a movie set on an intergalactic space cruiser.
Tonight Gretchen and I had dinner at La Pupuseria (the easiest trip to El Salvador we ever take) with J & X, a gay couple from High Falls. They're newish friends of Gretchen from the local LGBT and alternative publishing worlds with which Gretchen occasionally interacts. We'd been to their house warming this summer and seen them in Rosendale once. I love both these guys if for no other reason than that they know how to drink and aren't the least bit apologetic when they do so. Today was the first time I ever enjoyed a stiff drink at La Pupuseria and it took the form of a shot of tequila. I dug the way the waitress brought the bottle to our table to pour the shots, as if doing so has some sort of ritualistic significance in El Salvador (though I'm sure this was just to keep from spilling it).
Much of dinner conversation was about J's current relationship with his biological mother, who looked him up after he'd been raised to adulthood by a pair of adoptive parents. He learned that is father was a pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles and that his mother was once something of a Fenway Park groupie.
After dinner we all went across the street to a Hispanic grocery store. It's sort of like the Hispanic section of Hannaford's multicultural aisle, except there is also a Mexican telenovela on the teevee and a little black-haired boy playing roughly with Tonka trucks in the back.
Me and my temporarily very-cluttered laboratory. It's a staging area for solar deck work and electronic soldering, so it's always a mess.
In both pictures you can see the oak posts that help support the roof and the solar deck that sits atop it. That moth-eaten chair in the background is a popular resting place for cats when I grow weary of them hanging out in my lap.
Today was so warm that Julius was in full belly-exposure mode, for hours at a time.
I swear he's not dead.
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