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tying up valuable storefront
Saturday, April 15 2006
This afternoon Ray and Nancy returned from their travels, having been particularly taken with Troy and parts of the drive back south along the high bluffs of the east bank of the Hudson. Gretchen had heard somewhere that Troy's population is divided into three equal parts: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students & faculty, crackheads, and some third group Gretchen can't remember.
The plan tonight was for us to go eat Italian food. Pasta would constitute something of an early break in the matzah-only Passover routine that Gretchen and (to some extent) I have been grooving on for the past few days. (It's amazing how much matzah I can eat without even thinking about it; it's a reflex at this time of year that goes along well with the other novelties of the season, such as leaving the front door wide open all day long.)
We drove out to an Italian place on Route 28 between Hurley Mountain Road and 209, that place we discovered last time Ray and Nancy visited. But it was closed for Easter so we were forced to go into Uptown Kingson. Our interest was mostly Italian, but all the places we ducked into were expensive or had weak vegetarian options. So we opted instead for what we imagined would be cut-rate Mexican at a new restaurant called something like Rebecca's Tacos. It was a cheerful place with vintage Mexican-themed posters and a floor colorfully tiled with bright 12 inch linoleum squares. The two women working there were both gringos, and one was thickly-slathered in tattoos. The food was appealingly inexpensive, so we all ordered burritos with various extras.
I could tell something was amiss when they came out pre-cut into halves and not swaddled in aluminum foil. Biting into one, the problem was immediately obvious. There was absolutely no flavor, not even the kind provided by a simple dash of salt. This isn't to say the burrito wasn't in some small way authentic; I had identically-flavorless beans on many occasions recently in Guatemala (though they were all made by one person). Suffice it to say, this was a real disappointment. Kingston really doesn't need another useless establishment tying up valuable storefront. Happily, the rapid demise of a restaurant as bad as Rebecca's is not a foolish thing to predict.
In the evening a bunch of people came over, including Penny and David and two of their friends. It was all very raucous and festive, but for some reason I didn't really have the necessary energy to engage. After explaining how my solar panel worked for the dozenth time I wondered if perhaps it would be a good idea to prepare some sort of printout I can just hand to people who ask about it. By the way, usually when people ask about the panel it doesn't matter if I carefully explain that all it does is heat water. They want to know how exactly it feeds into our electrical supply and whether or not we can "sell electricity back" to our power utility. Tonight, though, the guy I was talking to knew enough not to go there.
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