This morning Wendy, Gretchen's friend from the East Side of Manhattan, came to visit en route from her vacation house somewhere in coastal New England. Wendy is an old school Northeastern WASP, and roughly thirty years older than Gretchen, but they share a mutual appreciation for poetry and the arts. Furthermore, Wendy is unusually earthy for someone who lives in a building featuring a doorman. She often refers to herself as "the old bitch."
In the past Wendy used to always bring me an expensive cheese when she came to visit, but now that ours is a vegan household, she brought me a jar of fancy mustard instead.
Part of the reason Wendy came to our place was to use it as a brief writers' retreat, one of the uses for which Gretchen has always wanted our guest rooms to be put.
Gretchen has also wanted to make more use of her basement library/office this August. For various reasons, she didn't get to go to a writers' retreat this summer, so she's having her own little self-enforced writers' retreat instead. I've been trying not to bother her when she's down there.
At some point I went down to the trampoline (northeast of the house), the place where I want to set up a winter-season greenhouse with an integrated composting toilet. I managed to move the trampoline about fifty feet to the south, somewhere atop the raised rectangular mound that is our septic field.
This evening Wendy took us out to dinner and a movie in Woodstock. This meant that dinner was at the Garden Café, since that is pretty much the only place where Gretchen is happy to eat outside the house. But truth be known, I much prefer Gretchen's vegan cooking to the food available there.
We were sitting outdoors and a thunderstorm cut our meal short.
The movie was Tell No One at Tinker Street Theatre. It was in French, with subtitles. It was reasonably entertaining, though it fell into a somewhat predictable pattern, and most of the reveal took place in the form of a rambling dialogue between our hero and a guy holding a gun. I'm sure the reason it's been getting so many good reviews is the ending, which is the most emotionally-manipulative instance of bittersweet I have ever seen. And I'd love to get a copy of whatever song it was that played when the credits rolled. I think it was the one French-language song in the whole soundtrack. (The only song I knew on the soundtrack was U2's "With or Without You.")
