|
|
|
Lordy Lou!
Tuesday, February 16 2010
Sometimes when I wake up in the morning after a night of too much alcohol or a day of too much forest product extraction, I jokingly exclaim, "Lordy Lou! I feel like I just turned 42!" Well, this morning I actually did turn 42, so from now on I'll have to reserve that expression for mornings when I wake up feeling especially well-rested and able to face the day.
Gretchen is good about making it so that I experience my birthdays without having to lift a finger. She did all the dishes from last night (though that's usually my job) and then she made us a pizza for breakfast. Unfortunately, though, it was snowing and had already accumulated a couple inches, so I was fretting about whether or not the Hurley dump would be open. If it wasn't, that would mean that all that shit we crammed into our cars yesterday would have to stay there until Friday. Gretchen had called the Hurley Highway department to find out whether or not the dump was open, and we received confirmation that it was, for the time being at least, while Gretchen was out in the forest walking the dogs. Actually, she was only walking Eleanor, as Sally (who is nearing 15 years of age) had abandoned the walk very early (as she has been doing lately).
So once Gretchen returned, we convoyed yet again to the dump, this time with, as Joe Biden might say, success. Snow was still falling, making it the bleakest dump-run weather we'd ever experienced by a good bit. But there they were, the cheerful dump guys, this time outfitted in parkas. As always, it took little time for us to dispose of our crap there. And there was even a random golden retriever for Sally and Eleanor to play with.
I had my first slice of birthday pizza once I got home from the dump.
After spending a solid afternoon hip-deep in delimited-string-fed Javascript, Gretchen returned from the prison and we drove up to Hudson. The plan was for me to have a birthday meal at the Hudson transmitter of Mexican Radio. This was partly to make up for the fact that Gretchen's plan to have a birthday meal at Mexican Radio was thwarted by the length of James Cameron's Avatar (a movie that I have almost completely forgotten about after less than a month).
An additional mission for Hudson was to get a composter. We'd been browsing composters on Amazon.com and learned from the user review section that our (or, actually, my) favorite composter is sold for much cheaper by Tractor Supply, a farm-supply franchise whose nearest outlet is near Hudson (there's also a Tractor Supply in Staunton, Virginia, which I visited less than a year ago).
It was all of us over 40 pounds: Sally, Eleanor, Gretchen, and me. The dogs go crazy when they don't get to do stuff so we try to bring them along when we can. On this trip, we'd never be any particular place for all that long, and it wasn't too cold, so we brought the dogs. We quickly found our composter at Tractor Supply (we went for the smaller variety of the model we liked, which fit easily in the back of the Subaru). After we'd bought the composter, we let the dogs run around in the snowy parking lot. Snow had stopped falling back in Hurley but it was still coming down in Hudson, suggesting that we had caught up with the north-bound storm front.
Mexican Radio was suprisingly crowded for a snowy Tuesday. I'd forgotten how beautiful it is in there, with half its second floor ripped out to make a cavernous front room of ancient brick walls accented here and there with gorgeous iron crosses (perhaps salvaged from a Honduran village destroyed by a mudslide).
Prices at Mexican Radio are surprisingly high for a Mexican restaurant, particularly one so far upstate. My vegan burrito, for example, was $17, and it was noticeably smaller than the plump $4 ghetto burritos I used to eat in San Diego. Still, it was what it was. The food was great and the ambience was worth something too. And Gretchen had some sort of pre-paid coupon that reduced what we paid for the meal to something less than $40.
The tequila in my margaritas must not have been very good, because though I didn't drink much more than just two of those tonight, the next day I was to have a fairly substantial hangover.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?100216 feedback
previous | next |
