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beer and tweaks
Saturday, September 11 2010
I was out in the yard collecting tomatoes this morning with a cordless phone in my pocket because the plan was for Penny or David to call and arrange a morning of yardsaling. But their kid makes such activities difficult, so the plans fell apart.
Later this afternoon, though, Penny and David came over so we could do some last-minute tweaks to the redesign of David's site. Penny had done the original design, and she had some issues with leading and spacing and various icons I'd used that were the wrong size. At first it seemed we were dreading getting work, and procrastinated for quite awhile around a bottle of fancy hard cider (it was five percent alcohol and reminded me of the mead my mother used to make). Inevitably, though, we had to get going on what we'd arranged to do. Since young Milo was such a distraction (lowering our collective IQ by 50% in a "Harris Bergeron" kind of way), David took him on a brief yardsaling foray and Penny and I trudged up to the laboratory. I think both Penny and I feared we would have some sort of professional clash over the website, but it wasn't that way at all. One of the skills I demonstrated during my three and half years as a cubicle-dwelling dot-com employee was working well with women (whether they were project managers, sales people, or graphic designers). I'm not proud of this but I think it's true: lurking somewhere inside me is a macho desire to impress women with my talents, and nothing impresses a project manager or graphic designer more than deftly correcting, in real time, some little annoyance that they want corrected. This is especially true with esoteric web code. It's just objectively impressive to make a few quick edits in the middle of a long rambling indecipherable text file, upload, and then watch graphic elements snap into some hoped-for arrangement. So Penny and I worked well together. I'd edit a .CSS file or perhaps a PHP library, good things would happen, and she'd squeal with just the right amount of delight, sometimes even asking how I could possibly know what I am doing and where to edit. The truth about my line of work is that I mostly prefer working alone, but I only enjoy making fussy little graphical corrections when I can make it into a performance. Otherwise it's a dismal, dreary job.
At some point Penny asked if I had some beers, and so soon enough alcohol was added to our work environment. That made it even more like recreation. In a way it now had all the benefits of socializing, but I was getting work done too!
And then David came back with Milo and all of us were in the laboratory. The laboratory is probably one of the least child-safe environments you can imagine, and Penny kept having to put various sharp objects up on shelves. These included a 24 inch long spade bit, a wood chisel, and a hole saw. At some point Milo discovered my electric guitar, and so we let him strum away at that with amplification. What 14 month old kid wouldn't enjoy doing that repetitively for a very very long time?
Later on Nancy (of Ray and Nancy) showed up in the laboratory, and then there was Gretchen too. It was the most number of people that had been in my laboratory simultaneously since our wedding seven and a half years ago. Nancy and Gretchen were about to head off to some sort of Planned Parenthood benefit in Woodstock. The venue for that benefit was to be that new ostentatiously impersonal log-cabin compound on Rock City Road near the center of Woodstock. There they would be wowed by all sorts of conspicuous consumption including copper walls and copper ceilings. If anyone knows any heroin junkies in need of some quick copper in the Hudson Valley, one could do a lot worse than pealing off the copper fucking garage doors at that place.
Penny and David had to pick up a friend named Jim at the bus station and asked if I wanted to go out with them for dinner. At first I was reluctant and they joked that I wanted to stay home to masturbate. But then at the last minute I decided to join them. The thing about friends with babies is that you usually have a lot of time to make last minute decisions, as it takes forever for them to load their kids into their vehicles.
Jim is some sort of television producer working on one of those Discovery Channel shows. He's sort of between things in the relationship department, and Penny and David thought it would be good for him to get out of the city for awhile.
We ended up eating at El Danzante, a very authentic Mexican restaurant on Broadway in Kingston where I'd never dined before. It's the kind of place where you feel yourself reflexively answering the waitstaff in Spanish, even though they address you in reasonably-good English.
The veggie burrito looked like it would be fairly easy to make vegan, so I ordered it without sour cream. In the end it came with a light sprinkling of melted cheese and some parmesan on the black beans, but this amount of dairy was too trivial to raise a stink about. I ate it all and it was delicious. Everybody else had various sorts of animal-based foods ranging from red snapper (Penny) to chicken molé (David) to something based on beef (Jim Lonelyheart).
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