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beans like bony fish Wednesday, October 13 2010
In the late afternoon our friends Jenny and Doug came over because they were in the neighborhood and because Jenny was feeling glum after a number of downer events, including having to euthanize their dog Frieda (an old patched-together mutt who had looked sort of like a white version of Sally). They'd just come back from a dismal experience at a fancy bed and breakfast that had offered to donate some things to their animal sanctuary. After having rented a U-Haul and everything, they found that what was actually expected of them was that they would remove and dispose of a huge volume of nearly-worthless junk (including such bulky items as window air conditioning units and large CRT-based television sets). These differences of expectations, coupled with a condescending "I'm rich, but I have no idea what you class belong to" attitude led to an angry exchange that Doug almost certainly did his best to quell. Jenny and Doug ended up leaving with nothing, the U-Haul rental having been a complete waste.
At our house Gretchen had just finished processing a mess of vegetables brought over yesterday by our neighbor Andrea (who gardens part-time for someone else). So when Jenny and Doug arrived, Gretchen was just bringing one of her savory tofu-and-chard pies out of the oven. There were other items as well, such as string beans baked in tomato and garlic. That latter dish was delicious, though unfortunately there was a lot of inedible roughage in those green beans and eating them was rather like eating an extremely bony fish.
Our gathering didn't go entirely smoothly; it seems Gretchen and Jenny are on two different sides of a personnel dispute over at the sanctuary, but Gretchen couldn't really get far into explaining her perspective before Jenny started freaking out. It was a bad time for such discussions, her being so fragile and all. Again, it was Doug whose job it was to pound flat the ruffled feathers.
After Jenny and Doug went home and Gretchen had driven off to the prison to teach an evening class, I went to pick up this week's CSA veggies. I continued on out to Home Depot to get supplies for a replacement for the greenhouse door. Originally the plan was to make a door out of treated lumber and treated plywood, but while there it occurred to me that a better flat material would be Durock (a concrete-and-fiber material similar to Hardibacker and Wonderboard). I've had good luck with that as an outdoor material in the past, so why not sheathe the greenhouse door with it?
One thing that has struck me about the mainstream media coverage of the rescue of the miners trapped for months in a Chilean mine is this: there's mainstream media coverage of a human drama that doesn't involve any endangered Americans. Perhaps after 224 years we've finally joined the global community.
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