|
|
|
three weeks of entropy
Thursday, May 26 2011
Tomorrow Gretchen and I would be boarding another airplane and flying to a vacation destination, again leaving our house in the care of Sarah the Vegan. This time we'd be going to our 20th reunion at Oberlin College (since I didn't actually graduate, it would technically only be Gretchen's reunion, though it still had the potential to be every bit as much of a reunion for me). While Gretchen was off at work, it was my job to wage another cleaning jihad to roll back the three weeks' worth of entropy that had accumulated since my last such jihad. (We mostly only clean the house for the benefit of others.)
Ray came over in the late afternoon to return my old gas-powered lawn mower (which I'd loaned to him but which he'd been unable to get functioning). Ray was excited about having just bought a used $400 lawn tractor to simplify the maintenance of his nearly acre of yard. (I mow an area less than a tenth that size.) Additionally, Ray was excited about having just accepted an offer for a well-paid position working on a loading dock for a Manhattan-based delivery service that somehow gets turbocharged by the World Wide Web. What exactly this implied visa vis his living arrangements (now that he lives in Hurley, not New York City) had perhaps not yet fully been explored. Remember, only a year ago Ray was the guy who was living in one of our guest rooms after taking an upstate job well before closing on an upstate house. No matter how good or uncomplicated his news is, Ray tends to have second thoughts, and these often cripple or retard his decisionmaking. Today, though, he seemed about as close to elated as he ever gets. He was in a mood sufficiently celebratory to drink two Imperial IPAs, something he has rarely done since a doctor prescribed a quadruple bypass and scared him straight regarding his diet.
Gretchen was making a dinner (a bean-and-tomatillo stew) for which she persuaded Ray to stay, and he even drove to the Kingston bus station to pick up Sarah the Vegan when she arrived. As always, Sarah brought a surprisingly amount of luggage with her. [By contrast, tomorrow I would be carrying everything I needed in Oberlin, including a netbook, in a single small laptop bag.]
After dinner, we all watched Jeopardy and an episode of the Office.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?110526 feedback
previous | next |
