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anachronistic meals in Rosendale
Friday, October 19 2012
Today was a rainy one, and the rain was nearly torrential at times, causing most of the normal flooding symptoms (though the ground was never saturated enough to cause flooding in the basement via the well's power conduit, something that only happens one every two years or so, usually from snow melt or a tropical storm).
Despite the rain, I made occasional forays to the greenhouse upstairs to work on inside projects. I needed to install a couple shelves along the tops of horizontally-oriented windows, and one of these had to be wide enough for cats to walk on comfortably so it could serve as an interim step from the wide shelf beneath the upstairs' window array (29 inches above the floor) to the catform (over five feet above the floor).
This evening Gretchen and I drove down to Rosendale to pick up Nancy after she'd spent a week down in the City doing graphic design for a project that will be closing up shop at the end of the month. Though the project is doomed, it nevertheless provides Nancy and Ray money until it is shut down for good. While in Rosendale, the three of us went to the Red Brick Tavern for a dinner of vegan American comfort food. The Red Brick Tavern caters to a mix of college kids and conservative-looking white people, though they do have a portobello sandwich on the menu and their waffle fries are very good. Most of what we saw coming out of the kitchen were steaks the size and shape of Danielle Steel novels. To Gretchen and me, it was an almost anachronistic thing to behold, as if we were watching an episode of Mad Men. It was hard to believe that more than a trace number of Americans are still brain dead enough to think of a big juicy steak as the perfect thing to order for at a restaurant. Ignore the health reasons for avoiding such a meal; why would you want to demonstrate such bland desires to your Friday night date? I saw a guy eating his steak across the table from a woman who looked a little too hip to be impressed by such things.
Poor Nancy; she's not a big fan of big slabs of mushroom in her sandwiches, so she ordered a salad instead. But she missed out; those portobello sandwiches are good; they're overstuffed and each contains a delicious layer of cooked spinach (among many other things).
After the meal, we ended up having to drive Nancy all the way to the bus station in Kingston so she could retrieve her car. Normally Ray would have taken her to the station at their leisure, but under the terms of the pre-sentence guidelines resulting from his recent DUI arrest, he can only to work and back (and Kingston isn't between where he lives and where he works).
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