|
|
|
lordy live
Saturday, February 16 2013
Today was my 45th birthday (the couplet being "Lordy Live"), and to celebrate Gretchen and I had coffee despite the fact that it was not a Sunday. Later in the morning Gretchen also made me a sausage, mushroom, and vegan ricotta pizza to which I added Goya pickled jalapeños, which I sliced and diced.
For a good chunk of the afternoon, a guy who is publishing one of Gretchen's books came over and they talked about publishing minutia. What might have been an eight minute meeting lasted something like an hour and a half, because that's how it is when one meets with certain people. The publisher also brought over his wife and his dog ???, a charming elderly black Pit-mix who, we were warned, "Just wants to lie around listening to Benny Goodman records." Ramona tries to bring out the inner-puppy in everyone, but ??? didn't want to play those games. She did seem to like me, though, and licked my face on several occasions when I passed through.
After a birthday bath, I was ready for a birthday night on the town. Sarah the Vegan came over, and the three of us carpooled to the Rondout, where we had a reservation at Mole Mole (the closest thing to a good Mexican restaurant in the area). The place was packed, mostly with young adults with festive spirits. I saw lots of margaritas being drunk, and that was part of what I'd come for. We ordered a large pitcher of las margaritas. Eventually we were joined by KMOCA Michæl and his wife Carrie, though they were in a glum mood because they'd had to euthanize their cat today after a long battle with forehead cancer. Our waitress was not nearly as attentive as one wants a waitress to be, and our baskets of chips seemed small given the number of people eating from them. But the food was, as always, fairly good. I got a veganized version of the veggie burrito with a side of guacamole, and to that I added some sour cream Gretchen had somehow made from scratch.
At some point I opened the presents that had been brought. Michæl had put together a collection of mineral samples for me: 225,000,000 year old salt crystals from the Permian of New Mexico, a sample of borosilicate glass of the sort that might one day be used to seal up radioactive wastes, and a chunk of the Nantan Meterorite that fell on China in 1516. At first I thought the sample of borosilicate glass actually contained radioactive waste, and it made me ironically giddy to think that the nuclear industry had finally solved its waste disposal problem by simply dumping it into the mineral collections of nerdy eight year olds. My other present was from Sarah; she'd bought me a nice little bottle of Maker's Mark bourbon, and it's hard to go wrong with that. As for Gretchen, she'd enrolled me in a blacksmithing class administered by Ulster County Community College, though it's uncertain when it begins. (She'd tried to do this last year as well, but the class was canceled due to an insufficiency of students.) Gretchen also got me a copy of Handmade Woodstock Houses, that book I'd been thumbing through in the Golden Notebook on St. Valentine's Day.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?130216 feedback
previous | next |
