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dating Upstate Friday, September 13 2013
In the early afternoon, I drove over to Sarah the Vegan's rental place in West Hurley to help her get her printer communicating with her iBook. She's professional editor but helpless when it comes to technical matters. Without a working printer, she's been going to Catskill Art & Office Supplies to do printouts. The problem turned out to be that she'd changed her WiFi password with the move upstate, and now her wireless printer could no longer communicate with her WiFi router. Had I been able to reset the printer back to factory settings, I could have gotten her printer working wirelessly again, but for some reason I couldn't successfully get it to do that. But Sarah had also bought a USB cable and all I had to do was take it out of the package and connect it up and the printer worked. I don't know why she hadn't done this herself; she'd had precisely the thing she'd needed.
While I was there, I also showed her how to dump the dust from a Dyson vaccuum cleaner (which had come with the house; yet another indication that the landlords might not be as heterosexual as Marcus Bachmann). And then I unstuck the door of a shed out in back which seemed to have settled in a way that pinched the door inside its aperture. While we were back there, I noticed that Sarah's neighbors to the immediate north have an ATV mud bog in their back yard. Sarah says she heard them arguing the other day about the expense of the new pool, which, I probably don't need to add, is above-ground in nature. I also noticed a number of unusual antennas suggesting either an interest in ham radio or CB communication with distant truckers.
Sarah likes her place, but she feels like all her neighbors are watching her at all times. She actually felt like she had more privacy when she lived in the City.
Certainly, she suggested, she had more freedom of action in the fully-anonymous urban environment. Up here, it's hard to avoid shitting where you eat. She says she'd like to date, but who? There would surely be political blowback from dating one or more of the guys who work in the kitchen at the Garden Café (where she works once a week). But who else is there? She finds the local vegan scene overly-serious and not very fun. (Do we, for example, really only care about movie actors who are vegan?) She's met a few interesting guys in her yoga class, but they're either physically unattractive, broke, boring, or a combination of all three. It might be that hers is not a good age for being single Upstate, but my feeling is that she's being too picky. Our friend Deborah gets tons of ass, although she relies heavily on dating sites, something Sarah doesn't want to do.
Meanwhile, Wilma (the cat that Gretchen and I rehomed with Sarah over three years ago) was walking around making her presence known. Back when we had her, Wilma was fat, cantankerous, and had a persistent ear infection. Her ear recovered completely several years ago and she's mellowed out considerably, and now she's a thin remnant of her former corpulent glory. This is probably due to advancing age, as she is something like 16 now. But other than a new habit of pissing in unexpected places, she's doing okay.
When I was done at Sarah's place, I drove into Uptown Kingston and eventually ended up at Hudson Coffee Traders, where I sat in the back with my laptop and wasted my time the way I would have had I been at home. I was just there to give Gretchen some more alone time. She's been in need of that since our last trip to the Adirondacks.
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