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about that new apartment
Friday, September 2 2016
location: near Sligo Creek Park, Silver Spring, Montgomery County, Maryland
Gretchen and I had left for Maryland after my workday so that we'd be at her parents' house by noon today, when my Friday workday would begin. The idea was that I would set up my laptop and put in my workday there, and then we could begin my labor day weekend immediately afterwards.
This morning we could hear a couple guests conversing with Gretchen's parents down in the living room. They were mostly discussing a recent article in the Wall Street Journal discussing the Watergate, which opens with a mention of the very apartment Gretchen's parents will be moving into after they unburden themselves of the house we were all presently in, one they've lived in since 1978. The apartment they are buying turns out to have been the residence of Attorney General John Mitchell when he was masterminding the Watergate break-in. Other residents of the Watergate mentioned in the article include Bob & Elizabeth Dole, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Monica Lewinsky.
Gretchen and I joined them downstairs, and there were a few jokes about Monica Lewinsky exchanged, though they were all fairly tame. Eventually we all had a light breakfast in the dining room, where we mostly discussed the reality that there is no way for people employed in the middle-class jobs of yesteryear to be trained for the high-paid jobs of today. Sure, there's a demand for robot maintainers and programmers, but the skills required to do those things are rather different from the dull, repetitive tasks that have been automated out of existence or fled to China.
Soon thereafter, I had my laptop set up on an unused desk in Gretchen's father's office. I borrowed one of his monitors, allowing me to work in my preferred on-the-road configuration. Today's remote workplace task was fairly modest in scale, though it did require a fair amount of setup (I would be assembling data from two databases that aren't designed to be queried together). And even then, I found the queries necessary to populate columns in a semi-temporary workspace table taking a very long time to run. This opened up time in my workday for things like helping Gretchen's parents wrestle a heavy carpet out into the sunlight (to combat moths) and walking the dogs in Sligo Creek Park with Gretchen.
I also poured some hot saline solution into my right ear out on the astroturf deck (the roof above the indoor lap pool). The infection in there isn't too bad, but there's an occasional annoying itch in there, and when I rest my head on that ear, there's often a dull ache from the sore that appears to have developed on the inside of the tragus.
Towards the end of my workday, Ca (who was in the West Hollywood offices) reported that he was the only one there doing any actual work. So I had no problem cutting out of work early to join Gretchen and her parents for dinner at a new vegan soul food restaurant called Evolve in nearby Tacoma Park. Our waiter seemed like a recent immigrant from Africa and his language skills were poor, so negotiating an IPA from the tap required a couple visits to the bar. I convinced Gretchen to order a cocktail (to "celebrate" the recent completion of the solar deck brace project), but she found it foul and undrinkable. I liked it better than than the IPA I'd ordered, so I drank it as well, getting a reasonably-large liquor buzz on top of the 50 mg dose of Vyvanse I'd taken at around 5:00pm. This put me in a good mood for talking about such things as the looming potential disaster of a Trump presidency. As for the food, my "fried chickun" and macaroni salad was great, though the black beans really needed something, and I'd neglected to bring my hot sauce.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160902 feedback
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