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exactly where I'd left it
Friday, May 12 2017
Today was a relatively leisurely Friday. I'd managed to finish (well, for the time being) an important new system designed to crawl through contact data and flag errors, and I was now in the phase of obsessively tweaking it. [REDACTED]
This evening Gretchen, who had been working all day at the Woodstock bookstore with Neville the Dog, wanted to have dinner at the Garden Café, partly to celebrate our 14th wedding anniversary. My hair was still a mess after all the bathing I'd been doing that didn't end in hair washing, so I took a shower before driving to Woodstock with Ramona. On the way, I realized I'd left my laptop in the footwell of the backseat of the Prius, and Gretchen always leaves that car unlocked whenever it's parked in anywhere but in a major city. What if someone had reached in and grabbed that laptop bag? That laptop has FileZilla installed on it with all the passwords to all the servers I manage, and it has copies of databases that are probably worth hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. The risk of it being stolen was small, and the risk of anyone knowing the value of what is on it was much smaller, but these risks were enough to put me in a low-level panic, and I made it to Woodstock in record time. After parking in the little lot at the end of Old Forge Road, I ran up to the Garden Café's garden, where Gretchen was introducing Neville to some other dogs (Neville had just scratched the ground so aggressively that he'd flung dirt into a woman's to-go container full of leftovers). I asked where the Prius was, and she pointed over to Tinker Street. Mercifully, my computer bag was exactly where I'd left it, and I could relax.
Gretchen and I ordered two different sandwiches and exchanged halves, because she likes to do things like that. I generally humor her when she wants to do such things, but when I'm eating some specific thing, I don't generally want to eat less of it so I can eat some of something else. This is why I find multiple courses an aggravating and unnecessary complication.
By this point, Ramona had joined us at our outdoor table. She can't be trusted off-leash in a scenario like this, though apparently Bandit, a svelt black dog with decidedly unfloppy ears, can be. He belonged to the next table over, and he and Neville had already met. Bandit was a boy, so we expected Ramona to like him, but she kept curling her upper lip at him in a menacing manner. She would only do this when at the end of her leash, though, so it might've been a manifestation of leash aggression. Ramona was better with a little dog-curious girl whose parents encouraged her to toddle up to her, though Ramona did indeed knock her down at one point.
I should mention that it was a little cold to be dining outside, especially as the sun fell behind the trees.
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