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going down on grandma
Saturday, July 1 2017
The other day I saw some species of wren that appeared to be attempting to nest in the copper "dragon skull" sculpture over the entrance of our front door. I later determined that this was also the bird that had been making an earsplittingly-loud warbling tune through the nearby bathroom window. Today I realized the nest wasn't being built in the copper sculpture, which doesn't afford enough protection from the rain. Instead, the wrens were working in the open end of the bathroom exhaust duct. Normally a little flap covers the duct except when the exhaust fan is blowing, but that fan hasn't been connected in years and the little flap now appears to be stuck in the open position. The duct is three inches across, which must be within the range that wrens seek, since they've evidently concluded that it will work. By this evening I'd concluded that this species of wren must be house wren, due mostly to their loud, complicated song.
After a relatively brief Saturday-morning coffee, Gretchen and I drove down to the Ulster County Fairgrounds west of New Paltz to attend the Tiny House Festival (for which Gretchen had won free tickets offered on the radio). We were forced to park unusually far from the actual event due to flooding in the closer parking field. As we found our way to the will-call area, I asked Gretchen why something that is little more than a marketing event for expensive products has an admission fee at all. Gretchen pointed out that all festivals are little more than retail opportunities. There's also the expense of paying all the people running the festival and paying rent on the venue.
It was a beautiful sunny day and a little hot, so the tiny houses superficially appeared as through they might provide some shade. But one usually had to wait in long lines before getting a chance to go inside. The longer the line, the bigger the seemingly bigger the reward. The tiny varied in terms of size and shape, but they mostly had efficient layouts, with some prioritizing kitchens and others prioritizing bathrooms. In general, though, there was a sameness to all the tiny houses. They were all in a form factor designed to be attached to a truck and moved from one place to the next. For this reason, they tended to have simple rectangular layouts, uncomplicated roofs, and only a single door. I would've liked to see more tiny houses built with natural materials in funky designs. For Gretchen and me, our favorite of the tiny houses was also the smallest: a tiny teardrop-shaped camper whose one room could be a dining room, kitchen, or a bedroom (I forget how the bathroom was handled in that one).
Somewhere along the way, we ran into one of Gretchen's old colleagues in the Bard Prison Initiative, someone Gretchen hasn't talked to since she was squeezed out of the program back in 2012. While they were catching up, her husband I talked at some length about the greenhouse, the tiny house at our place. I told about how it was passively solar-heated and about its enormous thermal masses, though I didn't go into all the rock excavation I've done. The guy is a builder, so this stuff interested him (indeed, that was why he and his wife had come to the Tiny House Festival, though he did remark at all the off-gassing he was smelling and by that he didn't mean blooming onion farts).
Me with a teardrop tiny today at the Tiny House Festival.
At some point Gretchen and I went to a drink concession that was selling alcoholic beverages. I had a mediocre double IPA and Gretchen got some sort of fruity cocktail that she really liked. We wandered into a cavernous space being used as a lecture hall. A woman was on stage telling about how she'd downsized her life and moved into a "tiny" (in her case, it was one of those teardrops we'd marveled at). Her story took a gripping detour when she related how her tiny had been stolen and the Facebook campaign to recover it. Ultimately it was found at a camp in the woods surrounded by other stolen property, with indications that it had been used as a meth lab, among other things. Jesus, methamphetamines must not be hard to make considering all the idiots who make it.
After sneaking out of that lecture, I was suddenly famished, so I got some tempura mushrooms at a food stand. I don't know what the tempura had been made from and I didn't ask. All I can say is that it was exactly the kind of greasy, salty food I was craving.
The last tiny houses we looked at were a series of buses remade into recreational vehicles. These all had an 80s Aerosmith tourbus feel to them, and they lacked the fancy touches of the tiny houses. There were no marble countertops or steampunk sinks in those things. They also tended to have a funky smell that was perhaps even less welcome than the offgassing aldehydes. I didn't need to see much of that.
Back at our non-tiny house in Hurley, we had three hours of downtime before the next big thing: Ray's 50th birthday, which he would be celebrating in the most unlikeable village in America: Rhinebeck, NY.
Shortly into our drive to Rhinebeck, just a little north of where Dug Hill Road meets Hurley Mountain Road, I saw a medium-sized black snake in the center of the road. I had Gretchen stop and I jumped out. Using my flip flop, I managed to urge the snake towards the east side of the road, though he became increasingly belligerent, striking at me with his bright red mouth. Once under the car, he refused to go further, so I had to get a stick, which was successful at getting him out of the road. While I was doing these things, our friend Kate (who would also be going to Ray's birthday celebration) also drove through, stopped, and half-jokingly asked us if anything was wrong.
Rhinebeck was exactly as I'd remembered it last time through: lots of conventional-looking older white people doing convential older white-people things. A good number of these assholes (particularly those at Fosters Pub with its racist wall decorations) had probably voted for Donald J. Trump and now they were eating foods rich in cholesterol and saturated fats (which a health system might actually be wise to encourage, given that they tend to lead to non-lingering deaths).
Our destination was Cinnamon Indian Restaurant, though walking there from our car, we saw the brand new Aba's Falafel, which we hadn't even known would be opening. Gretchen had to go in there and talk to Cathy and Roy. They'll still be doing their thing at all the local farmers' markets, but their brick & mortar presence in the village I hate most just made that village ten times better (though you don't get far multiplying even very large numbers by zero).
Our party was only six people, and we sat at one end of the long elevated "common table." Most of us ordered drinks; for some reason I made a miscalculation and ordered the English Rose cocktail, which has a strong dose of rose water in it. I'm not a fan of the smell (or flavor) of roses, which (for me) have unwelcome antiquated associations. I guess I figured the gin would counteract all that, but it did not. Summarizing the flavor of my drink, I said it was "like going down on grandma." The spicy soup was pretty good, though the other things were just kind of meh. My entree was fairly spicy, but you can't really expect good Indian food in a village catering to rich Republicans. In terms of gifts, several people had brought art history books (Gretchen brought two from the downsizing of her parents' library). I'd gotten Ray an inexpensive OBD II reader I'd bought online, because one of the main reasons he has for visiting me so that I can use my OBD II reader to reset his check engine light. I'd bought it back before his white 1998 Subaru died (due to an expensive problem with the differential), but Ray said that he still had a use for it; the check engine light is on on his other Subaru as well (as they always seem to be).
At some point in the meal, Gretchen ran across the street to have another conversation with Cathy about her first day of business in a brick & mortar store. I was left to settle up the bill while the five others hurried off to a dance performance at Bard. (Gretchen knew better than to try to get me to go.) Only six of us had been dining, but somehow the bill came to over $300 with tip. That's another reason to avoid Rhinebeck: there's actually a surcharge for being in a miserable village full of selfish white people.
I drove home alone in Prius, listening to the radio to hold the position in the Shittown podcast Gretchen and I have been listening to. I had on the beginning of WDST's Heavy Light Show, which I caught moments before a David Bowie song entitled "Stay." I was unfamiliar with the song, but I could tell that it was either David Bowie of an aging musical genius who sounded a lot like David Bowie. Next, as I crossed the gorgeous Hudson fjord back to the benign Midwest, a minimalist, slightly (and very casually) ominous song called "Bulletproof" from a band called This is the Kid filled the car. I'd never heard it before, and it felt like the soundtrack for this scene of my life. Lately I've been listening to much darker material, especially Cristobal Tapia De Veer's soundtrack for The Girl With All The Gifts, and this was much more cheerful, driving-friendly stuff.
Back at the house, I couldn't find my cellphone anywhere and even called Cinnamon to see if it was still there. When they couldn't find it, I searched the Prius yet again and found it; somehow it had fallen into the footwell of the driver's side back seat. That car is a real eater of cellphones. One time Gretchen gave a ride to a Latina who later asked if Gretchen had found her cellphone in the car. Gretchen ransacked it and found nothing. Months later the phone did turn up, but by that point we'd lost the woman's contact information (it had been in an email account that Gretchen had lost access to when she quit that terrible job where she drove from town to town evangelizing high school kids about the evils of animal-based foods).
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