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anachronistic blandness
Saturday, July 8 2017
By this morning it was clear that Gretchen's problems weren't just a bad reaction to the cyclobenzaprine she'd taken yesterday. She was pretty sure she had a fever, though of course our digital oral thermometer had a bad battery, and it took an obscure enough kind that we didn't have a replacement in the house. This sent me into town, where I first stopped at the Hannaford to get some food Gretchen's sick stomach might be able to eat: matzah, Campbell's Vegetarian Vegetable soup (like nearly all of Campbell's antiquated line of soups, it's not completely vegan, but upset stomachs appreciate its anachronistic blandness). I also got some groceries for Andrea, who eats a depressingly-restricted diet of mostly raw foods. She only wanted three things: kale, red cabbage, and quinoa. I'd never bought the latter before, and had to ask someone where it was (it was in the ethnic aisle).
I often suffer from nagging blahs the day after using amphetamine-like drugs, and today, having taken 40 mg of Vyvanse yesterday, I experienced mild dysphoria for much of today. In such a mood, one wants to lie around passively consuming media. For this reason, I spent a fair amount of time stretched out on the futon in the greenhouse with a laptop on my lap, watching The Ben Heck Show, a YouTube show featuring a delightfully exhuberant guy working on glorious digital electronics projects in his shop. It's nerdier and more technical than anything that could've ever been on television, and the projects (at least the ones not involving retro gaming gear) are right up my alley. Ben Heck does things like build homemade BASIC-capable pocket computers using an Arduino, an LCD, and a tiny keyboard from an Xbox chatpad. With shows like this on YouTube, there's really no reason for me to settle with the compromised nerd-targeted programming available on satellite television.
In the late afternoon, I finally got around to giving the dogs their daily walk. I took them up the Farm Road and then back homeward east of the wetlands east of the farm road. I crossed those wetlands a bit south of where the Chamomile Headwaters trail does, and as I picked my way across a semi-open patch of moist ground, it occurred to me that it looked like prime poison ivy habitat. Moments later, I saw that poison ivy was indeed growing here (41.927988N, 74.107967W), though not profusely. Otherwise, this section of forest is nearly devoid of poison ivy; the nearest other poison ivy plants I can think of are within 100 feet of our house, which is a quarter mile away to the north.
Neville crosses the swampy area on a log. Click to enlarge.
Ramona smells something in the air.
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