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especially badass Arya
Sunday, July 16 2017
Gretchen was still feeling bad this morning when it came time to go to her bookstore shift. But she'd missed last week's shift and thought she should probably go. She managed to power through it all the way until 7:00pm, but all the work of yesterday and today took a toll, and by this evening she was decidedly bedridden.
Meanwhile I did a number of little chores in the laboratory: attaching a smallish monitor to an arm attached to the trim of the laboratory's north-facing window for use on the many occasions when I need a VGA monitor to test or setup equipment. There had been another smallish LCD monitor on the table below for this purpose, but something had gone wrong with it (perhaps rain had gotten into its circuitry), causing it to act like its configuration buttons were being randomly pushed. (I'd spent way too much time trying to fix it and finally today decided to throw the damn thing out; better monitors can be had for $10 at the Tibetan Center thrift store.)
This evening I mixed up two 80 pound sacks of concrete and use it to build up the foundation pad around the one wooden post I've installed for Gretchen's screened-in porch project. This time I used a wooden mold to give the foundation a square cross-section to better resist frost heave in the adjacent ground.
I came in all sweaty from that chore to find Gretchen in bed looking terrible. She told me that Ray and Nancy had invited me over for dinner and a watching of the first episode of the new 7th Season of Game of Thrones. An earlier plan to watch that with Eva & Sandor had fallen through, so I was game. Ray and Nancy had also invited Andrea, but she was busy with some phase of her ongoing job search.
The meal Ray had prepared tonight was Trader Joe's vegetarian sausages (Gretchen later told me they're not vegan) with a very spicy, rather oily sautéed pan of broccoli and kale. This might be part of Ray's ongoing attempt to avoid carbs. In other Ray & Nancy news, they recently bought a 2010 Subaru Outback for $12,000. It's more of an SUV that the squat Legacy station wagons we'd both been in the habit of buying. Best of all, it has less than 100,000 miles on it and the check engine light remains off.
Meanwhile, the lovefest between the dogs (Jack, Ramona, and Neville) ended abruptly when Ramona and Neville found the softball-sized ends of what had once been an enormous rawhide "bone." I had to take these away from them in order for them to return to civility.
As for tonight's episode, it pretty much delivered, particularly in the cold open (featuring an especially badass Arya, who is looking noticeably older). Ray had gone to get us three all "weapons" before the show (so we'd have something to fiddle with as similar weapons were wielded with deadly results on-screen. The weapons today were all large knives and daggers with real (though not especially sharp) blades. I don't know why, but it's fun to absentmindedly scratch your face with a huge dagger or run your thumb along its blade. In this way, knives can be a little like fidget spinners, but with more menace.
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