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here it was in Kingston, NY
Saturday, December 2 2017
[REDACTED]
Late in the afternoon, as darkness was descending, I finally returned to the screened-in porch project. I wanted to repair some concrete I'd destroyed by trying to screw a lagbolt into it. I did the best I could with some old lumpy portland cement and then installed the very first floor joist of the deck. This one was intended to torque the two-by-eight I'd attached to the house (what do you call that attachment board anyway?) to make it plumb, a situation that the setting portland cement would hopefully fix permanently. The weather was cool and humid, but not so cool that working outside was unpleasant.
Soon thereafter, Gretchen arrived from Woodstock, where she'd been walking around browsing the shops (which had all been serving coffee and cookies for an event called "Woodstock Open House"). We drove together back to Woodstock to meet up with Chris & Kirsty at a particularly crowded Garden Café. Chris, of course, works with a spinoff of the same organization that I work for, and we had some [REDACTED] stuff to catch up on. For some reason I made the mistake of ordering a dish comprised of sauteed kale, mashed yucca, sliced plantains, mushrooms, and tempeh. Based on the ingredients, I was thinking it might be some miracle of Mexican comfort food. Instead, it was an array of dome-shamed mounds of glurp arranged in the style of a 1950s meat & potatoes meal (with about the same amount of flavor). Fortunately, I'd brought my own hot sauce. Unfortunately, I forgot to grab it when we left. Tonight's meal was unusual in that it went for two rounds of alcohol and all of us were drinking (though Chris only had one round). They picked up the tab, which came as rapid karmic payback for Gretchen and me having picked up the tab for Susan and David yesterday (though that had been a much cheaper meal).
After a quick visit to a very festive Golden Notebook (which was staying late for the Woodstock Open House foot traffic), Gretchen and I drove to Uptown Kingston for the next thing. It was our friend Nick's (of Nick and Chrissy) birthday, and he was celebrating it at a lovely new bookstore-cum-bar called Rough Draft. (I know, sounds like it might actually be a gay bar.) It's the kind of innovative retail one might expect in a place like Portland, Oregon, but here it was in Kingston, NY. It's in a beautiful ancient stone building, supposedly at the oldest intersection in the United States (the one with the oldest complete set of buildings). The scene there was predictably hipster, but not excessively so, and all the bartenders were nice and responsive. We quickly met a pair of Nick's friends from the music scene (a couple named Chad — who looks like a Wallstreet wunderkind, and his girlfriend (I didn't catch her name, but I think she was giving our her stage name), who had a much less conventional thing going on. Later this wackadoodle woman Chrissy knows who is fascinated with porcupines showed up with two tiny dogs, one of whom stuck his little tongue up my nostrils and into my closed mouth. I went off to piss at one point, beer in hand (I was drinking a delicious Barrier Tanto IPA), and as I waited in line, a guy I knew was telling a woman I didn't know that he wouldn't take long in the bathroom. I was ahead of both of them in line and chimed in with, "Not me! I'm going to take a looooong time!"
At some point Jeff and Alana showed up, and it wasn't long after that that Gretchen started showing people pictures of her uterus (which, as you may recall, one of the members of the hospital staff photographed for her immediately after it was removed).
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