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late night at the New Paltz Diner
Friday, December 8 2017
Things were kind of relaxed in the afternoon as all the hard work of earlier in the week seemed to pay of with the stable functioning of some complicated ecommerce code that had been deployed last night. [REDACTED]
In the mid afternoon, things had settled down enough for me to take a break by driving out to the Tibetan Center thrift store. There I found not one but two old point and shoot digital cameras, so of course I bought both of them, along with a dog leash, a washing machine hose, and a red collar to replace two different hunting-season collars that Neville had recently removed from Ramona's neck and then ruined. It all came to $8. Back at the house, both cameras proved functional. I was particularly excited about the Kodak EasyShare C813, which has a big LCD screen and takes 8.2 megapixel photographs. It would be nice if these cameras were a little fancier and could be fired remotely by a remote-control. Most of the ideas I have for these cameras have them being instructed to take photographs by an Arduino controller, but without an IR receiver, I will have to open them up and attach wires to their switches.
[REDACTED]
This evening Gretchen was on a late bus back from the City and, to avoid an extra half hour on the bus, she'd arranged for me to pick her up from the commuter lot in New Paltz at 1:00am. I normally wouldn't've been too excited to drive all the way to New Paltz at that hour, but I'd decided to make it fun by suggesting we go out for spaghetti at the Plaza Diner (best spaghetti in the Hudson Valley). So that's what happened. While the dogs waited for us in the car (temperatures were in the low 30s, but I'd made the car nice and toasty before we left it), Gretchen and I took a seat in the diner. There a number of people in there at this ungodly hour: a couple drunk guys, a lonely-looking older woman eating at the counter alone, and a couple or two. A 24 hour diner probably doesn't put its best staff in the overnight shift, and this was probably why the service was slow and a bit awkward. Our waitress was a woman who looked to be in her late 50s, and she seemed to have recently been given tips on how to be a diner waitress. She touched me on my shoulder when she talked to me, and it felt forced and unnatural. I later saw her making the same move on another customer. She was also terrible at cleaning up dirty plates as we generated them. The pasta was as good as ever, though Gretchen thought it wasn't as warm as it should be. That had also been a problem with the vegetable soup, though for some reason it's frequently served luke warm at the Plaza Diner. Not long before we left (that is, around 2:00am), a crowd of 20 or so African Americans showed up. Strangely, they all seemed wide awake and sober. It was a good thing we'd had our food before they filled the order queue.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?171208 feedback
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