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seemingly to imbalance the feng shui
Friday, February 9 2018
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The workday kind of ended on a whimper after that, so I went and did what I always do in such circumstances: I took a nice hot bath.
This evening our friends Jeff & Alana wanted to treat Gretchen to a belated birthday dinner, and it was initially assumed I couldn't come because of the risk of Neville breaking out of the recuperation fort and doing something bad to his still-healing knees. But we're nearing the end of the time when Neville must remain imprisoned in the fort, so I thought perhaps I could actually join Gretchen tonight so long as we took some measures to limit what trouble Neville could get into. So I latched the pet door, making it so it only allowed creatures outside the house to come back inside (while also allowing some of our more clever cats to pull the pet door in and escape should they want to, a skill that eludes both dogs). Gretchen then brought the wire barricade down from the teevee room and used it to block entrance to the stairs going to the second floor, thereby preventing Neville from climbing stairs. And left the recuperation fort door obviously open so Neville wouldn't feel the need to climb over its walls. With those measures, the worst that Neville could do was climb up on the couch or play roughly with Ramona.
Jeff & Alana live near downtown Saugerties, so it was natural for us all to meet at Rock da Kasbah, our favorite restaurant in that town (I like it better than anything in Woodstock, for that matter). We parked a few doors down on Main Street, stepped through the crunchy barricade of filthy snow in the gutter, and then discovered Rock da Kasbah was closed tonight due to some sort of maintenance issue (perhaps a sewer pipe had ruptured, flooding the attached speak-easy underneath main street with a foul brownish-grey fluid flecked with condoms and toilet paper). This sent us looking for alternatives, which were a little hard to come by. Miss Lucy's Kitchen had a menu decidedly unfriendly to our dietary requirements (and tonight it seemed to be full of women who wouldn't've looked out of place at a rally of Young Republicans). So we settled on Love Bites Café, which at least had a vegan burger on the menu. Love Bites has a long, narrow floorplan with a bar in the back half seemingly to imbalance the feng shui. There's also a hideous metal low-relief sculpture dominating the dining room. It features a read heart-shaped face with pursed lips, like something out of a maddeningly-uncreative acid trip. Out waitress was a cute young woman who unfortunately spilled my cocktail (a Cactus Banger; it contained tequila and would prove, on the second try, to be delicious) onto Gretchen. That incident was no big deal and was quickly cleaned up. But then she kept apologizing about it. (Pro tip: apologies are important, but after that obligation has been fulfilled, no sane person wants to relive the unpleasantness.) Both of us couples each split an order of vegan tacos and a vegan burger. Going forward, I'm going to do better to resist any temptation or peer pressure to split sandwiches. The process always mangles them and severely diminishes the dining experience. We all also had a weird African-influenced peanut soup, which, like everything else, was amazing. Love Bites even had a brand of hot sauce I'd never heard of called Matouk's. They had two flavors of it, a hot and a medium, and the pepper component of both was scotch bonnets (one of the hottest peppers in the world). Evidently Matouk's method of producing a milder sauce is to just bulk up the non-pepper ingredients.
In terms of conversation, we caught up Jeff & Alana on Neville's recovery, including the unexpected tumor on his face. Alana told us about a fairly uneventful trip to Los Angeles, and Jeff told us of a photography & research gig in the production of a documentary film that will keep him employed for the next year or so. (The documentary is about an influential musician about whom I am unfamiliar.)
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