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chosen to waste their shade
Saturday, April 28 2018
I made my own damn self a french press of coffee and drank it alone on the couch while some wrens made loud noises out in the pile of unprocessed wood in front of the woodshed.
I had some errands to run but it seemed prudent to do a little work on the deck of the screened-in porch project first so that if the need for any supplies came up I could deal with them then. As I was puttering around, I happened to notice that Clarence was favoring his left front paw. He wasn't just favoring it; he seemed to want to avoid putting weight on it. That hadn't been the case this morning. Had he just done something to it? I couln't see anything wrong with it, but he wouldn't let me examine it either. By the end of the day it was noticeably swollen.
My first stop in town was at the Ghettoford where I mostly needed yet more flatbread. I also went to the Herzog's and got a combination padlock for the Brick Mansion's garage, which nobody seems to ever have a key for. While there, I also got a 3/8 inch drillbit nearly a foot in length, as I keep having the need for long holes that are this narrow. Meanwhile the dogs waited for me out in the car, which, due to the strength of the sun, I'd parked in the imperfect shade of a large oak tree. Almost all deciduous trees are still entirely leafless, and while there are also some evergreen trees near Herzog's and Walgreens, it's as if they were planted in places specifically chosen to waste their shade.
At the Brick Mansion, I turned the dogs loose in the backyard, and they quickly discovered that there was a cute Sally-style dog on the other side of a fence. Unfortunately, the pickets were too close together to allow through much more than scents and sounds. I was there mostly to install the combination lock (though I didn't have a key to the existing padlock). I also need to make the latch on the gate to the backyard more reliable; apparently tenants had been locked out of the backyard by components working themselves into the wrong places. It seemed I could fix most of these problems by applying bits of hand-molded epoxy. Meanwhile Neville scratched dirt around and otherwise did the stuff he does when he's bored.
I continued out to Home Depot, where I bought eight twelve-foot two by sixes and strapped them down to the Subaru roof rack while the dogs looked for chicken bones among the low evergreen bushes growing on the islands of useless vegetation in the parking lot.
On the way home, I made a detour out to Eva & Sandor's place east of Woodstock so I could pick up an old HD monitor Sandor no longer had a use for. When I showed up, Sandor handed me a glass of red wine, which was a really nice way to go into that part of the evening. It was a glorious later afternoon, though clouds were gathering. We were soon joined by the neighbor guy Ben, the guy who's usually in the company of his witchy girlfriend Nicole (though she wasn't around tonight). He was carrying a walking-around glass of red wine he'd poured back at his house. Eventually Ben brought up an interesting story I'd never heard about the confluence of two unrelated things. For decades in the Redhook part of Brooklyn, there had been a factory that produced maraschino cherries (the bright red sweet kind used to garnish sundaes and the like). In more recent years, there had been a fad among Brooklyn hipsters to raise their own bees. These bees apparently found their way into the maraschino cherry factory and gathered the red syrup as though it was nectar, producing a honey from it that was also red. The red was so pervasive in their diet that the bees themselves turned red. Apparently this red honey proved popular, and all was well until the Department of Environmental Protection decided to launch an investigation to see if this red syrup was a safe honey precursor. In the course of their investigation, they stumbled upon a massive hydroponic marijuana grow operation on the basement of the maraschino cherry factory. Ben thought that chain of events particularly random and absurd.
The clouds kept piling in until a thunderstorm drove us indoors. It soon pelted the landscape with a brief assault of pea-sized hail (all of which quickly melted). I didn't want to make my visit into a whole big thing, so I moderated my drinking (etc.) and took my leave soon after Eva began asking whether I was hungry. The rain had let up and dogs and I could make it to the car. Sandor put a coat over the monitor to keep it dry.
Back at the house, I continued the nostalgic wallowing in grunge that I'd begun yesterday, discovering a song Courney Love released in 2010 (well into her rock 'n' roll dotage) called "Samantha." I found it such a post-grunge masterpiece that I watched in many times over and over, thrilling to all the dynamic changes of lyrical pacing and crunchy high-production guitars (evidently what to expect when Billy Corgan is your producer).
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