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missing the Zena Road intersection
Sunday, June 24 2018
Several thunderstorms passed through today, though this didn't keep me from working on the screened-in porch. At this point I'm down to building the screens and detail work, such as making the surfaces for attaching triangular pieces of screen underneath the slope of the roof. The southern of these triangular frames was done, so today I fashioned the northern one. Among other things, this involved ripping a 12 foot two by six down to exactly five inches wide using the table saw.
Meanwhile Gretchen, who was working with Neville at the bookstore, wrote to ask if I wanted to join her and Susan and David at the Garden Café for dinner. Sandor wrote independently to ask if I wanted to join him and Eva (and, as it turned out, his mother and sister) at R&R in Woodstock. I decided to do both; I need all the support my real-life social network can provide, even here in the desert of the real.
By now I had an uncomfortable feeling in whatever that space is above the bony dome of the roof of the mouth. It felt like perhaps I'd accidentally inhaled sawdust, though no amount of hawking and snorting could make it go away. Oh well, I'd survived worse.
At the Garden I ordered a glass of red wine and the taco special. I told David and Susan all about the end of my job at The Organization, though the conversation was so rapid-pace (and so impulsively interrupted, mostly by restaurant protocol) that there were lots of details I didn't get into. At some point I asked David what was going on in his life, and he described a storyboard job from hell. Initially the desired images had been highly abstract, but then the client went totally off the chain, demanding photorealistic images of Zοοey Deschαnel and wondering why production had slowed. There are a lot of ways for this world to suck, and we hadn't even gotten to the kids in cages fiasco.
Eventually I took my leave and went to R&R to meet Sandor, Eva, et al. I found them at the bar. There was a live band playing there, but proved to be less of a distraction that I'd been led to expect. Again I rehashed the story of how I came to be unemployed while drinking a "sour ale" (which was not much to my liking). Eventually Eva and the family headed back home, but Sandor stayed with me at R&R for another round (this time I had a delicious 8 ounce imperial IPA) and we mostly talked shop in a way we really haven't before. He's mostly a frontend developer who works remotely, though his employer is gradually trying to round up all the remote workers to get them to work in co-location offices. He talked about the various technologies he uses, including Python (which I found somewhat surprising).
Since Eva had left, I took Sandor home as a detour on my drive back home. But there was such a downpour happening that, as I drove homeward on Zena behind another car, I somehow missed the four-way intersection ("Not a Store") and started heading towards Kingston on Sawkill. As soon as I figured this out, I tried to have Google Maps help me out, but I got dumped out on US 209 anyway, heading out towards 9W instead of homeward. I had a weird feeling in my head at this point, as though perhaps I was on some drug I hadn't remembered taking. Was I losing my mind? The rain had been bad, but not bad enough to confuse me into driving an extra 15 miles. Once I was on 9W, though, I had a solid sense of where I was and managed to get myself home. But it was a harrowing experience, particularly given that I wouldn't've wanted to encounter a cop in my condition.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180624 feedback
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