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fireworks, beers, and dogs
Wednesday, July 4 2018
Gretchen took Neville with her to work at the bookstore today, and the plan was for her to ultimately climb Overlook Mountain with some friends to have a grand view of the many Hudson Valley fireworks displays. For that part of the adventure, she did not want to take Neville (since he would miss Ramona) unless, that is, I was also coming, with Ramona. But I'm still recovering from whatever it was I had last week and had no desire to go hiking up a mountain. I could, however, drink Mexican beer and putter away on the screened-in porch project. Today I finished the north "stud wall," which I had to build entirely in place due to the fact that it was shaped more like a trapezoid than a proper rectangle (the deck floor has a slight downward slope eastward to promote drainage away from the house).
This afternoon, I took a break to drink a mix of SportsTea and gin and watch crappy YouTube videos, mostly of people doing fucked-up things in traffic and then having their cars destroyed in an instant.
I eventually drove to Woodstock to fetch Neville. When I went into the store, I also brought Ramona. The place was full of happy Fourth of July shoppers, many of whom seemed to be delighted by the presence of dogs. Falafel Cathy and Roy arrived just as I was arriving, hand-delivering two falafel sandwiches Gretchen had ordered. I'd forgotten that, in addition to everything else, it was Woodstock Farm Festival day, where their falafel stand is always the main attraction.
On the way home on 375, just as I was passing the Woodstock Elementary School, a little drama was playing out. A mother deer had just crossed the road, and everyone was driving very slowly because her little speckled fawn was scared to do so, making little baby deer noises (which I could lip-read but not hear). The dogs went crazy, leaning out the window and barking, so I hurried through as quickly as the traffic would let me.
Another deer on Dug Hill Road caused Ramona to step on and (with a claw) pierce the unopened (and very warm) beer in the console between the two front seats. It started spraying beer everywhere, and I was forced to toss it out of the car to limit the damage. That was actually today's second beer crime. The first had begun yesterday when I left a beer in the freezer. By today it was bulged and ruptured, and eventually I put it out on the east deck to drain into a bowl. Maybe a dog would want it.
I could hear fireworks going off constantly in the distance in all directions, and a little after dark someone launched a few from near our downhill neighbors' house. One was powerful enough to go above the treeline before exploding in a rainbow of colors. After about three of those, that was in; evidently the budget was exhausted. The dogs had never seen or heard anything like it and were losing their minds in barking.
Later I watched the first two episodes of a somewhat trashy Netflix original series entitled Slasher: Guilty Party, a sort of a slasher-style movie spread out over a whole season (there should be a name for the seasonalization of what had been a stock movie format, but I don't know that there is). Because it has a whole season to fill, there are actually a lot of non-gory seasons in between the gory ones, though the gory ones seems just as random and seemingly unnecessary as they seem in classic slasher flicks from the 70s and 80s. Still, there's a mystery beneath it all (in fact, there are at least two), and that kept me watching. And then there's the perennial appeal of watching beautiful people butchered like pigs.
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