|
|
|
anachronisms in country music
Sunday, August 12 2018
location: Twenty Ninth Pond, Essex County, New York
I got out of bed fairly early and began cleaning up and taking my stuff to the Subaru. In the night, Neville had managed to semi-destroy a couch in the middle room (a couch Ramona had been using to "pout" on when things didn't go completely her way). But I managed to put it back together to the point where it looked good (though it creaked ominously when one sat on it).
Later, after Gretchen got up, I dedicated myself to such tasks as burying the compost in the forest and cleaning the flecks of detritus from the inside of the refrigerator. In the Adirondacks, there are always more pine needles that need to be swept from the porch and living room, but at some point we declared it done.
I drove us all the way back to Ulster County, managing to avoid dragging the exhaust system over any rocks on the entire way out of the treacherous Twenty Ninth Pond access road (though it hangs within four inches of the ground). The Subaru has a cheap Chinese multifunction stereo whose radio works badly and which seemed not to be able to read the SD card we'd put in it with all our podcasts (actually it could read it just fine, but we hadn't pushed the correct button). So we were forced to listen to Froggy 100.3 (the country music station). As we listened, we kept being struck by what an anachronistic culture country music represents, one where "little girls" are actually unmarried women suitable for dating, and most of the songs are about drinking alcoholic beverages. The weirdest song we heard was entitled "Drunk Girl," which is about refraining from taking sexual advantage of a woman who has drunk too much. Chivalrous as it was, it made our skin crawl with its many embedded sexist assumptions.
We stopped at the the New Baltimore rest area for gas, and I went to Roy Rogers for coffee. There was a Starbucks, but the line was long, and they don't sell french fries. (Unfortunately, Roy Rogers french fries are almost as lame as their coffee.)
Gretchen intended to work today at the bookstore in Woodstock, so I got off at the Saugerties exit and dropped her and Neville off in the back of the store.
Back at the house, it took a fair amount of time to unload everything from the car. As I did so, I kept discovering other things that had been in the basement that had been compromised by rodents. Someone had chewed into a bag of corn & wheat torillas as a well as a bag of rice flatbreads. And the rice flatbread had already begun to grow mold. I could also smell rodent piss on the outside of some of the intact bags of nuts and seeds. While it seemed that the chipmunks had been careful not to piss and urinate in the bags as they stole their contents, perhaps mice had been less careful. In any case, the upshot of all this is that one cannot store bags of any sort of food in a basement, not even for a night.
[REDACTED]
I'd had plans of studying more React stuff, but all I could manage to do was figure out how to configure Webpack (and configure package.json to use that configuration). I lay down in the bed, which still smelled of our housesitter, and fell asleep.
I was awaken by the phone ringing. It was Gretchen wondering where the fuck I was. It was 7:15pm and I'd agreed to pick her up at 7:00pm. Somehow I'd slept for more than three hours. So I loaded Ramona up in the Prius and drove to Woodstock as fast as I could, which wasn't very fast. I found myself behind a slow driver on the north end of Dug Hill Road and then behind one on both Route 375 and Millstream Road. After picking up Gretchen and Neville, we were behind yet another 35 mile-per-hour-er on Route 375, and that lasted all the way to Hurley Ridge Market.
A drawing made my our housesitter of our five cats. From left: Clarence, Diane, Oscar, Charles, and Celeste.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180812 feedback
previous | next |
