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Gretchen sees my low-energy workplace
Tuesday, October 30 2018
I'd been working at the new workplace for nearly two months and Gretchen had yet to see it. That all changed today when, after doing something at Bard College with her friend Celia (who is the wife of Alex, the guy who got me this job), she came by the office. She was a good 20 minutes late, and when she arrived, the office was dead silent. That all quickly changed as she immediately started gushing about the one dog in the office today: it was Alex and Celia's dog Augie "the Doggy." Nobody in the office is anywhere near as effusive and demonstrative as Gretchen, and she was just getting started. After a fairly long conversation with Alex, she turned to me, and I introduced her to my colleagues. The energy in that place is low, and they just smiled and said hello.
Gretchen and I walked from the workplace to a diner I didn't know about just north of the main intersection in Red Hook, supposedly the oldest train car diner in all of New York State. There we had veggie burgers, fries, and a side of pasta. The pasta was surprisingly good, at least in terms of the sauce. It wasn't quite to the standards of the Plaza Diner in New Paltz, but it might qualify as the second-best spaghetti marinara in the Hudson Valley. Gretchen found the pasta itself slightly overcooked, but that sort of thing can vary a lot depending on who is working there and when. As we ate there, a very famous Russian author (and Bard professor) came in with a friend. Gretchen, whose judgment of Jeopardy contestants often hinges on the extent they reveal themselves as not vegan, was horrified at the liverworst he ordered. She couldn't square this with how brilliant and funny his novels are.
On the walk back to my workplace, Gretchen wanted to a take a detour from my usual path, and this opened our eyes to a few things: there's a branch of our credit union I didn't even know about, there's a pizza place I might not've ever discovered, and there's a surprisingly large duck pond (full, on this day, of Canada geese) very near the center of town.
I had a number of ups and downs with my continued ExtJS autodidacticism, and then it was the end of my day. On the drive home, I got stuck behind a car that was following a particularly slow car on US 209. The speed limit is 55, but this car was going 45. When that car and the one behind it decided to turn into Hurley and then go down Wynkoop, the car behind it had had enough and quickly passed it despite the double yellow line. At that point, the car that had been going so slowly on US-209 evidently became indignant and decided to tailgate the car that had so rudely passed it. When I last saw them, the pair was heading at a breakneck speed southbound on Hurley Mountain Road.
Despite the rapidly fading light, I gathered a quick backpack load of firewood on the terraces just west of the Farm Road. Today's load came to about 30% dry oak and 70% dry white pine and weighed about 90 pounds (I weighed myself while I still carried the load).
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