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actually ordering dessert
Sunday, December 9 2018
I managed to gather three more backpack loads of firewood in the late morning and early afternoon. Two of these were from partially-salvaged sites a little east of the Stick Trail and south of the Chamomile, though I managed to cobble together a third from odds and ends closer to the house (north of the Chamomile). I also felled and brought home a small part of a smallish standing skeletonized oak from just west of the Farm Road that was dry enough for immediate use. All this wood pretty much completed the woodshed's third tranche while restoring the stack (and then some) in the living room.
This evening a group of us would be meeting at the Garden Café to celebrate the 50th birthday of Sarah the Vegan, and I wanted to paint a small painting for her (as I usually do). My first idea was to paint a redwing blackbird, since I wanted it to commemorate the small pond near the house she rents. But the first tiny canvas I found had an aspect of 1:2, which suggested either a subject that was eithe short and wide or tall and thin. So I decided to paint a blue heron. After making the sky in the background a fairly uniform blue, I thought the painting looked flat and dull, so I added a choppy layer of semi-transparent pastel orange over the blue, and I really liked the result.
As I worked, I had the old 1978 horror classic Halloween running in a window of my computer. I'd heard a lot about it due to the release of a recent additional installment in Halloween's multi-decade continuity-denying franchise. I'm not a fan of such movies, which (to my sensibility) are overprovisioned with annoying (and cheap) suspense: the slowly-opened door that reveals nothing, that sort of thing. But the smart cultural minds on Slate had said good things about it, so I thought I should be hip to it. Unfortunately, it wasn't much more watchable than I'd thought, though the creepy soundtrack is great and hasn't aged badly.
Ray (who was driving without Nancy) picked me up at my house and drove me and Ramona (and Hurricane, a little dog he's been dogsitting for his brother Kim) to Woodstock. Ray said he's really been into Blondie of late and was even wearing a Blondie teeshirt. After he extolled the virtues of Spotify, I asked him how he discovered new music. He said that Spotify itself was good for that, though he also listens to recommendations made by some of his younger co-workers at the Red Onion.
We met Gretchen in front of the Garden, where she was quickly appalled to learn that Hurricane had come from a breeder.
There were nine of us at our table, and I sat next to some new people who are friends with Sarah from the yoga world. They'd brought a couple little dogs, which, with Ramona, Neville, and Hurricane, meant there were five dogs at our table. The guy to my left was named Lance and Gretchen had excitedly told me the other day that he builds robots for a living. I talked to him about this, and it was true. But the work he does is mostly mechanical; the parts of the robots come pre-manufactured and he is one of the people who assembles them. The robots are then used in auto plants, drywall factories, and slaughterhouses (presumably merely stepping stones before murdering humans). It was surprising to learn that something as industrial as a robot factory existed in a rustbelt city like Kingston.
For dinner, I (and several others) ordered the coconut-flavored cauliflower tacos. When sufficiently spiced with hot sauce, they were great, though they didn't amount to very much food. So when time came to order dessert, I surprised everyone (particularly Gretchen) by ordering the apple crumble with a scoop of mint & chocolate chip icecream. Gretchen said this was probably the first time she'd ever seen me order dessert.
The blue heron painting I painted today.
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