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Jewish Christmas, 2018
Tuesday, December 25 2018
It being Christmas morning, there was the usual exchange of gifts packed into socks. Since last Christmas, I'd begun doing the same for Gretchen. Since what I had for her was so bulky (three bottles of liquor, a bottle of hot sauce, and a tiny painting), I stuffed them into a pair of her sweatpants after knotting the bottom of each leg. As always, Gretchen had bought me a great many small canvases, bags, of nuts, and candies (not all of which I would ever normally eat — there were, for example, "sour worms"). And no stockings would be complete without a small bottle of booze, a tradition started with my mother, perhaps when I wasn't yet old enough to drink legally. It was a product of a local Hudson Valley distillery.
The biggest surprise in my stocking was an ancestry-only genetic testing kit from 23AndMe.com. Gretchen had recently gotten her results, confirming that she is 99.6% Ashkenazi Jewish (and presumably 0.4 percent Cossacks rapist), and it had been more fun than I would've expected. Being more of a mongrel, I expect my results to be more interesting. I saved my saliva, spit into the tube, and then filled out an interminable health questionnaire on 23AndMe.com.
Otherwise, the morning was much like a Saturday, complete with a roaring fire and his & her french presses of coffee (decaf for Gretchen, of course).
Later Gretchen took the dogs for a good walk in the forest. It was cold and windy, but I took the opportunity to go outside and do some firewood salvaging. Both yesterday and today I continued to bring home some long pieces of white ash and thin pieces of oak from a few staging locations west of the Farm Road. On the walk this morning to retrieve a piece of oak, Diane joined me for a venture she never would've taken on her own. Since she was doing the annoying cat thing of getting underfoot and attempting to rub her head on my ankles as I walked, I carried her for part of the way so I wouldn't step on her. When we arrived at the piece I wanted to carry home, she immediately jumped onto it and walked back and forth on it several times, rubbing against it and clawing it.
This afternoon, I tried working from a fresh install of the Raspian distro of the Rasberry Pi operating system. It booted up great on my old 'Pi, but for some reason refused to see any WiFi hotspots with the WiFi dongle that had been working great with the old OS on the SD card that became corrupted yesterday. So then I kept trying other dongles and monkeying with .conf files. But nothing worked and I burned through hours of valuable me-time before this evening's Jewish Christmas activities.
For tonight's movie, Gretchen had wanted to see the new Spiderman movie. I'd heard good things about it, but after seeing Black Panther, I was pretty sure I never wanted to suffer through another superhero movie again. I was interested in a new Clint Eastwood movie called The Mule, where Eastwood plays a drug smuggler working "one last time." I'm a sucker for movies about criminals coming out of retirement for one more heist or murder or what have you. But Gretchen had heard bad things about that movie and didn't much want to see it. So in the end we'd decided to see The Favourite, a farcical historic comedy set in the court of Queen Anne in the early 1700s. First, though, we had to have Chinese food. For that, we drove into the center of Red Hook and went to the Golden Wok, which Gretchen knew to be open. It turned out it was a small place designed mostly for pick-up and delivery, though there were a few tables. so we could sit down and have a meal there. Unfortunately, there was no liquor, and we hadn't thought to bring any. Gretchen ordered three dishes, all of which were better than average for Hudson Valley Chinese food. I particularly liked the black mushrooms in the moo shoo vegetables. And the broccoli with tofu was amazing. The place was very busy, but the employees were adept at moving quickly and keeping people happy.
The Favourite was at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck, my least-favo[u]rite village. We still had nearly an hour to kill, so we wanted some place to maybe get a drink. All the bars were closed, of course, including that racist place named after an Australian beer. But the Beekman Arms, which touts itself as the oldest inn in America, was open. So we ducked in there (I say "ducked" because its ceilings are rather low) and had a look around. If nothing else, they had a fireplace. But then it turned out that they had a bar and it was even open. The woman working it seemed to have a chip on her shoulder from having to work on Christmas day, but she got me my jack on the rocks. And then Gretchen and I saw her pour two such amazingly stiff drinks that Gretchen actually made a comment. The main thing we did while at the bar was take a walk down memory lane, looking up in my online journal all the movies we'd seen for Jewish Christmas over the years. Gretchen couldn't even remember seeing Memoirs of a Geisha, but evidently that is what we saw on Christmas Eve in 2005.
The Favourite was unexpectedly delightful. Watching two women politically scratch each others' eyes out, often using intermediaries, while the world around them wallows in the simple charms of the early modern era: pigeon shooting, duck racing, lobster racing (and then eating), and marveling at the existence of something called a pineapple. The casualness of the lesbian content signaled The Favourite as thoroughly a product of 2018. Amusingly, Gretchen had worried I wouldn't like the movie because it centered exclusively around female characters, with nearly every scene passing the Bechdel Test.
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