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visit from a job creator
Friday, August 16 2019
As usual for a Friday afternoon, I drank kratom tea and then had a road beer for my drive home, which (also as usual) took me out of the way to the Tibetan Center thrift store, and there I bought yet another concave makeup mirror (every bugout bag should have one, for starting fires if nothing else) and a steel plumb bob, each for a dollar.
Gretchen's old girlfriend Barbara, the woman she lived with for five years before our reconnection in 2001, recently came out of a long relationship with some woman who had forbidden Barbara from communicating with Gretchen. So at 5:30 the afternoon, Barbara arrived to stay for a couple nights as part of an ongoing automotive tour of the east coast from her home in Pittsburgh. The first thing we did was to walk the dogs on a smallish loop in the nearby forest, going down the Farm Road, cutting over to the Stick Trail on the Chamomile Headwaters Trail, and then briefly going a little south on the Stick Trail to look for a chicken of the woods that occasionally grows on a sickly oak there. We didn't find any, though I had found a fair number of old chanterelles to collect along the Chamomile Headwaters Trail. Barbara was good at identifying these, though it turns out she doesn't like to actually eat mushrooms.
The three of us (dined tonight at the Garden Café while the dogs hung out under the table, intrigued by a pair of whippets a couple tables away. Ramona had rolled in something that I'd been unable to clean completely out of her fur even after scrubbing her in Rock City Creek (or whatever the moving body of water at 42.041052N, 74.119544W is called). Much of our dinner conversation was about the doggy day care center that Barbara now owns and operates in Pittsburgh. She is now, I pointed out, a job creator. Foodwise, Gretchen and I ordered pretty much the same thing: the red bean soup and the curry cauliflower tacos, though I got the biggie-size soup. The tacos came with a delightfully-trashy pasta salad (served cold of course), and I was so full from that and the soup that I only ate one of my three tacos. For her part, Barbara had the linguine and a porter. (I had the Abbey Ale, while Gretchen only drank water.) Happily, nobody ordered dessert.
Back at the house, I immediately turned to another phase of my laboratory cat piss abatement project. I'd realized that there was cat piss in the spray foam I'd put around the copper pipes carrying hydronic fluid to and from the solar panels, so I needed to do something about that. My solution was to cover the spray foam in joint compound (since I have plenty leftover from the kitchen renovation that will go bad unless I use it for something). At first I tried applying it with a putty knife, but that didn't work as well as just smearing it on with my bare hands. I came down into the kitchen while Gretchen was making the batter for tomorrow's waffles and Barbara, looking at my joint-compound-covered hands, remarked that she was surprised by how quickly I'd "gotten into something" after we'd gotten back from dinner.
Gretchen and Barbara ended up staying up past midnight catching up on all the various things in each others' lives.
Barbara (left) and Gretchen at the tree where some hunter once arranged dead coyotes along the Stick Trail (somewhat less than a mile from home).
Click to enlarge.
A bright yellow organism, perhaps a slime mold, just below the Stick Trail about a quarter mile from home.
Click to enlarge.
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