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the pond behind Hasbrouck
Thursday, September 3 2020
At 4:00pm, I drove out to P&T Surplus, the quirky store in the Rondout that sells everything from scrap metal to obsolete (if not vintage) computer equipment. My reason for going there was to find esoteric brass fittings that might help me complete my tub project. The best thing I found there was a brass tube designed to connect toilets to a cold water tap. This matched the "quarter inch" copper pipe to which the new bathtub faucets are designed to attach. I'd bought a piece of such copper, but it was so soft I was worried it might easily get bent in my application, so a brass version seemed better. P&T was also selling old gun shells, which also looked to be made of brass, and some of these had the same diameter as that brass toilet supply pipe (5/8 of an inch outside diameter). So I bought a handful of those too. I also managed to find a find a few possibly-useful brass fittings. I continued from there directly to Lowes, where I bought yet more brass fittings with the additional wisdom I'd amassed in the last few days.
This evening Gretchen and I went to Hasbrouck House to see the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line at the movie-showing venue they have set up in a tent on their lawn. We got there early, with both of our dogs, and managed to snag good seats near the screen where the movie would be shown. We immediately ordered food, and (for me) a drink. Gretchen had made empanadas back at the house and only wanted fries, while I ordered fries, a Beyond Burger, and some sort of frozen margarita. There weren't many other people there, but among those who were, there were a fair number of dogs. (The pandemic being what it was, people wore masks whenever they went to the "Butcher Bar" to order food or drinks.) As always, we had to keep a tight leash on Ramona (who, at this point in her life, mostly wants to attack other dogs) while letting Neville demonstrate his unjustified love of all mystery canids. Walk the Line is a good movie which I'd seen before, which was why I was there. Gretchen was a little perturbed that I spent so much of the movie worrying about the needs of the dogs instead of petting her, but that's how it is to be a dog daddy. At some point I took a piss in the very nice bathrooms provided and returned to the bar and got a Juice Bomb IPA, which was very good (if overpriced). It was hard to see how the operation made money with two kitchen staff serving less than a dozen people, but perhaps $8 beers makes the ledger balance out okay.
After the movie, Gretchen and I went on a walk down an illuminated path that seemed to have been recently constructed. It eventually led to a pond (or "lake") that was well-illuminated and seemed to be designed for wedding ceremonies (41.841957N, 74.144951W). The lake itself was covered with greenish scum and duckweed, but perhaps that was a temporary condition. On the walk back to the parking lot, somehow Ramona found an alternative path and was at the car when we arrived, though (as always) Neville was about five minute behind.
One of the scenes in Walk the Line that seems too cinematic to be true was the one where Johnny Cash proposes to June Carter on stage. During the movie, I'd looked up the birthyears of both Cash (1932) and Carter (1929), and after our walk to the pond I did a Google search to see if the on-stage proposal had actually happened. It's a testament to Google that all I had to type was "did johnn" before it auto-suggested "did johnny cash propose on stage." Gretchen wondered if perhaps Google had been searched by others there in the Hasbrouck audience wondering the same thing, and had used global positioning data to inform its search. An hour or so later when she did the same search, she got the same suggestion (which, for both of us, was the second one; the first was "did johnny depp die").
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