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guarding puke
Friday, October 9 2020
Last night Gretchen had given the dogs a bunch of moldy bread and moldy non-dairy cheese that had been discovered in our refrigerator. It ended up being too much food for Neville, and he vomited it up near the northwest corner of the house. But, since the huge mound of vomit he produce was still rich in resources that Neville didn't want to lose, he stood around guarding it, as ridiculous as that sounds to someone with the perspective of a human. Eventually Gretchen used some water from the nearby rain barrel to blast the vomit pile was much reduced in size, washing away most of the bread and soggy kibble and leaving bite-sized chunks of pre-sliced cheese. Neville always feels relief when the thing he's been guarding is somehow removed or otherwise reduced in importance, because it means he gets to go back to being his old affable self, the Dr. Neville to his Mr. Guard.
Today I was a little better at focusing on work-related tasks, but then near the end of the day I learned that one of my best friends from college, Miranda Ballou, had died. Back in college, she'd been mischevious and up for anything. As a potter, she pretty much ran the Oberlin pottery co-op. And as a pizza cook in the Harkness co-op kitchen schedule, she was famous for stealing white flour from Tank Co-op to make our make pizza not suck quite as much as it otherwise would've. Though she liked to get drunk and stoned on a regular basis, she got a degree in biology and should've had a successful life. But that isn't what happened. Gretchen visited her in Louisville during her book tour in the early autumn of 2013, when a now-overweight Miranda was living in a squalid apartment with a terrible boyfriend. It's not clear from the long Facebook threads about her death how exactly she died, but it seems to have been related to alcohol or perhaps a drug overdose.
Gretchen is planning a weekend trip to visit her parents at the Watergate in Washington, DC soon, so she thought all three of us should get tested for coronavirus first. She and Powerful had their tests yesterday, and mine was scheduled for 6:00pm this evening. I drove to the Rite Aid near the corner of Flatbush and 9W (a part of Kingston I would otherwise have no reason to go to) and went through the conventional drug-store drive-thru. I took a swab, swirled it ten times in the part of my nostril where it just starts to get uncomfortable, and then did the same in the other nostril. Then I put it in a red fluid in a vial. I'll be getting the results via email.
I'd taken the dogs with me, and Ramona is back to acting weird, whimpering at pains whose source is impossible to locate. She also insisted in co-occupying the front passenger seat with Neville, which caused him to be in my lap for the final several miles of our outing.
Powerful made two different dishes for dinner tonight, which was more "lab work" for his remote vegan cooking course. One was an Asian rice dish that I did not like, and the other was a risotto dish that was bland and contained too many peas for my liking, but with some hot peppers it was okay.
Friends horseplaying in Harkness room 2016 in early 1990 in Oberlin, Ohio. Shandi Hopkins is in the foreground; he died by suicide in 2001. Miranda is to the right; she died just now. Nate Rudolf is in the background and died [as I would learn after posting this] last December in s freak snowboarding accident. Everyone in this thirty year old photograph is now dead.
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