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Gretchen's 50th birthday
Tuesday, January 19 2021
I don't know what caused it, but I suffered terrible, occasionally quite painful diarrhea today, resulting in multiple unpleasant runs to the brownhouse followed by gingerly-stepped walks back to the house. My lower gut felt like something unfortunate was going on down there. Fortunately, I improved later in the afternoon, particularly after eating a Pepto-Bismol.
Today was Gretchen's 50th birthday, and the plan today was for Powerful and me to prepare a complex four-entrée meal using recipes Gretchen had selected from Mississippi Vegan and Isa Does It. There was to be roasted cauliflower, cæsar salad, tempeh meatballs, and a crazy noodlebake involving a pound of rigatoni pasta stood on end in a casserole dish and then drenched in a mushroom puree and faux cheese. The mushrooms for that last one needed to be rehydrated dry mushrooms, and my first task of the day was to do that rehydration. Unfortunately, that was to be my only role in food production today; Powerful did everything else, working for something like five hours straight in the kitchen. Normally I would've had time in my workday to help out, but I was slammed by an unexpected server crisis, and all I could do to contribute was take a few breaks to wash dishes. I'd also given Gretchen her birthday morning decaf in her brand new Donnie Dipshit's Last Day coffee mug, but unfortunately the polyurethane was still off-gassing.
Powerful finished Gretchen's birthday feast at around 3:00pm, so we ate it as lupper while there was still light outside. It was delicious, and Gretchen even liked the wine (a Riesling or something like it that Powerful had picked out with my advice).
Later I joined Gretchen and her family on a birthday zoom call that only lasted about an hour and didn't include any music performances.
At around 7:00pm, Jeff and Alana came over for a bonfire that I'd started using reluctant materials. Usually I have no trouble getting a firepit fire going, but tonight the air was completely still, and pine-needle fire against damp skeletonized pine only wanted to produce a thick white smoke. Eventually, though, the fire developed enough of a draft to fan its own flames, though even with that source of heat, after two hours I had no more interest in being outdoors.
Gretchen had put a little something strong in my my cider, which was nice. On two different occasions over the space of two hours, a pack of coyotes started whooping it up in the forest to the southwest. There was a moon lighting the sky, but it was only a waxing crescent.
At some point my brother Don called me to on Gretchen's phone to tell me of my mother's (Hoagie's) latest hallucinations. This time she'd reported people gathered in the tack room of her barn. Don must've really wanted to talk, because after saying he had no plans to wear a mask on the municipal bus to Waynesboro tomorrow, he spent a long time telling me about Tiktaalik, one of the earliest amphibians. I actually already knew all about Tiktaalik, but it was pointless telling Don that. So I let him ramble on, occasionally saying "uh huh" in a manner I hoped he would interpret to mean that I was bored. The fact that he was oblivious to this is yet another indication of his autistic tendencies.
The food Powerful made for lupper this afternoon.
Click to enlarge.
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