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bimi bop
Sunday, May 23 2021
It was Sunday, though we acted as though it was another Saturday, this time joined by Gretchen's parents. Gretchen had taken the day off from work so she could do fun things with her parents. The panagram for the Sunday Spelling Bee was "benevolent," with "e," in the middle, and there were so many words it was hard for me to enter them fast enough via my Chromebook.
Gretchen had made a french press of coffee, but it was just decaf, and after a couple hours of Saturday-type morning, I just wanted to go back to bed. It wasn't that I was hungover or anything like that; I think I was just exhausted from so much socializing (and I hadn't slept particularly well last night). Perhaps a year of social distancing has left the socializing muscles in my brain atrophied. So I climbed into bed and actually dozed off for awhile while Gretchen was walking the dogs and then talking loudly with her father in the living room.
I probably should've known better than to join Gretchen and her parents on their outing today, but there was promise of a lunch, and the venue for that promise had become a brewpub out on Route 28 west. There aren't many pleasure in life better than lunch at a brewpub. So the four of us all piled into the Kona and headed into the Catskills. (Powerful might've come along too, but he had to go to work.)
Our first destination was lunch at Woodstock Brewing, a fun Portland-style place set in an ugly strip mall which itself was set against a beatiful mountain backdrop not far east of Phoenicia. They had a nice big outdoor area with umbrellas to protect us from the strong late May sunshine. Gretchen ordered everything vegan on the menu, which included things like various kinds of tacos, cauliflower "wings," bánh mi sandwiches, and the greasiest batter-fried onion rings outside a trashcan full of half-eaten Garlic Fest bloomin' onions. Gretchen also got me a beer of course, in this case their I Dream In Blue Double IPA (which was excellent), and she got herself some fruity girlie sour beer, which she only drank two thirds of. A couple nearby had a cute little brindle pit mix chewing on a bone she'd found, and Gretchen noticed they'd ordered the same things we had; it turned out (and Gretchen always finds out) that they were also vegans. At a table further away were some overweight bikers who were unlikely to be vegan. Before they left, they were sure to leave one of their motorcycles idling long enough to fill the outdoor dining area with noxious fumes.
After lunch, we continued for some reason into Phoenicia so Gretchen and her parents could do that thing they love to do but that I hate: slowly walking through a closed (or nearly closed) village, taking in the sights. There was an open store selling pottery, candles, and other precious knick knacks targeted to the impulse-buying visitor. It turned out Gretchen knew the potter who had made the pottery, and his life partner was operating the store. The life partner told us that the potter had been priced out of studio space in Kingston (and that the Teeshirt Factory itself, where his studio had been, had been bought up by speculators from out of town) and that now he works at a studio in Amsterdam, NY, not far from where our new lake cabin will be. Fortunately, Gretchen pulled the plug on our slow-walking through Phoenicia before I found it completely intolerable. (It helps that Phoenicia is even smaller than I remember it.)
Next stop was in Bearsville, which we reached from the west after driving eastward past Willow, Lake Hill, and Shady. Gretchen's mother had repeatedly been saying she wanted vegan icecream, and it turned out there was a place one could get it in Bearsville: Nancy's of Woodstock, a creamery that opened during the pandemic in a long-unused storefront in the Bearsville complex. They only had a few vegan flavors, and one could tell it had been made from a coconut base, but it scratched the icecream itch, such as it was. I don't know why I ordered a "large" of the mint chocolate chip after the huge greasy lunch I'd just had, but it was one of those kind of outings.
I felt a little like I was beginning to crash at our next destination, Haran Market, a tiny Asian grocery & takeout restaurant that had opened in a little storefront in the middle of nowhere on the three corners of Wittenberg Road (42.025042N, 74.196266W). Given how little was actually for sale there, I don't know how we managed to spend something like a half hour in the store, the final ten minutes of which I spent by myself outside so I wouldn't have to wear a mask (I'd borrowed it from Gretchen's mother, and it was difficult to force my breath through).
On the way into Woodstock, we stopped at Sunfrost to get more seedlings, mostly basil, lettuce, a single mint plant, and a few more brassicas.
Naturally, of course, we then stopped at the bookstore in Woodtock to say hello to whoever was working Gretchen's shift (in this case James, one of the owners). But we weren't done with all our adventures; just before getting to the house, we stopped at Andrea's place (several hundred feet up Dug Hill Road) so Gretchen's parents could say hello to her. It turned out Powerful was there too; Andrea had hired him to do some gardening chores. As for me, the socializing was over. I climbed into the driver's seat of the Kona, buzzed it back to accommodate might significantly larger skeleton, and drove it the several hundred feet home, where I plugged it into the grid to charge. And then I climbed into bed with the dogs and napped again for quite some time.
There was no real dinner tonight, as we were all still stuffed from lunch. Powerful ate some leftover cauliflower wings and when Gretchen peckish she added some rice to some salad, a combination I jokingly called "bimi bop." "bi bin bop!" Gretchen corrected several times, adding that it was nothing like bi bin bop. After explaining our cut-cord television consumption these days, a lifestyle that depends heavily on bittorrent, Gretchen's father had me set up Deluge, a bittorrent client, on his computer. He'd told us many times of once trying to use bittorrent but then ending up with lots of viruses on his computer. So I was sure to have him turn off the infuriatingly stupid (and infantilizing) default setting of "hide extensions for known file types" (which seems engineered to get people to open executables disguised as mp3s). He was eventually able to download a couple files, though there weren't many in the swarm for the Beethoven music he was seeking.
Later the four of us watched two back-to-back episodes of Jeopardy!, which I'd downloaded using bittorrent, of course.
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