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avoiding, then craving, spaghetti
Wednesday, August 25 2021
Gretchen began her flight back from Portland, Oregon at something like 10:00pm Pacific Time (1:00am Eastern Time) and, once landed in Newark, she drove directly to her Sunday shift at the Golden Notebook in Woodstock, meaning she missed a whole night of sleep. Meanwhile, I had my usual Wednesday of remote work in the laboratory. It was another big day of tax database imports, and, for the most part, the software I'd written did the work and I could mostly relax.
I'd already done most of the work of cleaning up the house so Gretchen wouldn't have to return to squalor, though I kept finding patches of mold that had grown on surfaces where I'd never seen mold before. One of these places was the dining room table, where patches of greenish-grey spores had appeared. Had the unusually high humidity caused a fungus to take up residence inside the actual wood of the table? Or was it restricted to within a thin film of gummy material on its surface?
Towards the end of the workday, I made a quick run into Uptown Kingston, mostly to get provisions to make dinner tonight. Gretchen doesn't eat spaghetti when she travels, because it's not much of a restaurant meal, but then she comes to crave it. So I wanted to make spaghetti with marinara sauce with the usual fried-up chonkiness (using tofu, though, not tempeh) and broccoli (cooked with the spaghetti).
My vision was eventually realized about ten minutes before Gretchen got back from the bookstore, and we ate it out on the east deck while telling each other how we'd spent the last five days. Gretchen had stayed with Gilley and Alan and met a number of other Portland-area people we know (such as Carrie & Aaron and Betty & Richard, that nice older couple on our vegan tour of Rajasthan). Gilley's demanding (and highly unpleasant) mother has finally been moved out of Gilley & Alan's bedroom and into an old folks' home (where all she does is complain and demand to leave), so that source of stress is somewhat diminished, though there are other issues. Gracie, one of their two dogs, is now sixteen years old and now shits and pisses everywhere, and there aren't enough pee-pads to absorb it all.
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