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falafel with Alex
Friday, November 19 2021
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
This morning I awoke from a horrifying dream that had me on the set of some sort of gangster movie starring John Krasinski. Though I knew everything I was seeing was fictional, the special effects were so depraved and gruesome that they haunted me after I awoke. In one of the scenes, the headless torsos of mafia victims were being electrocuted at their neck-stumps, causing them to thrash violently and gurgle up fluids. And one of the victims still had his head, though only enough flesh to keep him alive had been left; the rest had all been peeled away.
Normally I don't go into the office on Fridays, but Alex wanted me to, mostly (I think) because he was lonely. The ostensible reason for me being there was so I could demonstrate some fixes I'd made to the sprawling Angular/C# web app I've been slowly tweaking in the months since the Ukrainians stopped working on it. That demonstration didn't go well, though this didn't throw Alex into the rage it might've in the past; he's very uncertain where the company is going now that this woman Theresa is running things and has a strong suspicion we will both soon be laid off by the penny pinchers working for our private equity overlords.
But that's just the cloud of dread hanging over Alex's head. He had more immediate concerns, such as a tax import that had the wrong parcel identifiers. Fortunately, I was able to fix that problem by suggesting a configuration change.
I'd brought both of my dogs Ramona and Neville and Alex had brought his dog Winnie. Knowing that Ramona is bad with other dogs, particularly instigators like Winnie, when I went upstairs to Alex's office and thought it would be fun to bring a dog, I only brought Neville, who is great with other dogs, even the kind that don't play well with others. At the entrance to the office, Winnie was initially menacing, repeatedly snapping her jaws shut on the air next to Neville's face. He intuitively knew how to de-escalate the situation by avoiding eye contact and avoiding sudden movements. Winnie and Neville had socialized in the past, so perhaps at this point Winnie remembered Neville and that accounted for her switching over to play mode. Unfortunately, Neville isn't particularly playful, and he mostly ignored her many overtures in puppy play position. At some point he found Winnie's bone, which she happily let him gnaw for a time. And then she gnawed it some once he was finished.
Later Alex and I took all three dogs for a walk out past the field of solar panels. Initially, of course, we were concerned that Ramona would immediately attack Winnie and the day would be interrupted by a visit to the vet. I hadn't brought any leashes, so I took a power cord from the office cable nest (that required some untangling). We met down on the low flatland south of the office complex, an open enough place for the dogs not to feel trapped. Winnie was immediately delighted to see that two dogs, one a stranger and one a friend, were going to be walking with her. She ran right up to Ramona, who immediately sensed that she had to control herself. She sniffed noses with Winnie without even growling, though the hair on her back was standing up to reveal the underlying skin, indicating that a large part of her brain wanted to simply tear Winnie apart. But there were evidently higher cognitive functions at play suppressing these desires. Ramona did growl a couple times and bared her teeth once. But the whole time I gushed to her about how good she was being, and she clearly wanted this praise to continue. Within a few minutes, most of the torque was off the encounter and Winnie wasn't paying so much attention to Ramona.
Gretchen had called me to tell me that the young woman who had encouraged Powerful to move in with her and her boyfriend in Tivoli had just given Powerful notice that he was to move out. The situation had become so tense that Powerful and told Gretchen that he was willing to risk the transplant-related dangers of our house (mold and indoor/outdoor cats) to be done with the failed Tivoli experiment. Gretchen was, naturally, furious at the "little shit" who had promised Powerful a place to recuperate (saying she was "all in") only to kick him out. Powerful had really considered this woman a friend, but it seems you never really know who your friends are until you actually need them for something. In the end, Gretchen is the only friend willing to help him in this chapter of his life. I discussed this situation with Alex as we walked our dogs. Alex theorized that perhaps sharing the Tivoli apartment's one bathroom was what made the situation collapse. "A big man in a bathroom..." he said, indicating that he might've stunk the place up something fierce.
After we walked our dogs, Alex suggested going out for lunch. Initially he wanted to get burritos at Bubbie's, but I suggested we drive down to Rhinebeck and get falafel instead. So that was what we did. On the way, we passed an old farm house that Alex said was a museum for General John Quitman, whom Alex characterized as one of the worst people America had ever produced. Born in Rhinebeck, Quitman moved to Mississippi, where he came to own multiple plantations and hundreds of slaves. He became so committed to the cause of maintaining the institution of slavery that he advocated the annexation of Cuba so it could be added as an additional slave state, tipping the balance of the United States itself in a more pro-slave direction.
As I was waiting in line to get our falafel (Alex was waiting in his illegally-parked car), Roy (one of the falafel place's two owners) told me that Gretchen had just been there, probably on her way to or from picking up Powerful from Tivoli. Gretchen and I had no idea we'd both be getting falafel today, and when she was there Gretchen got me a falafel pita as well, which was of course fine with me.
Alex and I ate our falafel upstairs in his office space and then I went downstairs and resumed my dreary Angular development, punctuated as it still is by multi-minute compile times.
I drank a Southern Tier IPA on the drive home this afternoon. It seemed to have withstood the challenges of refrigeration and room temperature much better than the Ballast Point Sculpin had.
Back at the house, Powerful was all bundled up under blankets on the couch and Gretchen had good fire burning in the woodstove. Since Powerful will be staying on that couch until his basement room can be cleaned, have its carpet removed, and is repainted, I turned on the boiler, which we don't much use since getting all the heat-pump splits. But the living room has no such split, and with me going to the Adirondacks every weekend, I'm not around to maintain a fire in the woodstove. But if the boiler is on, it can heat the living room just fine.
I helped Gretchen move all the big furniture out of Powerful's basement room so its renovation can begin next week. I was in kind of a cranky mood because I just wanted to get on the road to the Adirondacks, and Gretchen was picking up on it. If Ramona can tamp her impulses down, I should be able to as well.
It wasn't just Powerful keeping Gretchen from going to the Adirondacks this weekend; she had plans to attend some sort of remote event that probably couldn't be done from the cabin. So I left for the Adirondacks with just the dogs and this week's cargo: several large pieces of bluestone, three end-tables, a small stool, an LCD monitor, and a collapsible 20-foot ladder, among other things.
Because Gretchen had been driving around in the Bolt, it didn't have a full battery, so I had to stop and recharge at the Albany Walmart. I was little flustered when I tried to log on to the charger. I placed my phone against the credit card thing, since for some reason that seemed to be the place to put it. But all that did was trigger Google Pay. At some point I figured out, oh right, I need to place my phone against the grey NFC pad. When I did that, it figured out who I was and the electricity started to flow.
While the car was charging, I went into the Walmart and bought a number of things, including a pair of pajama bottoms (since I'd forgotten to bring any). I also bought an Italian bread that turned out to have only cost a dollar, which is suspiciously cheap.
I didn't see any evidence of snow until I turned from Route 309 onto Woodworth Lake Road. Immediately I saw snow on both shoulders, and that snow was everywhere except the driving surface of the road. It was only about an inch deep, but it was enough to be annoying on the front stoop of the cabin, where there is still no snow shovel for such occasions.
The cabin was about 50 degrees Fahrenheit when I arrived, and I could start up the generator from inside without having to jump start it (since its starter battery had managed to stay charged due to the generator having come on multiple times over the past week). Normally I do some chore when I arrive at the cabin, but all I did this evening was unload the car and then drive out to the Woodworth Lake gate to retrieve a large package left leaning against a random building (it was an Ikea-style computer desk made mostly of laminated particleboard and steel).
I'd been a little off my feed since seeing on BoingBoing.net that Kyle Rittenhouse, the Kenosha shooter, had been acquitted today of all charges after being tried for multiple murders and attempted murders. This is a guy who brought an assault rifle to a protest and shot three unarmed people (in this case, all of them white). This is, of course, a terrible precedent. The gun-obsessed right wing will see this as marking the beginning of an open season on leftist protestors, functionally doing away with the right to peaceably assemble. As with all such cases of this sort, we're left to wonder, how much worse will things have to get before our society takes corrective action (in this case against gun culture run wild)?
Ramona and Neville under my desk in the office today. Click to enlarge.
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