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immediate Queen Bee
Tuesday, November 23 2021
I was at the office in Red Hook today and it was too cold to eat my Bubbie's burrito outside, so instead I brought it back to my desk and devoured it there. The only other person in the office was Scott, though my boss Alex was upstairs and came down a couple times. I was working on a complicated tax importation issue and he was mostly leaving me alone.
Gretchen and I have been communicating in the morning so that we both load up the New York Times Spelling Bee into our browsers so we can play for awhile separately on a fresh, unplayed game. Then later we communicate and arrange a refresh, at which point our words are consolidated. Today the panagram ("fixated," with "f" in the middle) was a bit elusive, and I only found in just before our coordinated refresh. When that happened, Gretchen had 29 words and I had 31. After refresh, we were immediately at the elusive status of Queen Bee, only a week after our last Queen Bee.
Gretchen wants me to buy fewer things at Home Depot, since as a sociopathic big-box store, it is mostly a force for evil. So this evening after work I drove down to William's Lumber (on the north edge of Rhinebeck) to do my purchases. I needed some caulk for the bathroom, but mostly what I needed was half inch black iron and fittings so I could assemble a firewood rack for the cabin. I didn't really have a plan for the rack, developing one as I selected fittings and laid them out on the floor. This stuff fits together like Lego, though one does have to be aware of the need to rotate pieces with respect to each other as part of fitting them together. For this reason, I also got four union fittings so that I can marry the two halves of the rack together without rotating those halves with respect to each other. With the exception of the the union fittings (which were about $9 each), the fittings weren't too expensive. But it consisted of about 38 pieces, and I ended up spending over $238. The guy who rang me up seemed a little incompetent (asking at first if this was a return!) so before leaving I made sure that I hadn't paid for more items than were in my shopping cart.
This evening the old Mercy For Animals IT diaspora got together on Google Meet for a rare happy hour. It was the usual four of us, talking mostly about pandemic-related issues. These days Cameron is in Fort Collins, Colorado, while Allison and Dan are in Florida. Allison's new boyfriend also made an appearance on video, and caught everyone up on Powerful's heart transplant and the fact that he is now living on the couch in our living room. At some point Dan told us the coconut tree in his yard and that he'd bought a machete specifically for slicing coconuts in half. He then sent us a photo of him sharpening his machete while his young son Lane looked on. Near the very end of the call, I grabbed Diane and held her up to show the other attendees while claiming she was "Church the Cat." Earlier, you see, Cameron had held up his not-especially-happy-faced black cat named Church, and I thought passing off another black cat as Church would make for a good teleconference gag.
I should note that both Dan and I were drinking Hazy Little Thing IPAs. Somehow that particular beer has completely taken over the non-macrobrew market in just one or two years.
Our happy hour tonight.
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