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introducing La Florentina to new friends
Thursday, November 2 2023
Today was my father's 100th birthday and also the 12th anniversary of his death. It was a big enough of an occasion for me to post it on Facebook, as few people my age have parents who are now a century old.
At this time of year, when it's starting to be cold all day long and it makes sense to run a fire in the woodstove, I feel like I'm living unsustainably if I'm burning wood but not gathering it. This is true even when I have lots of firewood stockpiled (as I do; I probably have enough fully-processed bone-dry wood in the woodshed alone to make it through the winter and there is a huge pile of unprocessed wood on the edge of the driveway). To fight this feeling of unsustainability and to begin building up in the indoor firewood supply, today I gathered a backpack load of wood just east of the Stick Trail close to the house. It was mostly small stuff, including some dense Ostrya virginiana from a tree that was broken in an icestorm a year or so ago.
This evening Gretchen and I had a dinner date up with our new power-couple friends from Olive Bridge, the couple where one is a fairly famous actor and the other is a reasonably well-known playwright. Our destination was La Florentina, the Middle-Eastern-infused Italian restaurant on Albany Avenue. The only entrée we get there is the red cabbage sformato with tahini sauce, so of course that was what we all ordered. Unfortunately there was some bureaucratic problem with La Florentina's liquor license, so we all had to drink non-alcoholic beverages. Conversation was mostly about theatre and books, two topics about which I had little to add. But when one of the guys asked about the cabin, I told them how I'd used a battery-powered winch to drag the floating part of the dock out of the lake so it wouldn't be destroyed by winter ice.
Our friends agreed that the sformato was interesting and delicious, which meant that yet again, La Forentina's word-of-mouth fame reached yet more people.
On the drive back home, we fretted about what Charlotte might've done to our house in our absence, given her propensity to act out. Surprisingly, though, nothing seemed amiss, at least initially. Later, though, I discovered that she'd apparently peed on a blanket in the laboratory and the linoleum floor in the laundry room. Worst of all, she'd let a spot of piss in the very center of the laboratory bean bag (which, up until now, had somehow avoided being peed on since I'd gotten it a year and a half ago). The dreary job of rinsing out the blanket and the pee spot on the bean bag required numerous trips to and from the bathroom, and Charlotte kept getting in my way as I did so. Usually I talk to her in a high-pitched voice, but she was on my shit list so I said nothing to her at all, and this seemed to keep her frightened of me. She did her best to keep out of my way, though at one point she stupidly jumped off into the stair well under the trail that keeps humans from falling that direction. It was clumsy fall for her, but she seemed okay after it. Evidently it's going to be awhile before we can trust her not to shit and piss in our house. In the meantime, I'll be devising a system so that only cats can enter and leave the laboratory while I'm not around.
A group of five deer (four of which you can see here) appeared in Hurley Mountain Road on our way to La Florentina tonight, and they didn't immediately get out of our way. They were very hard to see in the distance, but when I saw shapes moving on the road, I screamed at Gretchen to slow down.
Click to enlarge.
some pictures of my father, Dr. Robert Francis Mueller, who would've turned 100 today.
Back in World War II.
In the kitchen of my childhood home with my brother Don.
In the kitchen of my childhood home with a colorized photo of him as a child in the background.
Click to enlarge.
With one of his smaller gardens in the front yard.
Click to enlarge.
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