|
|
|
it's a one-way street, asshole
Sunday, December 24 2023
After a fairly typical Sunday morning drinking coffee and playing collaborative Spelling Bee in front of a roaring fire in the living room woodstove, I went up to the laboratory and continued working on the spec project I have been building for my old boss Alex. At this point I'm down to figuring out how to routing around bugs in the underlying platform (in this case, Google Chrome), which doesn't always draw the right rectangle given a Javascript range and using the getBoundingClientRect() method. I also built out a popup tool that is triggered by clicking on a highlighted issues in a scanned text. (Those highlights are produced using getBoundingClientRect().)
In the mid afternoon, Gretchen and I drove with the dogs to Woodstock to get lupper at the Garden Café. We figured we'd be arriving during a mid-afternoon lull, but the restaurant was unexpectedly crowded. Fortunately, there was a table reserved for someone else, and that someone else had yet to arrive, so (since Gretchen is a VIP), we were given that table. We brought the dogs in with us as usual, and (also as usual) it took a little bit for Charlotte to settle down and quit barking (with her ear-splitting bark-shriek) at a greyhound in a festive red sweater out on the sidewalk. I ordered the stuffed mushrooms and the TLT (the latter of which I hadn't ordered in years) as well as one of my favorite beers, the Abbey Ale. Gretchen ordered some sort of beet-based appetizer and a main course that looked like vegan Thanksgiving leftovers drenched in a marsala sauce. By this point, the dogs were calmed down and lying in an adorable cuddle puddle.
Gretchen had it in mind to leave a $50 tip, which she did. But its impact was offset by a $25 gift certificate she was given with her bill.
After dinner, we walked over to Gretchen's workplace, the Golden Notebook bookstore, to introduce Charlotte to Gretchen's co-workers. It being the evening before Christmas, the store was crowded with last minute Christmas shoppers. We turned Charlotte and Neville loose and they were both well behaved. It was old-hat for Neville, who plunked down on the floor in front of the cashier in a way that made people buying books have to step around him carefully. Meanwhile Charlotte trotted about, accepting pets from strangers and not acting anything like the neurotic dog I would've expected her to be. She was a hit with everyone, particularly the employees who already knew Neville.
Later as we were trying to leave Woodstock, somebody was stopped in the middle of the little one-way street that goes southwestward on the northwest side of the triangular Village Green (the place where the drum circles happen). While Gretchen was telling the guy who had left his car there that we were trapped behind him, some other person seemed to be rising to his defense. I was in a belligerent mood and kept shouting "It's a one-way street, asshole!" Gretchen was mortified, asking why I was being that way. I suppose she has to worry more about her reputation in Woodstock, where she is something of a public figure.
Back at the house, I made yet more progress on my spec project, which has become something I work on as a form of procrastination. At some point Gretchen and I watched another episode of our favorite upper-Midwestern gothic series, Fargo (season five). After that, I went downstairs and found Neville with two of my Christmas stockings, devouring a mix of nuts and candy. Gretchen had hidden the stockings in the place she always hides them, in a closet near her first floor computer, and somehow Neville had found them. It looked like he'd partially destroyed one or two socks and perhaps damaged some of the contents. We were a little concerned about how much chocolate he might've eaten, though we've seen dogs eat all sorts of foods they aren't supposed to eat many times without ever seeing any ill-effects.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?231224 feedback
previous | next |
