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a party despite the hurricane remnants
Friday, August 9 2024
All through the night and into the day, we had series of torrential downpours, the remnants of Hurricane Debbie. Once most of that had passed, a much warmer air mass moved in, putting fog on the outside of our windows.
Gretchen spent much of the day in the kitchen making a three-layer frosted carrot cake to serve our frind Lisa P's birthday cake. Initially the plan had been to make it only a two-layer cake. But then the layers turned out to be too thin. There were other kitchen misshaps as well, but somehow the carrot cake turned out great. Towards the end of Gretchen's cake preparation, I cooked up a pot of medium shells (the pasta) so I could eat them with sauce and leftover pizza toppings (a pan of fried up tofu, onions, and mushrooms). That made for a pretty good lupper.
Lisa P had been planning a big birthday party at her house, but it was a danger of being canceled due to a power outage. But then the power came back on so the party was back on. We showed up at about 6:30pm. I don't really know Lisa's friends, so I found things a little awkward for much of the party, though occasionally I had a few good conversations. (The more wine I drank, the easier these seemed to come.) One was with an older woman that Gretchen and I talked to, and that went well until her husband came over and we started talking about Tim Walz. Naturally at that point, Gretchen felt compelled to mention that her only problem with him is that he is a hunter, to which the husband said something sardonic about how it might be better to vote for neonazis than a hunter, at which point Gretchen took offense, missing the point he was making. Somehow that conversation ended amicably, but only just. I should point out that Lisa P., who is not vegan, had made her party a vegan one mostly just to make Gretchen comfortable.
Gretchen's boss Jackie was there, and she'd brought her long-time boyfriend Bennett, who is a controversial politician in the small political pond of Woodstock. (Our friend Peter insists Bennett had something to do with whiteawashing Central American deathsquads back in the 1980s and 1990s, and more recently Bennett ran a failed campaign to become Supervisor of the Woodstock Town Board.) Bennett and I had a fun conversation about unemployment (he's been chronically underemployed for a long time) building bluestone walls. Later, after the cake was cut, some older woman with a light northern European accent saw me standing by myself looking lonely and came up to me to strike up a conversation with the words "I'm not trying to pick you up." I ended up talking to her about unemployment, what it's like to manage a modest real estate empire, and the art I used to take more seriously than I do now. Later still I talked to a guy who remembered me from back when Gretchen and I used to go to art openings on the Rondout in Kingston.
Just before Gretchen and I left the party, we talked to a couple who was a little older than us who had, about ten years ago, got back together after a thirty-something-year estrangement, which makes our twelve year estrangement look like a long distance relationship by comparison.
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