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the long way to Lorenz Road
Sunday, August 11 2024
Gretchen has had a difficult time finding us a dog sitter for some upcoming trips we'll be taking, and she got so desperate that she decided hire a professional, that is, someone who with dog-sit for a fee. Early this afternoon, we were visited by a couple dog sitters who had apparently just started some kind of pet care company and were trying to figure out how best to circumvent the communications restrictions (and cut-taking) of the Rover online pet services matching app. When they arrived at our house, I think one of the guys (the smaller, squirrelier one) was a bit skeeved out by how wild and wooly our yard is. But when I came out with the dogs, he seemed more enthusiastic. They both seemed to genuinely like dogs. We gave them a tour of the house and told them what our needs were, and it seems like we're going to be doing this. I don't really know how it can be lucrative for them to dog sit at our house for only $64/day, but the smaller, squirrelier seems otherwise unemployed and probably on a disability, so if he's not doing anything else, he might as well be dog sitting.
Some months ago, Gretchen ran across the new inhabitants of a house off Lorenz Road that had belonged to a woman named Dee (and before that, Dee and her now-deceased and highly-unpleasant husband, a builder with a reputation for incompetence). The new people are Ken and Laura, and they're part-timers from Brooklyn who bought the house about two years ago. Ken is an actor and I forget what exactly Laura does, but she is also a writer. Gretchen has been friendly with them and they came to her reading some weeks back in Bearsville. This afternoon they walked down to our house so we (including our two dogs and their dog Rosie) could take a walk through the forest back to their house and better know the available trails. Initially there was some concern about how well Rosie (some sort of collie mix) would get along with our dogs, but they seemed to coexist perfectly well. Charlotte was a little intimidated at times, but they're both young and energetic, so they even played some. Mostly, though, Rosie seemed to have the best time when there were puddles to wallow in. Fortunately for her, the open water in the wetland east of the Farm Road is completely restored after recent rains. And there were many other wallowing spots as well, some in unfamiliar places. As for Neville, he came along, but fell behind so far that we lost him soon after entering Georges' property (the "farm" at the end of the Farm Road).
The route Gretchen took us on was not the most direct one, which would've been less than a half mile but would've required us to bushwhack a bit. The route Gretchen took us on, by contrast, passed the east end of the abandoned bluestone mine and was more than three times longer. Along the way, there was another unexpected new house on Reichel Road not far from its end. I also pointed out a broadleaf plant that I'd seen a lot of and been unable to identify. Laura, who claimed not to know much about plants, happened to know that it was burn weed, which I would later learn is a native plant (one that is now an escaped exotic in China!).
I'd never been to Dee's old house, which is way back on the woods at the end of a long driveway on the side of a narrow pond leftover from bluestone extraction. I hadn't had an opportunity where it was appropriate to piss, so all I could think about initially was doing that. Once that was done, I could marvel at Laura and Ken's house. It's an improvised building where porches gradually were boxed in and became rooms and floors sag as the leave the proximity of walls. There were also a number of small outbuildings and an enormous amount of blueston, some of which is being worked into a broad entranceway.
We were on something of a time crunch for our next thing, so Laura drove us and our dogs (Neville had caught up!) back to our house.
This evening we had dinner in the outdoor garden area of the Garden Café in Woodstock with our friends Cathy and Roy (who run the falafel place in Rhinebeck). It was gorgeous evening and a bit cool for this time of year, so conditions were ideal. Unfortunately, the Garden had run out of mushroom tacos, so I ended up getting the Beyond Burger and a bowl of chickpea-tomato soup. Dinner conversation focused briefly on our upcoming travel plans and then on possible plans for funding a the house purchase for one of their sons in the present high-interest-rate financial season. And then Gretchen told the story of how she and her friend Carrie are reuniting after a nearly three-year estrangement. This inevitably led to a discussion of Gretchen's strong personality and how intimidates others. Roy brought up the time, years ago, when Gretchen criticized their falafel stand for offering water in plastic bottles, which Gretchen found ecologically abhorrent. Perhaps they could offer water in some other form? This led into a bit of a renewed locking of horns, with Roy saying such gestures were trivial and wouldn't help much. And then Cathy said something about she is not an environmentalist, which seemed strange coming from a vegan. I decided it must be part of her "schtick," to say that, since anyone dining at her falafel restaurant in Rhinebeck would generally be pleased about how environmentally-sound it is. (There isn't much plastic waste, and packaging tends to be minimal.) On the way home, Gretchen explained it as more that she has given up on token gestures to save the environment, which is something I can understand. But needless waste feels like sin to me, since I feel that more deeply than, say, thou shalt not steal. (When I'm traveling, for example, I am so loathe to throw coffee grounds into the trash that I will go outside and dump them out under the shrubbery.)
Our last social call was to attend a party at the residence of Gretchen's boss Jackie and her boyfriend Bennett. They live with their blended family in a big old house on a hill just northeast of Bearsville. Soon after we arrived one of their adult children was telling Gretchen all about how great Central Asia is after doing a stint in Kyrgyzstan. Then Gretchen and I checked out an impressive treehouse that was more just an elevated deck with a small branch coming through the middle of it. By the time I got down from that, a freakish storm had blown in for the north, causing a mad dash to get all the party stuff inside (including a dozen cupcakes had baked earlier today). Later I had two conversations with Bennett, one about how easy it is to grow cannabis and the other about the insane tasks I made for myself when building my greenhouse (including jackhammering a deep hole into its bluestone floor). Sandwiched in the middle there somewhere, Gretchen and I had a conversation with the mother of the woman who'd fronted that band we'd seen at Tubby's on Thursday. She smiled a bit too much, but otherwise she seemed nice (and like a good mother to a rock-n-roll daughter).
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