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the pizza place where they get things right
Friday, March 7 2025
Though it was still only Friday, I treated it like a weekend, and made a fire in the woodstove (something that has been less urgent since I installed a first-floor minisplit) and a french press of coffee. There was a little back & forth with the company that wants to hire me and the recruiter who hooked us up settling in on a final salary. I ended up negotiating $5000-less per year if I could take the two vacations Gretchen had already arranged for later this year (one to Sri Lanka and the other to the upper Danube in Europe).
Later I boxed up the menorah I'd made for my first-ever menorah customer and then Gretchen and I drove with the dogs to run a bunch of errands, the first being to mail off the menorah. Next we went to Downs Street to see if our worst tenant was home. She wasn't, and she hadn't even picked up the letter Gretchen had left on her door. Then we signed some paperwork at our accountant's office. (Unfortunately this year we owe over $7000 to Donald Trump's federal government, where it will probably end up paying off his legal bills or funding purchases of Cybertrucks from Elon Musk.) Finally we drove out to Mother "Fucking" Earth, mostly to get nutritional yeast, though we ended up spending nearly $100, because that place is expensive. We were both feeling a bit flush from the reality that I would have a full-time job soon. I briefly considered getting some decadent snack such as a packet of vegan hot "wings," but I decided not to, because I knew Gretchen was going to have a problem with all the hard clear plastic it was packaged in. (She'd said some things the other day that made me feel bad after I'd bought some rice at Hannaford that wasn't organic.) This dissonance between what I am comfortable with and what Gretchen is comfortable with reminds me a little of a similar dynamic that played out between my parents when I was a kid. Back then, it was my mother who wanted to buy things that my father didn't approve of, and she used to do so secretly, sometimes swearing me into the secret. This successfully modeled for me the keeping of secrets from a spouse, and it is now something I regularly do. But when Gretchen and I are shopping together, such secrets are impossible.
Gretchen thought we should celebrate me getting a job, so in the end I decided we should go to Ollie's, the pizza place in High Falls. (I was briefly tempted by the Garden Café, which had the eggplant rollatini special today, but in the end the vibe I wanted was Ollie's.) [REDACTED]
It's interesting that Ollie's still maintains their culture of only employing what I characterized as "lesbian lumberjacks" as their front-end staff. They also price things like they're a high-end boutique restaurant (as opposed to a pizza parlor). For example, the mediocre hazy IPA I ordered somehow cost $12, a price I'd never yet seen for a beer. Our meal there tonight cost around $100, and that was with only two sides, a pizza, and one drink. But we love Ollie's, and we'll surely be back. And it's not like they're driving people away with their prices; when we left, there was a line of people out the door waiting for a table. As Gretchen said while we were eating there tonight, "This place just looks right!"
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