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six person dinner date inertia
Monday, May 12 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
Today at work I battled off and on with an Azure Devops build pipeline specifically built to run Cypress end-to-end tests. At this point in the process, I was trying to get some dotnet services working in the context of the pipeline, and I kept having problems with the services finding a set of DLLs. But, as I've known for a long time, given sufficient persistence, eventually any problem can be solved. And so it was that this one was, though that only revealed another problem that I then needed to solve. This job hasn't been too demanding, but there haven't been enough wins, and without them it feels Sisyphean.
On the drive home, I stopped for supplies at the strip mall in Stone Ridge, where I got some beer, bread, tostadas, and grapes at the MyTown supermarket and a half gallon of cheap vodka at the nearby liquor store. (I prefer gin, but they do not sell half gallons of cheap gin in that particular store.)
Back home in Hurley, our Scottish guests had somehow passed the day with just the dogs (since Gretchen and I had been at work). I immediately took them for a walk up the Chamomile Headwaters Trail and over to the Stick Trail, where I was able to do a little work on the extension of the Chamomile Wall west of the Stick Trail for the first time in over a week. As I walked, I drank a road beer I'd started drinking back in Stone Ridge.
Back at the house, I gathered up the guests and drove us all to Woodstock to meet Gretchen and our friends Lynn and Gregg for an unusual six-person triple dinner date. I'd taken a recreational 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine this morning and by dinner time I was a little surprised to find that it had me feeling cranky, easily embarrassed by the small-talk banter and silly jokes being told by the two couples who were meeting each other for the first time.
The bulk of our conversation ended up being about vegan cruises, which was how we met Kelly and Brian. In tonight's conversation, Kelly said they'd been on seventeen of them. (Gretchen and I have been on five.) Astounded, I imagined what they could've done with that money had they saved it instead. "You could build a wicker man and set it on fire!" I exclaimed. The gist of this conversation seemed to be to convince Lynn and Gregg to join us on one of these cruises. Such evangelism has already worked on another couple; Falafel Cathy and her husband Roy have already booked a room on a Mediterranean cruise we'll be on that starts in Croatia and ends near Sicily some time next year.
After the main part of the meal (I'd had some mushroom skewers, a lentil soup, and a TLT), everyone started talking about the options for dessert, and my eyes began to glaze over. Gretchen could tell I was miserable and offered that I had my own car and could go if I wanted. That's not something I have been doing lately, but with six people at our table, their inherent inertia was likely to have them sitting there for a very long time. But now that I am employed, my time is especially precious, and over the past week I'd built up a nearly-mental-health-affecting alone-time deficit. So at some point, to the surprise of some, I announced I was leaving. And with that I got to my feet and walked out into the beautiful May evening. I already had a road beer stashed somewhere in the Bolt for the drive home.
Back home in Hurley, I could attend to some tasks that required being alone and a modest amount of mental focus during the hour or more that the other continued to eat their dessert and chit chat as the sky darkened to blackness. Well after dark, Gretchen, Kelly, and Brian returned and proceeded to re-watch Office Space, an activity I opted out of. But I did tell Kelly and Brian goodbye before I went to bed, as I wouldn't be seeing them again until our next cruise.
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