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Pat Ryan at the Golden Notebook
Saturday, March 14 2026
I went out twice today to get more salvaged firewood, starting with more of yesterday's felled dead white ash and then getting some scraps cut months ago, including at least one piece of what I think is big tooth aspen (not a great firewood species, but I had room for it in my backpack). While I was there doing these things, I was also working on my stone walls. Today I extended the part of the Chamomile Wall west of the Stick Trail several more feet westward, where and its now straddling a place where spring water persistently emerges from the base of the escarpment to the south (this spring is actually active a larger fraction of the year than the Chamomile "River").
For the past week or more, I've been noticing that our tankless electric hot water heater has not been successfully boosting hot water temperatures much above the levels reached by hydronic solar power alone. It made me wonder if perhaps the heater had finally gone bad or been gunked up by mineral deposits. But today when I was testing, I was finding it was producing scorchingly hot water from its output, but that hot water was never reaching a faucet. Something about the plumbing was mixing this hot water with colder water, something I should've been more suspicious of given the recent plumbing changes I made. I soon found what was happening: hot water was going to a branch of the heating system that used to be in a nearby room-size basement closet to a place where we used to have a heatpump-based hot water heater (which subsequently became the main water heating system at the Adirondack cabin). In that closet had been a valve to allow water at the input to that missing heater to flow directly to the output of that heater, bypassing it completely (which was necessary to avoid sulfur in the output in cases where its heating utility wasn't needed). In the course of installing the new manifold for the hot water replumbing project, I'd opened that valve, which was now allowing hot water from the tankless heater to mix with water that hadn't been tanklessly heated. That was the entire problem. All I had to do was close that valve.
At a little after 5:00pm, Gretchen and I loaded up the Bolt with lots of finger food Gretchen had prepared, and we drove to the Golden Notebook, where Gretchen had organized an intimate political gathering featuring a visit from Woodstock's congressman, Pat Ryan. Gretchen is a huge Pat Ryan fan even though he's not actually our congressman (we're in Josh Riley's district, though Pat Ryan's district begins before one even gets to Route 28 on the drive to Woodstock). Because the event was mostly driven by Gretchen, the finger foods would all be vegan, though I think the Golden Notebook provided drinks (including a good collection of wines and seltzers). For some reason I'd grabbed Gretchen's coat by accident, since it resembles one of mine, and once I'd gotten out of that, it was like getting out of a straight jacket. [REDACTED]
I helped some with the initial setup, which didn't take long, and chatted briefly with one of Ryan's aids, wherein I detailed my theory that the Hudson River divides New England from the Midwest. When he brought up the fact that Hudson used to be a whaling village, I pointed out that the Hudson is tidal all the way to Albany, so the old whalers could drag a whale corpse all the way to Hudson without encountering any rapids or locks. Indeed, I added, Henry Hudson had once sailed up the Hudson River thinking it might be the Northwest Passage and a possible route to Asia.
Meanwhile Gretchen was fretting that perhaps she had not prepared enough food for the potential 40-person crowd that could show up. I said it would all come down to the ratio of WASPs to non-WASPs (I thought it best not to say "Jews"), since WASPs would only be interested in drinking and the food would only be eaten by non-WASPs. "As a Jew," Gretchen sighed, "I'd be very upset if we ran out of food!" The others told her not to worry, that just the boutique vegan cheese and crackers would be enough to sustain a lot of snacking.
Soon after Pat Ryan arrived, I was chatting with various other people I know well, particularly Kirsti (the female half of the photogenic vegan Buddhist couple I've been mentioning for decades). She told me about her latest crew of sick cats that keep her from leaving the house for more than a few hours at a time, and I told her about Lester, our transgender cat whom we used to call Celeste. Then I was chatting with our neighbor A, the actress, who is also not in Pat Ryan's district. She was telling me about the apartment being sold out from under her boyfriend Jamie and how he will probably have to start living illegally in his photography studio. I was telling her about how our Subaru had failed inspection but that I would be doing all the work necessary to get it to pass. Somewhere in all this, one Pat Ryan's other staffers came up and told A what a big fan he was of her acting work.
Not long after that, Nancy (of Ray and Nancy) arrived, and she's also not in Pat Ryan's district. Then Andrew and Ashley, the couple who visited us with Peach last night, showed up, and I chatted some with them. Then Gretchen got everyone quiet and gave the introductory speech she'd been fretting about for days. She had to do it from memory, and she did an amazing job. What struck me was that the points she hit in it were all mainstream ones, about things like VA hospitals and Social Security offices that Pat Ryan had kept open in the face of DOGE. As she was saying these things, I turned to Nancy and said, "She's being so reasonable!" Andrew and Ashley overheard this and chuckled. I also mentioned to Andrew and Ashley that Gretchen is definitely the extrovert in our relationship.
After Gretchen's intro, Pat Ryan spoke for well over an hour, talking about forming coalitions with people not necessarily in his camp to get things done, like the reopening of offices closed by DOGE. He has a good energy and effortless charisma about him and he comes across as a real person, much more so than someone like Kathy Hochul or Chuck Schumer. His talk was good and uplifting, and at the end he took questions, including one about whether Donald Trump might cancel the midterms. Ryan was confident the midterms would happen, and implied that the talk of suspending them was mostly about dispirting his opponents, which Ryan insisted we never allow happen.
After the event, there was more chit chatting, most of which I was doing with Nancy. I was very hungry by then and people hadn't done much damage to Gretchen's spread of foods, particularly the boutique vegan cheeses. So I hit that hard, particularly enjoying some sort of pepper jack.
After most of the others had left, Nancy and I helped Gretchen put away the foods. Jackie (the co-owner of the bookstore) gave Gretchen and me all the leftover wine and seltzer, which was a fair amount. It turned out that over $400 worth of books had sold during the event (when the bookstore was technically closed), over a quarter of which were bought by our neighbor A.
After the event, we went to the Garden Café to see if they were still open, but their kitchen had been closed by then for some time, so we just chatted with the owner and staff there about the event. Pat Ryan had actually been to the Garden before the event and had ordered a miso soup. "Did he tip well?" Gretchen asked. It turned out one of his staff had been in charge of the bill.
Mural by Will Lytle in the upstairs at the Golden Notebook. Click to enlarge.
An opossum in the mural. Click to enlarge.
Deer and a fox in the mural. Click to enlarge.
Pat Ryan (standing in front of the steps) addresses the people at the Golden Notebook. Click to enlarge.
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