Gretchen headed off to work early this morning and wouldn't be coming home tonight; she had a book release party to attend (the book having been written by our friend Jasmin). I took the dogs for a walk up the Farm Road and Chamomile Headwaters Trail, soon cutting over and salvaging a single branch from a very large dead skeletonized Red Oak on the bluff above the Stick Trail. The pieces of the limb came to only about forty pounds, so I added a big pre-sawn chunk along the Stick Trail which took the weight up to 97.0 pounds. But I wanted to gather as much wood as possible on what was predicted to be the last dry day before a long soaking rain. So later I returned to the place along the Stick Trail where I'd pre-positioned some pieces from the helical trunk I'd gotten pieces from yesterday and the day before. This was so close to the woodshed that I didn't bother with the backpack; I just carried the pieces in my arms. One weight about fifty pounds and the other about sixty. Today's total salvage value came to 207.15 pounds, although those two latter pieces contained a bit more moisture than I would have preferred.
This afternoon, I loaded up the dogs, popped the top off a Beer Camp Tropical IPA (not Sierra Nevada's best work), and drove out to the Tibetan Center's thrift store as the first destination of an outing. I'd been drinking kratom tea, and combined with the beer and the modest human interaction at the thrift store, I experienced a gentle pleasant feeling, the kind I recognize as coming from elevated serotonin levels. When I'm feeling this way, I experience a connection to strangers that is normally absent. This feeling intensified when I went to make my purchase. I'd taken a stainless steel dog bowl, added a stainless steel liquor flask, that scientific calculator I'd mentioned a long time ago (it needed a home!), and a D-Link DCS-942L WiFi-equipped networking surveillance camera (complete with a 8 gigabyte microSD card). The price for all that loot came to less than $5.50, and experiencing such a great retail moment sent another burst of serotonin into my humors.
From the Tibetan Center, I drove into Uptown Kingston. At the Hannaford (where I mostly needed bread), I saw that guy with the grotesquely deformed face; I hadn't seen him in years and thought he'd either died or moved away.
Some of my pajama-style pants have a way of sliding off my ass when I'm salvaging firewood, and it would be helpful to just be able to pin them to my shirt. But it seems that amongst all the crap in our house, we have only one or two tiny safety pins. So I went into the Ben Franklin there in the same plaza with the Hannaford and bought two packs of safety pins, one containing big ones and another containing moderately-small ones. Yet another destination was the liquor store, where I bought a half gallon of cheap gin and a litre of Duggan's Dew scotch.
On the way back home, I drove out into the corn field south of Wynkoop and parked near the spot where the dusty farm road cuts over to Hurley Mountain Road (41.923579N, 74.078357W). I'd brought the bigger of my drones with me just so I could fly it here, away from trees. Though this particular model of drone (the Syma X5C) tends to be a little slow to respond when it is far from the remote, I could nevertheless call it back when it seemed to getting away from me. It was so high up in the sky on a couple occasions that I actually lost sight of it. Here is the video I shot:
Back at the house, Sandor (Eva's companion) sent me a Facebook message asking if I had a microSD-to-SD adapter. I said that indeed I had plenty of those and he was welcome to one if he needed it. He then explained that he'd found a drone in the woods near his house and that it contained a microSD card and he wanted to see what might be on it. That sounded like fun, so I said to come on over. In about an hour, Eva and Sandor arrived.
It turned out that the drone was another Syma X5C. It was missing some LED covers and a rotor guard, but otherwise it looked to be great shape. Unfortunately, the microSD card was completely blank, so that was a bit of a letdown. Using my remote, I found that the drone was quite capable of flight. Sandor said I could have it "for spare parts or whatever," although he thought it might be fun to try to gang it together with my other drone (though it's unlikely that one controller can control two drones at once). [Note: it turns out that this is doable.]
Without Gretchen around, I'm sort of a dope when it comes to entertaining. I was good about providing drinks initially and even marijuana, but I didn't even think about food until we'd been hanging out for a half hour or so. Mind you, Eva and Sandor had arrived at 7:00pm, which is dinner time. I guess I'd been thinking that they were just coming for just a moment. Anyway, my solution to the food problem was to tear open a bag of Hannaford-brand organic multigrain corn chips and then make one of my bean salsas, this time using Goya-brand butter beans (which are not as good as Bush's Best). I added a lot of Goya-brand salsita (which isn't very spicy but contains MSG) and a drop or two of Dave's Total Insanity Sauce. Unfortunately, the result was too spicy (not for me, but I was entertaining others, remember). So I then watered it down with Trader Joe's mild tomatillo salsa and then added black-eyed peas, producing a totally different dip. I love this sort of thing when I'm eating by myself, but it might have been a bit too wacky for my guests. It wasn't just the spiciness that seemed to raise questions. They also seemed a little perplexed by my choices of legumes.
