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doggy play date on Ohayo Mountain
Sunday, March 29 2026
This morning while I was drinking my coffee and playing Spelling Bee, Gretchen got a message from A's boyfriend Jamie that "they" were coming over with "weapons." (I'd been talking with him about bows and arrows yesterday.) Who came over was just Jamie and A's daughter. And they both had bows and arrows. But before playing with those, we drank coffee and chatted about things. Jamie told us about his apartment-mate in Brooklyn, a wacky guy who produces amazing high-quality videos full of quirky (but catchy) original music.
When we went out into the yard to shoot arrows, I fetched my compound bow, from which I have not shot a single arrow in over ten years. (I'd orginally bought it as a tool to help me cut limbs high on trees blocking my WiFi experiments; this was why one of the arrows still had a bit of string attached to it.) We set up a cardboard box with a paper target Jamie had brought, but we also set up a few large pieces of bucked firewood to shoot at, and we put them in the narrow strip of forest between our yard and the Farm Road (technically on A's property). We (including Gretchen) would all spend a little time shooting arrows and then spend a much greater amount of time in the range (A's daughter thought we should shout the word "abdomen" so everyone would know to stop shooting) looking for the arrows. It wasn't long before we'd lost a couple arrows for the time being. The chaos in the range was partly because of the quality of my arrows; one had a curved shaft and was missing a third of its fletching. This caused it to fly in random curved trajectories. I'd also forgotten everything I'd bother to learn about my bow and didn't even remember what arm I should be using to pull on the string.
Jamie and A's daughters' bows were both simple bows, and Jamie didn't have any experience with compound bows. So he was delighted by how powerfully my bow could fling an arrow. "It was $40 on eBay," I said. They'd gotten their bow equipment at Kenco (at the intersection of Route 28 and Hurley Mountain Road) and had even taken archery classes in their indoor range. Shooting arrows was fun for a little while but we all got bored with it in less than an hour.
Once our neighbors had gone home and Gretchen had gone off to see a teleplay at the Rosendale Theatre, I returned to the Chamomile Wall to further build out its western end. Today I climbed high up the slope to the southeast and gathered some big sheets of flat bluestone, perfect for roofing the center void in the wall and greatly stabilizing the somewhat precariously-stacked stones on either side of the central void. The sheets were on the order of a half-inch thick but having dimensions something like two by three feet, making them light enough to easily carry. (Such material would be a great veneer for a concrete wall such as the basement walls at the cabin.)
Later this afternoon, Gretchen and I drove with our dogs to a doggy play date. This would be at the house of our new friends Andrew and Ashley, the couple who lost a pair of dogs in the big January 25th snowstorm and only ever recovered one of them, Peach. They live on Ohayao Mountain off Yerry Hill Road and have a quirky house they'd had work on to deal with horrifying decoration decisions (including a bathroom that looks like someone turned loose a bunch of toddlers equipped with both crayons and scaffolding. They also have a nice (but also quirky) guest house complete with running water and a bathroom. Our intial attention, of course, was the dogs and how much fun Charlotte and Peach were having playing together. Andrew and Ashley are still traumatized by the Peach and Yoshi disappearing for all those days and Yoshi's failure to ever return, so they never let Peach off leash even when it was clear that all she wanted to do was play with Charlotte. Ashley dropped the leash a few times but then quickly grabbed it again.
Eventually we went into the main house and sat around drinking tea and talking about various things. The biggest thing in Gretchen's mind these days is the beagle rescue she'll be participating in at the lab-dog breeding farm in Madison, Wisconsin. She talked about that for some time, including her expected level of participation. She says she'll be in the red group (which will enter the facility) but she promised to me that she will not get arrested. Supposedly it is difficult to get arrested, and only those who refuse to leave when ordered to will.
Then we had a couple parallel conversations, with Ashley talking with Gretchen about something while I talked with Andrew about my conviction that the current wave of artificial intelligence investment is foolish because providing for AI customers (who are not sticky since there are no network effects) is much more expensive than providing for users of conventional web technologies. So the business plan of attracting users by giving away services at a loss gets an AI company nothing, since the moment they try to monetize their user base, the users can jump ship to another service without experiencing much disruption. I said that Apple has a much better model with respect to AI: they make AI hardware that runs on equipment they sell to users that consumes power that the users pay for as well. So any AI features they sell can scale at no expense to them. We also talked about how AI is removing the lowest rungs of the career ladder for white collar professions, and that some day the only people left who will now how to do advanced white-collar tasks will be people old enough to have learned it in the years before the AI revolution.
When Gretchen and I were getting up to leave, Ashley said something about wanting to eat at the Garden Café tonight. Gretchen said that sounded fun, so we all ended up continuing our time together there. When we got to the Garden, we found our friends Gregg and Lynn "cheating on us" with some other couple. They were a vegan pair who had just moved to Hurley from Westchester (which is how they know Gregg and Lynn). Gregg and Lynn were interested in what couple we were cheating on them with, so we made those introductions as well.
I ended up ordering the burrito, which is kind of meh unless you ask for jalapeños to be put in it. The jalapeños that ended up in mine were as weak as bell peppers, but I like that flavor, and there were other sauces to work with, including a jalapeño sauce that came with the stuffed mushroom appetizer. Over dinner, we mostly discussed Andrew's mother's life. She's self-publishing a memoir, and has lots of stories about interviewing celebrities in the late 1990s and early 2000s as part of her work for an entertainment-related magazine. (She's actually started out working at Penthouse.) Andrew had a number of amusing stories, including that his mother had gotten Robin Williams and other celebrities to be on a congratulatory videotape played at his bar mitzvah. Andrew also mentioned a chapter his mother had written about having an affair with Andrew's best friend's father. (Andrew had had to insist that she not use their real names.)
Gretchen and I didn't have our wallets, but it wasn't a problem because Ashley and Andrew happily paid the tab.
I'd had no negative effects from the pseudoephedrine I'd taken on Thursday, so today at noon I'd taken another 120 mg dose, thinking it would help me refactor the command parsing code in my ESP8266 Remote Control System. But I never actually managed to get to it today.
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