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bridging musical islands Saturday, October 28 2006
We experienced unusually heavy rains this morning. I can't say I've ever seen such heavy rains fall for such a long period of time before. Puddles appeared in all sorts of unusual places, and little streams crossed the driveway in multiple places, something that hasn't happened since my spring drainage projects. Water even penetrated the basement in one place, coming down the PVC pipe that carries the line that runs from the well to the boiler room. There's almost no collection area for the watershed defined by the well line (it runs under something of a minor hydrologic divide), but this rain found it.
After the rain the weather warmed to nearly sixty degrees, and opened up the doors of the house so the fifty something degree air inside could be replaced with the warmer stuff. Our house is never any colder than it gets at this time of year, when we willingly endure hardship so as to avoid starting up the boiler until November.
Gretchen had a strange phone call today with one of her friends down in the city. This friend, let's call him D, is a poet and a writer and a year ago Gretchen and he had been arranging via email to have a reading down in the city. In the midst of the discussion of this plan, D mysteriously dropped the idea as well as the conversation. Mysteriously, he didn't correspond with Gretchen again for an entire year. So finally Gretchen became worried and called him on the phone. He seemed cold and distant at first and then it turned out that he'd arranged a reading and had even reminded Gretchen when and where it would be, but when the day arrived Gretchen wasn't there and the reading ended up being a complete disaster.
It seems that in the very middle of their negotiations over the reading, D's emails (which he'd been sending through AOL) suddenly stopped being received by Gretchen (who uses Yahoo). Some new blockage in the internet had arisen, either on the AOL sending end or on the Yahoo receiving end. The moral of this story is as follows: you can never be certain your emails are actually getting to their intended recipient and backup communications are often necessary, particularly when no confirmation is received via email.
This afternoon I sat by myself in front of the teevee and watched the Steve Buscemi movie Trees Lounge on DVD. It was a rich, sad little movie, full of misfiring cars and blue collar pathos-cum-geniality.
For dinner, Gretchen and I met Susan the German translator and a couple of Woodstock friends who are not part of the vegan scene at a brand new vegan restaurant in the middle of downtown Woostock. The food was delicious, a many notches above the flavorless vegan offerings familiar from vegan potlucks. Gretchen and Susan went across the street to buy wine, since the restaurant is still too new to have a liquor license. It's struggling under other aspects of Woodstock's oppressive regulatory environment, with tales reminiscent of those I've heard from modern-day Germany. Because the kitchen is not yet approved to have a commercial stove, the kitchen gets by with a hot plate and an oven. As for the bathroom, it isn't even part of the same indoor space. One must go out to the sidewalk and over and then in through a separate door. Having an unsupervised lockable bathroom so close to the gutter punks of the Woodstock Green is just asking for trouble
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