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poetry night at the Colony Café
Saturday, December 8 2007
Good evidence of my hermitlike existence of late is the fact that today was the first time since November that I got in a car and drove somewhere away from the house. The hatchback initially wouldn't start and I jumpered it with the other Honda, although I think the problem was more from a loose connection on the battery than the weakness of age. That battery is only two years old and I never get the cheapest option when replacing one.
I had an accumulated list of things I needed while I was out on the town: a box of a hundred Red Rose tea bags, lettuce, Goya-brand green salsa, extremely narrow-gauge flexible copper pipe, various small PVC fittings, and five gallons of apple cider. The success with my revisit of cider fermentation has tempted me to ramp up production.
While I was out, I happened to visit P&T Surplus in Kingston's Rondout area, and though I didn't see anything I needed, I was intrigued by some extremely powerful electric motors, some of which came with gearboxes. Also, I wondered if a pair of old ISDN router would be of any use for extending low-bandwidth networking using long lengths of cheap telephone line.
This evening Penny came over and it was the first time I'd seen her since the yardsale at her place in early November. She's and David are in the process of consolidating their city-based lives, and she's moving into his West Village apartment. As part of the move she sold a piece of furniture to a woman who paid with an envelope labeled with the agreed-upon price, $225. But by the time this envelope's contents were examined the next day, it was found to contain only $125. Penny was still plotting what to do about the situation (and she was definitely not going to let this go); the envelope featured contact information sufficient to track the woman down.
The three of us went together to a poetry-reading event at the Colony Café in Woodstock. Gretchen and our friend Tara were on the list of invited readers, although there would also be a period reserved for open mike that we would have to be sure to miss. In the meantime, Penny and I took advantage of the Colony's bar, which graduated in recent times to a bar of the fully-stocked liquor kind. Penny was intrepid enough to order a Manhattan, although the bartender looked a far too young to be capable of confecting such a thing.
When Penny and I cut out early, we went to the nearby Landau Grill for another round, where we compared notes on how much more social we used to be back when we were still unmarried. While we were there a complete stranger at the other end of the bar ordered a round of drinks for everyone there (including us), but we didn't stay long enough to take advantage. The others were soon seen taking shots of Jägermeister, something I've never seen done by anyone older than twenty. We were in such a hurry as we departed that Penny accidentally left that envelope with its $125 on the bar. Happily, though, a guy Gretchen had befriended at the Colony and brought to the Landau did the nice thing and brought it to Penny at the Garden Café, which we'd dashed to get to before closing time.
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