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inlaws and BRAWL
Friday, March 25 2011
I concluded the cleaning jihad with the basement bathrooms this morning. The middle bathroom is always a particular mess due to my bathing behavior (and the many hairballs I pull from the bathtub drain and throw into the toilet, which, because it is rarely flushed, simply accumulate). Still, no toilet gets flushed less frequently than the one in the basement master bedroom guestroom suite. Most of the water in the bowl had dried up, leaving behind an olive-green crust. It probably hadn't been used since Gretchen's parents visited us last Thanksgiving.
Next I took a turn at fixing a problem in the large asphalt lagoon in front of our McMansion. Years ago I'd dug trenches across the driveway to keep water from pooling in and uphill from it (where it tended to freeze into a treacherous slick every winter). There was so much runoff this past winter that such pooling was inevitable no matter how good the drainage. But what I didn't expect was how trashed the material used to pave over one of the ditches would become. Milder versions of such trashing in past years has caused me to gradually replace the original paving (concrete veneered with flat stones) with concrete reinforced with steel mesh and rebar. That stuff has held up well, though it hasn't been good at remaining flush with adjacent asphalt, lifting itself into something of a speedbump. Now it seemed like I was going to have to repave the last of the problematic ditch, but by this point I'd decided to try a different approach. Instead of using concrete, I'd just set large flagstones in gravel and allow them to move up and down as weather conditions require. But when I tore up the old ruined concrete, I found the PVC drainage pipe beneath it was also damaged (cracked and punctured along its dorsal surface), though perhaps in a way that could be patched. Lacking the necessary supplies, I cobbled together a temporary solution and buried it beneath a large piece of bluestone. The advantage to avoiding concrete is that the ditch can easily be disassembled, maintained, and then reassembled.
Gretchen's parents drove down from the Albany airport and arrived in the mid-afternoon. My mother-in-law is sensitive to cold, so I had a roaring fire built in the stove, but it wasn't quite enough for her, and she needed a blanket too. Conversation soon focused on our upcoming trip to Rome, Italy, with endless back and forth (mostly between Gretchen and her father) concerning the minutia of Italian travel logistics. There are few discussions that cause my eyes to glaze over quite like those that focus on the details of what should be done on an upcoming vacation, so I started on another springtime project I'd been thinking about for the past few days: widening the window sill on a south-facing array of windows in the dining room. This array measures some 87 inches in width and it's my preferred location for sprouting seedlings in preparation for the gardening season. I know, I know, I spent a lot of time and money building a perfectly good greenhouse, but the thing about seedlings is that they are high-maintenance. They live in tiny pots and must be watered every day. They also need better climate control than can be provided in the greenhouse. So the south-facing windows in the dining room are an ideal place for starting seeds, partly because of the great sunlight and partly because it's adjacent to the dog and cat food area (along the dining room's east-facing windows), which I have to attend to every morning in any case. The problem with the window sill is that it is only four inches wide, which renders it unsuitable for anything but a single line of narrow cans. This afternoon's project had me widening the sill to seven and a half inches using a single pine plank. To get it to fit, I had to cut notches for the window opening hardware, various pieces of molding, and the travel cone of the window-opening crank. By the time I was done and had painted the plank with two coats of primer, it was dinner time.
The four of us went out to our favorite regional Indian restaurant, the one in Uptown Kingston. We brought our own bottle of wine, a $3 bottle Gretchen had bought at Trader Joe's. It was delicious, as was the food, though perhaps not quite as good as it was that one recent weekend when all we ended up eating was Kingston Indian Restaurant food.
After dinner, we drove down to the Rondout to show Gretchen's parents one of the mid Hudson Valley's better institutions: women's arm wrestling. Winter is finally over, BRAWL is back, and tonight's showdown was at the Bridgewater (the steeple-less church that some enterprising douchebag has managed to convert into a sports bar). Tonight it seemed crazier and better-attended than ever before, perhaps because the word has spread about how awesome it is. Tonight there was a real stage (similar to a boxing ring, but surrounded with a flimsy PVC rail that inevitably broke), and Julie (the best MC BRAWL ever gets) was rocking the mic (and showing an unusually large amount of her patented buttcrack). Also in the crowd tonight was Jennifer Tidwell, the purported founder of the women's arm wrestling movement (she's from Charlottesville, Virginia and she looked familiar, though I never actually knew her when I lived there). Jessika had told me that a Charlottesvillian had founded women's arm wrestling, though for some reason that had sounded a little too much like the kind of thing a Charlottesvillian might boast, but if BRAWL's Julie says it's so, then it must be so.
Also present at BRAWL tonight was our friend Deborah (with whom I shared a Hurricane Kitty). She'd suspect that Gretchen's father was a hippy when she'd seen him back on Thanksgiving. Gretchen had tried to disabuse her of this theory, explaining the extent to which he is a square who had completely skipped the 60s counterculture. But now Gretchen's father has pulled the remains of his grey hair back into a ponytail, so what can Gretchen possibly say?
Usually some of the contestants stay the same from one BRAWL to the next, but tonight they were all new. The most unusual contestant tonight was Conjunctiva, who appeared with an entourage of "Pink Guys" — manic pink-painted gentlemen throwing and popping pink balloons while squirting silly string, quickly to be followed by men in gas masks with spray bottles and cloths to "decontaminate" what the Pink Guys had tainted. It was hard to resist rubbing one's eyes through this whole thing.
Having Gretchen's parents with us, we only stayed for one round. That's actually about enough BRAWL for me (unless my goal is to have a bad IPA hangover the next day).
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