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the Egg's Nest: a sucky experience
Saturday, February 4 2012
As you may recall, I'd originally planned for the hole connecting the living room to the upstairs bedroom to have a complicated drawbridge hatch that, when open (down) would have a place for cat to hang out. But in the end, the drawbridge became a simple door operated from inside the bedroom. To provide a place for cats, I'd have to build a balcomy on the living-room side of the hole. Today I built that balcony. I sawed an 11-inch plank into 28 inch segment, rounded its corners, and then, in keeping with the scale-model dollhouse paradigm in my mind, I built a silly little curving handrail, which I attached to the plank with 9 five-inch-long wooden dowels. I drilled holes to receive each end of each dowl, and the fit was so tight that I had to bang it all together with a rubber mallet.
This evening the plan was to meet our new friend Tricia at the Rodendale Café, where we'd eat a meal and then watch a performance by a bluegrass musician named Tony Trischka. But when we got to the café, it was so crowded with grey-haired bluegrass fans that it looked like we probably wouldn't get a seat. Gretchen, Tricia and I tried to find another place to dine instead, but the Bywater Bistro (which we call "the Bilgewater" — it's a Shakespeare reference) was closed and the Red Brick Tavern was nearly as full as the Rodendale Café. A Too Much Information (TMI) biographical story telling event at the Rosendale Theatre had brought two hundred people in addition to the Tony Trischka fans, and Rosendale's service sector was overwhelmed. We were going to have to go to another village to dine.
We ended up at the Egg's Nest in High Falls. "I thought you hate the Egg's Nest," Gretchen said with surprise when I agreed to go there. "I only hate the Egg's Nest when we're with Ray," I qualified. But the truth of the matter is that the Egg's Nest is just not very good. They mixed Gretchen the most horrible-tasting martini that doesn't include diarrhea as an ingredient, and then they proved so inflexible about the way they deliver their vegetarian chili that I had to order the chili entrée in addition to my veggie burger. (And it came on a bed of rice, which I didn't want; I just wanted a bowl of fucking chili.) Finally, a style note is in order. While evidently the Egg's Nest waitresses have all been instructed to only wear black clothes to work, it seems black sweat pants are deemed acceptable. Mind you, the waitresses are somewhat dumpy middle-aged women, and sweat pants probably make for a more comfortable workshift spent on one's feet. But at least one of the waitresses was also wearing a blouse that featured an elastic waist band. That's just not okay.
As for dinner conversation, it was kind of a bore. It was mostly just Gretchen and Tricia talking about TMI (the story telling event; they themselves were not guilty of TMI). By the end of our meal, which went on much longer than I would have liked, I decided it's not just Ray that makes eating at the Egg's Nest a sucky experience.
Back home, I stayed up late watching the new thriller Drive. For anyone who has ever driven around in Los Angeles, it's a fun movie to watch, and as a bonus, there's a surprising amount of gratuitous gore. One guy actually gets stabbed in the eye with a fork (I need to hear that sound effect again). While the action and roles seemed highly stylized (in a hypercool kind of way), the overall ambiance of the film had me subconsciously thinking of it as one that had been made in the 1980s. This has a lot to do with the music on the soundtrack, all of which was done with vintage 1980s synthesizers.
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