Today was Coffee Sunday, a day that is sure to hear me repeatedly mentioning "Caffedrine" in an Appalachian accent, precisely how my buddy Josh Furr used to when he would talk about the legal trucker highs available at truckstops nationwide. (Caffedrine is simply caffeine marketed as if it were a greymarket stimulant.) Due to continued grey quasi-rainy conditions, we had to once more enjoy our coffee in front of a fire blazing in the woodstove instead of in the greenhouse upstairs.
Gretchen and RaMona today during our Coffee Sunday.
Gretchen went to the Ulster County SPCA today to pick up Dutchess, the bony old Pit Bull we've taken a shine to, for another several days of fostering. By this point we'd taken to calling her Marigold, a name I suggested after Gretchen observed that Dutchess is a dog in need of an ebulliently floral name. Another potential name is also Gladys.
Though we've already renamed her, I'm still not sold on the idea of actually adopting her. She actually has another potential suitor who will be fostering her later this week. In the meantime, I don't completely trust "Marigold" with our cats. They're mostly quick enough to get away from her, but her presence is one of those things that throws chaos into the hard-won tranquility of our household (a tranquility that is still "evolving" in the Obama sense, given the seemingly-undying hatred between Julius — aka "Stripey" — and Nigel).
Nevertheless, Gretchen and I went out tonight and left the dogs back at the house. We took advantage of the now-open Wynkoop and drove into Old Hurley, where we picked up Ray and Nancy, and then drove to the Kingston Indian Restaurant for dinner. For some reason, the food tonight was not as good as it has traditionally been. The mulagatani soup had an off-putting sweetness it didn't used to have, and the mushroom shag was a disgusting puree. The guy who waited on us was someone we'd never seen before, and it made us wonder if perhaps the place had changed ownership. Some things remain the same, however: when diners get up from their table to leave, the staffer who swoops in to clean up after them is still certain to do so with a few generous squirts of Windex, filling the air with a strong chemical fragrance that does not go well with the eating of Indian food.
I've been listening to A Shoreline Dream, a new band I discovered on Soma FM's Bagel Radio. They play with a mix of styles that suggest wall-of-sound Shoegazer, so-called "Post Rock" (usually used to describe lavish indie rock without vocals), and some sort of goth. There are actually vocals, but they're often buried so deeply they're hard or impossible to make out. Here's a good example of their music and my first favorite of their songs:
Later I discovered a piece of their uncharacteristically metallic post-rock that reminded me of the sort of music Josh Furr (see the first paragraph) and I used to play together back in the early 90s. Maybe if we'd kept at it we would have sounded like this:
