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pseudoephedrine and last minute visitors
Thursday, March 7 2013
It seemed at this point that maybe I wasn't going to be getting sick after all, though I was a little concerned about my heightened mucous production. So I took a dose of pseudoephedrine. A normal dose is 30 mg, but I took my usual 120 mg recreational dose. It allowed me to focus on a complicated backend that I needed to get familiar with before a 2:00pm meeting via telephone. It's yet another web project, with yet another PHP framework. In this case it appears to be a one-off that doesn't even have a name.
Today Gretchen's friend Johnny (whom she met in Oberlin) called her from out of the blue and said he'd be coming through tonight and did she want to see him. Of course she did (such things are no big deal for childless people like us), and, after getting back from working at the bookstore, she proceeded to cook up a huge pot of hearty homemade minestrone. Coincidentally, while she had been on the phone with Johnny arranging his visit, a customer had walked up to her and asked if she carried Pictorial Webster's, an art book that Johnny had created. Mind you, practically nobody knows about that book, so the demand for it is tiny. But what really made it odd was that Gretchen had been on the phone with Johnny when the customer approached with this question, and it's not like Gretchen has phone calls with Johnny very often.
There was a snow storm happening when Johnny rolled in at around 8:00pm. The reason he was coming through this area was that he needed to be at MassMOCA tomorrow morning to help hang a show involving blow-ups of the engravings used in his Pictorial Webster's. I don't really understand what exactly he will be showing there and how exactly it can be said to be his art (since his relation to this material has mostly been curatorial), but I guess I'll know when we see the show in April. In the meantime, he has boxes of random clothes onto which he's silkscreened graphics from his dictionary. Indeed, the jeans he was wearing tonight featured an earthworm the size of a boa constrictor printed across the legs.
We ate the soup, tried on a few of the shirts, and then went on a tour of the house (which Johnny last saw at our wedding ten years ago). Later we hung out in front of the woodstove as we usually do when visitors visit at this time of year. Johnny's original plan was to just stay for a few hours and then continue on to western Massachusetts, but in the end he decided to stay the night. The snow looked like it might deposit an inch or two of very fluffy snow, but Dug Hill Road would surely be plowed, so all Johnny had to do was get up early and go.
This was the first time I'd seen him without his wife and kids (he has three now), and was easier in this context to see the sharp-witted oddness that had made him so appealing to Gretchen. He told us that normally the demands of his family force him to bed at around 8:30pm, though he often gets up in the middle of the night to putter around. Tonight, though, he went to bed after 11:00, sleeping in the master guest room (which he preferred to occupy unheated).
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