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still officially on vacation Tuesday, March 3 2015
location: Room 105, Best Western Hotel, Kingston, Ulster County, New York
Our hotel room came with a complimentary breakfast, so this morning, after Gretchen walked the dogs yet again in the parking lot, we headed down to the dining room to see what the breakfast looked like. Had we liked bacon, vats of amorphous eggy slime, and small shiny bagels, this would have been the perfect way to start the day. But it's been a long time since we last tried to eat in a place that catered so abominably to our specific dietary needs. I made myself a piece of toast, though there was nothing vegan to put on it, and also got a myself a cup of coffee, though the coffee was so bad that I abandoned it a tablespoon or so in. Other not-so-great options included the orange juice and a zero-calorie "mango water." For someone who doesn't like naturally-sweet food, aspartame-sweetened beverages taste like toxic waste.
Back in our room, I managed to brew a reasonable cup of coffee using the coffee maker and brewable bag of coffee we'd been provided with. While Gretchen took another swim in the hotel pool, I watched HGTV on the massive teevee while surfing the web on my Chromebook (mostly during ads). Based on the accents of the people portrayed, all the HGTV programming I saw this morning appeared to have been produced in Canada.
After we checked out of our room, Gretchen and I drove into nearby Uptown Kingston and had a proper breakfast of tempeh reubens in Outdated, the hip antique-store-cum-café. We also drank coffee, which, at Outdated, is always super strong and affects us like an illegal stimulant. Gretchen suddenly remembered that she had neglected to tell me that our friend Sarah the Vegan is finally "seeing" someone, a 49 year old man she met at, well, Outdated. I believe this is the first time she's done anything more than play kissy-face in the five years we've known her.
Gretchen went off to work at the literacy center, taking the Subaru because snow & sleet had been predicted for later this evening.
By the evening, the snow had changed to little balls of ice. When I last checked the outdoor temperature at around midnight, it was at freezing, a midnight temperature we haven't seen since early January. I stayed up late watching Shipping Wars, drinking beer, and smoking pot. In the early afternoon, I taken a recreational dose of pseudoephedrine. Since I'd awaken in a hotel this morning, you see, I was still officially on vacation.
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