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such serious problems
Saturday, July 18 2015
About 80 feet closer to the house than the place where I've gotten wood for the past two days, I found a random scrap of dry Chestnut Oak that was large enough to provide a day's worth of salvaged firewood. I added a couple small pieces from a much larger tree nearby, and the load came to a surprisingly-large 118 pounds. As I was splitting that up and stacking it in the woodshed (along with othe recent loads I'd failed to split earlier), Gretchen was making the final arrangements with Eva regarding our evening. In the end it was decided that they should come over at 4:00pm and we should eventually have dinner. (I have no idea why so early.) I realized that Gretchen's statement that we had a lot of beer wasn't actually true, so I drove to Beer Universe in Uptown and got a sixer of Ithaca Flower Power and a mysterious new product that came in a big 22 ounce bottle: Sierra Nevada Southern Hemisphere Harvest, which apparently aims to keep IPAs fresh-tasting year-round by taking advantage of the 180-degrees-out-of-phase nature of the southern hemisphere's growing season. It should be noted that there were no cars whatsoever in the parking lot of Beer Universe, suggesting that the young Asian guy working as a cashier walks to work. It was so hot today that he had the door to the beer cave open so it could cool the store itself.
After I got back from that errand, I was feeling very sleepy, so I took a good long nap. Meanwhile Gretchen went off with the dogs to Middle Deep.
Eva & Sandor arrived not long after my nap concluded (when they arrived I was in the middle of writing a function called calibrateWindvane() for my barometric windvane. It was designed to be run in no-wind conditions so that it could store calibration data in the Atmega328's EEPROM.
Gretchen had only just begun work on dinner when Eva & Sandor arrived, though already the first floor smelled deliciously of curry. She was making some sort of curried corn soup. While that continued, Sandor and I drank Ithaca Flower Powers out on the east deck. He proceeded to tell me a rather dramatic change in Eva & Sandor's life: in preparing to make massive repairs to their house on Maverick Road, they'd encountered such serious problems that they decided the house wasn't worth fixing further. They'd then looked at some places and gone on to make an offer on a largish Asian-style house on Chestnut Hill Road (not far from Susan & David's place). The plan is to fix up the Maverick Road place to a "good enough" state and sell it, though they might AirBnB it for awhile first.
Dinner consisted of that curry corn soup, kale, a salad, and ravioli that Eva & Sandor had brought. Towards the end of our meal, sprinkles began to fall from the sky, and eventually it turned into something of a downpour. But the umbrella (designed mostly to shield us from the sun) proved sufficient to keep away the rain, and so we stayed out there. Ultimately it was an increase in mosquito activity that drove us indoors.
Somehow Eva brought up the infamous gross-out video entitled "Two Girls, One Cup," which only Eva had actually seen. Gretchen wanted to see it, but neither Sandor nor I did. Some things cannot be unseen, and I don't watch beheading videos or anything involving cruelty to animals for the same reason. So Eva and Gretchen went over to the first floor computer and watched it together. Good times! Our conversation about that video, and the related phenomenon of being tricked into watching it, led me to use the genericized term "rickrolling," which can mean any trick to get people to see something they don't want to. But of course rickrolling has its origins in the prank of tricking people into watching a video of Rick Astley performing his 1987 classic "Never Gonna Give You Up." (It's not rickrolling if I'm honest about what you're about to see.) Most people had forgotten about Rick Astley before rickrolling became a thing, but on listening to the song (which we twice tonight) and watching the video (which I watched a few seconds of tonight), I suspect the thing that made Rick Astley as compelling as he was at the time was the contrast between his look (he appears to be a 14 year old white boy) and his voice, which could pass for that of a 50 year old black man.
After all that Rick Astley (and, for the ladies, the images of those two girls with that one cup of theirs), I needed something to cleanse our mental palate. So I did a search on YouTube for "spaghetti western music." This led me to a great channel for pleasant, though not insipid, party background music.
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