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able to abstract the knowledge
Sunday, April 3 2016
A gorgeous snowfall had come during the night, leaving a couple inches on the ground and perfect little snowy ridges along the top surface of every branch. I took all three of the dogs on a fairly good mid-length walk (one and a half miles in length) that involved most of the Farm Road and nearly a half mile of the Stick Trail. Neville seemed more energetic than he had in the past, suggesting he is acclimating nicely to the new physical regime. Maybe he's less of a couch potato than I'd initially feared.
The snow this morning, looking east out of the living room windows. Click to enlarge.
On my way to my afternoon mentorship session (this time at Outdated in Uptown Kingston), I jumped in the car and first drove north up Dug Hill Road, turned around at the intersection of Reichel Road, and then cruised back by the house to see what the dogs were doing. Disappointingly, I saw Neville at the end of the driveway about to start heading northward. I leaned on the horn and used the car as a herd dog to drive him and Ramona (the sheep in this simile) back towards the house. In order to be sure he wouldn't try to follow me, I had to latch the pet door for the duration of my absence.
As always, Outdated was crowded with fresh-faced Millennials (and at least one dog) when I arrived. My mentee was over in the corner near the coffee urns, and soon the woman who runs the program was there as well. I ordered a leek & potato soup, which was in keeping with unseasonable chill outside. It was great to talk to the woman running the program as opposed to my mentee. Unlike the mentee, she was engaged and interested, asking good questions and responding in subtle affirmative ways when I said things. If I put in a little effort, I can muster fairly good social skills and can even manifest an easy charm given the right people, and the woman who runs the mentorship program would qualify as one of those. (It also helped that I'd drunk a cup of kratom tea, which seems to elevate my serotonin levels and increases my sociability.) For today's session, there was an unspoken agreement between me and my mentee to act as though most of the work had been done by him, not me, and that he understood in detail how things worked. There was more than a hint of fraud to this deception, but it seemed like the best course of action given the circumstances. Amusingly, as we worked, the woman who runs the program asked a great series of questions that would have ideally come at some point from my mentee. Apparently she sensed that he is not a good question asker and stopped to explicitly point out that she was modeling behavior she hoped to see him copy.
I'd brought a couple laptops in hopes of demonstrating three-sprite movement synchronized across the internet, but for some reason my mentee and I went down a rabbit hole trying to implement individualized global sprite scaling (to allow improperly-sized images to be tweaked in the editor), and that (and rolling back the failed progress we made on it) ate up most of the session. Ny then, my mentee's mother was there, and I mentioned something about the new dog doing who knew what back at the house, so we wrapped up our session after only an hour and a half.
From Outdated, I went directly to Hannaford for the supplies I would need for my week without Gretchen, putting a special emphasis on beans, organic multigrain corn chips, spicy bloody mary mix, bread, and antacids.
This evening, Ray and Nancy hosted a little dinner party for me, Sarah the Vegan, Sarah's newish boyfriend Jeremy, and Alana (the live-in girlfriend of Jeff the Reality Show Cameraman, currently on assignment with a motorcycle gang in Pennsylvania). We let all the dogs sniff each other and run around through neighboring yards before herding them into the house. I expected to spend the night thwarting many attempts by Neville to mark everything in Ray & Nancy's house with urine, but he didn't try even once. Evidently he was able to abstract the knowledge learned in our house and apply it here at Ray & Nancy's, where he was nothing but a sweetypie. Meanwhile, Ramona and Jack played and played like they always do. It was good to see Ramona able to revert back to her immature puppy self, something I hadn't seen her do since Neville arrived.
Ray had cooked up a dish involving lots of chunky vegetables (particularly tomatoes and asparagus) in a thick oniony gravy with gnocchi. It was delicious, and a cut above his other recent efforts. Later Ray got out an enormous bottle of scotch and kept pouring us shots of it, though the volume of each shot glass consisted mostly of a cube of ice. It's a great way to drink, and with all the pours necessary, it's easy to lose track of how much one has drunk.
At some point I gave an extended riff on the finer points of farting in front of a new (and increasingly less-new) lover, using a series of increasingly absurd metaphors for the human body. One of these was "crossing light sabers" and another was "a tube of large intestine." Comically, I must have been doing something right, because I had Alana and Nancy gasping for air.
I left a little before midnight, being careful to drink a lot of water before getting into the car. Though I drink a fair amount, it's rare that I'm ever too drunk to safely operate a motor vehicle. (Nevertheless, it has happened.)
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