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Gretchen returns from Mexico
Sunday, April 10 2016
This morning I lost Ramona and Neville early in the walk, though Eleanor stayed with me and even waited patiently for me to finish cutting up and loading my pack with wood from the top of the escarpment above the Stick Trail. It took awhile, but eventually Ramona and Neville returned from whatever their adventure had been.
Back at the house, I eventually processed a bunch of wood collected on various days. The wood I'd just collected came to 78.35 pounds, and there were a couple longer sticks that came to 53.10 pounds. When I was all done, the indoor woodrack was full nearly to the top of its end tines. It had been nearly empty a week ago. I'd been worried about Gretchen having a sufficient supply of measured dry firewood during my Los Angeles trip, but now the weather forecast is looking balmy enough during that period that she won't be needing to burn any fires.
My mentee came over for a couple hours this afternoon, and we were back to our old dysfunction. He never says anything, so it's like I'm teaching Neville how to do web development. It's hard to come up with things for him to do given his skill level, but at least he's become competent with Adobe Photoshop. Unfortunately, the other day when he resized a bunch of images and made them too small, he'd failed to save the original versions. So to make them big again, he had to start from scratch. It was a rookie mistake and hopefully the experience taught him something. As a bonus, the need for him to make the images again gave him something to do while I researched alternative physics in the Phaser game framework. But when I tried to get those physics working, I kept having problems that, it turned out, were the result of me using an old version of Phaser. Mind you, I'd downloaded that version fresh from the website only four months ago.
This evening I went on stroll with my new smartphone to see how well a geotracking app worked (it's called Geo Tracker). If it produced good data, I could use it to better plot the locations of my trails on Google Maps. I walked to the Farm Road, took it as far as the Chamomile Headwaters trail, followed that to the Stick Trail, walked to the beginning of the mountain goat path back to the woodshed, and took that home. I lost Ramona and Neville low on the Chamomile Headwater Trail, but since I was on a mission, I just kept walking. Here's the resulting map.
When Ramona and Neville failed to return home, I rode my bike up the Farm Road to the beginning of the Chamomile Headwaters Trail. I found them not more than 200 feet from where I'd last seen them and it's unclear what they had been up to. They were happy to see me and excitedly followed me back home.
Tonight I would have to drive up to Albany to pick up Gretchen, who would be arriving there from Mexico at a quarter past midnight. In the hours before doing that errand, I had deal with another of Ramona and Neville's late night prowls. After not finding them anywhere in the house, I went outside to look. Something was up, because I found Eleanor strolling on the Farm Road and Oscar the Cat was perched on a boulder on the bluff above the woodshed (his eyeshine is orange, whereas Celeste's is bright blue). I listened and heard nothing, so eventually I had to give up. Later, though, I heard something and went out again with my flashlight. There it was, off near our uphill neighbor's house, Neville was barking. I went through the woods so I could be close enough to bark orders convincingly, though the sound of me crashing through the woods distracted them and they came over to me and agreeably followed me home. I didn't yell at them; Ramona had kept her wordless promise not to lead Neville across the road and had instead prowled around the neighborhood on this side.
I loaded up the dogs and drove quickly towards Albany, having allotted only an hour to get there. But even averaging over 70 mph, I was a bit tardy getting to the airport, which is north of the city. It was okay; Gretchen spent the time being amazed at the mild coincidence that our friend Julianna also happened to be there to pick up her husband Lee.
On the ride home, Gretchen told me all about her experience in Mexico. Purportedly (and this doesn't surprise me) she'd been the most advanced and hardest working of the people in the language school. The only other good student there kept baiting her with Spanish-language declarations about how much he loved to eat meat. In addition to the school, Gretchen had had a lovely hotel room and lots of great beach experiences (there was even a vegan taco stand). Though she'd had a great time, Gretchen was excited to be home, mostly (it seemed) to resume her honeymoon with Neville. They snuggled in the passenger seat for the rest of the ride home. Neville was so excited when we got back to the house that he immediately urinated on the armoire.
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