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belated birthday brews
Saturday, March 25 2017
Gretchen set off early this morning to attend the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford, Connecticut. She would be spending the night at some cheap motel and making the better part of two days out of the adventure.
I woke up late and took the dogs for their morning walk. For the first time since the blizzard, I went off-trail, heading west off the Farm Road near its southern end and then climbing the escarpment to the highlands above. I'd lost the dogs by this point, and so tromped through slushy snow northward. At some point I stopped and looked out across the Farm Road for the dogs, which I thought I could hear barking. I eventually saw Ramona running out of the woods and then south down the Farm Road, probably looking for me. And then, unexpectedly, I saw a large dark weasel-like creature climb up from the swampy lowlands below, take a look at me, and then continue up the escarpment and away. I'd had a pretty good look at it, and I suppose it could've been a fisher. But I thought it looked more like a mink. (It probably was a fisher; mink prefer more substantial bodies of water.)
[REDACTED]
The dogs returned from an extended outing in time for them to join me on my errands. There wasn't much for me at the Tibetan Center thrift store except an mini-USB cable and a very nice electric power brick that turns 120 volts into a couple amps each of five and twelve volts (the perfect power supply for adding a USB port to a Linksys WRT-54GS router). The price for both: $1.
Then I drove us out to the Lowes on 9W, mostly because the lightbulb options there are so much better than they are at Home Depot. While there, I bought a couple planks to help me build a rack for all the large pieces of chemistry glassware Ray has been giving me. I would've gladly bought metal brackets suitable for attaching horizontal shelves to ceilings at a 45 degree slope, but there are no such brackets at Lowes.
This evening[REDACTED] I drove to the R&R (that newish beer in Woodstock place near the corner of 212 and 375) to meet up with Eva & Sandor. Sandor had been wanting to get together with me for weeks, and it hadn't worked out until tonight. The three of us sat at the bar next to a random middle-aged guy (he was a bit older than me) named Jim, who eventually joined our conversation as an outspoken liberal once our conversation took a turn for the political. First, though, I wolfed down a veganized version of the "vegetarian burrito," (it was pretty good) and drank a variety of obscure hoppy microbrews in little five-ounce portions. As for Jim, he said he lived in West Hurley on Stone Road (not all that far from me) and had been a social worker but was now "between things" and hoping to start a county-wide bicycle repair cooperative. When he heard that both Sandor and I do web development work remotely, he wondered how one ends up in a great gig like that, particularly without having received any official education related to it.
Before I'd gotten too drunk, the party (without Jim) moved back to Eva & Sandor's place. There we eventually settled on a soundtrack by the Magnetic Fields and a conversation largely about web development work, both coding itself (something all three of us have familiarity with) and the project management thereof (one of Eva's specialities). Since we were all conversant in the jargon, the conversation went far further into the weeds than it might normally go. I think this was something of a revelation for all three of us. I headed home before allowing myself to get too messed up.
I should mention that Sandor and Eva insisted on paying for everything at R&R; apparently it was a belated birthday present, though I'd thought they'd already gotten me one.
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