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grassy turds and bursty radiation
Sunday, April 23 2017
Since we hadn't been able to do it yesterday, Gretchen and I had out weekly french press of coffee today. It was a fresh bag of the blackest, oiliest beans sold at the Honest Weight Food Co-op, though unfortunately I hadn't noted the name. It was number #3939, whatever that is. It was bit Starbucksy for my tastes, but Gretchen loved it. I should mention that the other day at Home Depot, I was drinking the free coffee and saying how good it was. I even said it was better than Starbucks (which, for me, it was; I don't like the house Starbucks flavor). The guy who'd made it looked at me like I was crazy, but I'm sticking to it. When Home Depot coffee is fresh, it's pretty good, at least at the Kingston Home Depot.
Gretchen took Neville the Dog to the bookstore today, as she often does in warm weather on her Sunday bookselling shift. I'd assumed that I would have to pick him up half-way through the afternoon, which is what I traditionally do. But when I showed up at the usual time, Gretchen was surprised to see me. It seems she thought I knew that the plan today was for Neville to do a whole shift in his job as bookstore dog. So I ended up just taking him for a leisurely stroll up to Shindig, across Tinker Street to the village green (where a drum circle was forming) and then back on the other side of Tinker Street to the bookstore. On the way, Neville met a number of dogs, including a greying black 13 year old pit-mix who looked like a male version of Eleanor. Soon after meeting that dog, Neville stooped over and dropped a single turd out of his butt. It was over quickly and slightly concealed amid the bushes of the green, so I could just sprinkle some woodchips over it and leave it. But now Neville had a long string of grass hanging out of his ass, and it was driving him crazy. He tried rubbing it on the sidewalk and in the street and then picking at it with his teeth. But it didn't dislodge until he rubbed it on the grass in front of Woodstock Reformed Church.
Back at the bookstore, Gretchen was spelled by her boss, so she put Ramona on a leash and we sat in front of Little Apple for a few minutes, letting the dogs greet other dogs (many of which Neville had just met).
So I left Woodstock without Neville, stopping at the CVS on the way to buy a pair of 1 diopter reading glasses ($10) and a can of cashews (about $5). I also visited the Tibetan Center thrift store, but since the reorganization of the electronics, it's just not the same. I probably need to wait long enough for fun new things to show up before going there again.
Ramona was whimpering so much as I approached the West Hurley Park that I felt compelled to walk her there. I'd recently bought a tiny geiger counter probe to attach to my smartphone, and as Ramona carried out her park agenda (which included passing a turd consisting almost entirely of wadded-up grass), I went around hoping to find radioactivity in the rocks. The best chance for such radioactivity is in granite, and here in the Catskills there are always granite erratics from the north sprinkled among the native bluestone. But none of the round boulders I encountered in the park gave me geiger counts with their proximity. The probe tended to give me counts in bursts that seemed unrelated to anything I was trying to examine, suggesting background radiation (at least these days in this area) is a fairly bursty phenomenon.
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