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abandoned cars on Dug Hill Road Friday, November 16 2018
Due to the snow, today was not a normal one. Supposedly there would be meetings this afternoon regarding the "plot" mentioned yesterday, but if it weren't for those, I could've worked remotely all day today. When I finally did get out of bed, I put on my rubber boots, grabbed a snow shovel, and I dug my way through the mountain of snow piled up by the road plow at the end of our driveway. As much as eight inches had fallen, but melting had occurred and now it was heavy and had a distinct crust. Snow was actually still falling, but it was coming to an end, so I decided to go retrieve the Prius. As I hiked down Dug Hill Road, I found two vehicles had been abandoned in the ditch on the side of Dug Hill Road near where I'd run into trouble last night, and the snow plow had just plowed around them. There was another car with mine at the bus turnaround, but this looked to be a masochistic hunter who'd parked there this morning and then trudged into the forest. I don't know why the people who had parked on the side of Dug Hill Road hadn't made more of an effort to park in a safer spot like the bus turnaround, but maybe they'd been hopelessly stuck. I'd brought a snow shovel with me, and it didn't take long to dig a little pathway from where I was parked out to the road. By now, the surface was covered with a brown slush that looked like it contained a fair amount of sand dumped by the highway department. This surface provided all the traction I needed to get my Prius back home.
I ended up staying home until about noon. I didn't do much actual work, though I did start an install of Visual Studio on Woodchuck, which would be a much nicer computer to work on when I eventually do start doing more remote work.
Since I would be at work for only a part of a day, I decided to bring both dogs (Ramona and Neville) with me. They'd just had a walk, so I figured I could just get into the office and start working without worrying too much about them. I gave both dogs rawhide bones, but only Neville wanted his. Ramona, meanwhile, was trying to tell me something, but I couldn't figure out what it was until she started pissing on the rectangle of carpet at the office's front door. So I took her out and let her roam the front of the building while I rinsed the pissed-on part of the carpet with a handy water faucet (the one I also use for cleaning my PORTLAND FUCKING OREGON coffee cup; our office has no sink, and I don't want to take my coffee cup into the bathroom).
I spent most of the day trying to work out a puzzle: why, in C#, were SQL queries producing objects that didn't contain properties that were both in the SQL table definition and in the C# class definition? I thought finding the answer to this question would take me a long way towards understanding C#, generic typing, and other concepts I should know. But, despite hours of debugging, I had no answer. Meanwhile, the guy I report to was finally back in the office, so Alex had to put his "plot" on a backburner, and there was no meeting about it today.
I left work at 5:00pm, returned home, and took an unusual early-evening bath so I would be presentable for the next phase of the evening. One of our friends was having a 40th birthday party in a large upstairs space at BSP (Backstage Productions) in Uptown Kingston, and Gretchen and I had been invited. Indeed, Gretchen had baked the cake, and my main job was to bring the cake (since I would be arriving first, and Gretchen would be coming separately from her prison teaching job). I also brought that painting of poison ivy leaflets as a potential gift, but when I saw nobody else was giving gifts, I decided not to give it.
The upstairs space at BSP has the dreary middle-class middle-brow quality of a Rotary Club meeting hall, and the decor for tonight's party somehow made it seem even drearier. There were a couple dozen balloons scattered on the floor at one end of the space where the "dancing" would happen, and there was "police do not enter" tape everywhere, but instead of saying "police do not enter" it said something about this being a "midlife crisis zone." I knew several of the people at the party, though most of them were strangers. I felt a bit out of place, and drinking wine wasn't making me much more social. Someone had made some pretty good vegan chili which we were encouraged to combine with Fritos to make "Frito pie," though the vegan sushi was terrible. Michæl (of Carrie & Michæl), and he told me of his latest vehicle woes. The day before the snow, he'd hit and killed a deer with his car, which was now badly banged-up, with smashed windows and big dents. He also discovered that the main thing people want to know when they stop to talk to you after you've hit a deer is if they can have the corpse to put in their freezer.
Gretchen arrived during a Jeopardy-like activity, where the "answers" were about things that had happened in the year 1978, the year our birthday boy had been born. I managed to get one of these right with the question "What is Speak and Spell?" Another question-answer was "What is the twinkie defense?" Later there was some dancing to a variety of contemporary pop songs (as well as a smattering of danceable 80s hits, which sounded kludgy and ponderous in the juxtaposition. I nodded my head to the music, but I just didn't have the serotonin and dopamine necessary to enjoy what was happening. Eventually someone started stomping the air out of the balloons, reminding Gretchen and me of that scene in Boogie Nights.
I had to be careful with my alcohol intake because I'd come separately and would have to drive myself home. Fortunately, I was able to do so without driving through the heavily-patrolled center of Uptown. I went directly to the QuikChek, filled the tank with gas, bought a six of Sam Adams Rebel IPA so I'd have something to drink on the drive home. But then I couldn't find an easy way to open it. I ended up drinking it at home, staying up until 2:00am watching stupid shit on YouTube.
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