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pre-coffee hunger shopping
Saturday, November 17 2018
It being Saturday morning, it was time for Gretchen and I to sit on the couch with the dogs and cats and sip coffee. Typically I would be checking Sparkfun.com and news sites on my Chromebook and Gretchen would be solving a printout of the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle. But we had a problem: we were out of decaf, which is now the only kind of coffee Gretchen wants to drink, and we didn't have vegan (or any other kind) of creamer. Gretchen suggest maybe she could drive to Mother Earth's Storehouse to get these things (it was the only place that sells coffee with her required level of ethical purity), so I said I'd make the run while she walked the dogs. First, though, I had to fix the the plastic around the Prius' front passenge-side wheel fender. Evidently it had been stressed by being driven through the snow and was now rubbing audibly on the tire. All it required for a fix was a zip-tie (I have dozens in each cars' tool kits), though (amusingly) where the plastic had been rubbing, it was either completely gone or as thin as a disposable plastic shopping bag.
One should never shop hungry, especially not at an expensive place like Mother Fucking Earth. I ended up spending over $40, not just on coffee and creamer, but also vegan hot wings and a fat tub of ready-to-eat vegan dumplings.
Back at the house, we had an almost complete crew of critters on the various chairs and couches as the fire roared and the crossword puzzle was solved. Eventually Ramona and Neville began gently playing where they lay on the couch, biting each others' faces and hands and nibbling on each others' ears. They don't do this as much as they used to, so it's nice to see. Eventually they took it outside and then Ramona disappeared. It turned out she'd gone down to the greenhouse. Evidently she remembers it as a cold sunny day option better than we do. Unfortunately, clouds had recently blown through, so it wasn't as warm as she'd hoped.
I spent much of the daylight hours after coffee gathering firewood. I managed to get four backpack loads in total, most of which went into finishing the second tranche in the woodshed (meanwhile, the third tranche is already about a third full). The first pieces were from near where the Gullies Trail forks off the Stick Trail, but when these pieces proved unexpectedly moist upon splitting, I switched to gathering drier wood closer to the house. The first such wood was from a very dry standing red maple that I felled in the ravine just above where the Stick Trail crosses the Chamomile. While most of the forest near our house tends to be xeric upland habitat (dominated originally by american chestnut, but now mostly chestnut oak and white pine), there are mesic zones on some of the terraces and in the ravines around temporary brooks such as the Chamomile. In those regions, one finds mostly red maple, sugar maple, black gum, red oak, occasional tulip trees, basswood, and white ash (nearly all of which has been killed by the emerald ash borer).
I took a long nap starting at around 5:00pm and then awoke with a fair amount of energy. Gretchen had wanted to drive up to Saugerties to see the new Freddie Mercury biopic, but I didn't really want to do that with my precious weekend evening. Instead we ended up watching Office Christmas Party from our media-server-based movie collection. We'd seen it before, and it's good mindless fun, if only for that bratty little iPad-obsessed kid wandering parentless through the wreckage of the office the next day.
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