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perky, unmusical chirps
Saturday, December 15 2018
Today was the day I wanted to start working on my tasks related to the kitchen remodel, which were mostly concerning electricity and drywall. But the weather was so nice (with temperatures as high as the 50s) that I also wanted to do some firewood salvaging. So after Saturday morning coffee, I set out with my big battery-powered chainsaw and walked about a quarter mile down the Stick Trail. There I found smallish oak that had fallen some months ago, landing partly across the trail (Tommy, the guy who rides his mountain biker back there, had even built a stone ramp over it). Bucked into stove-length pieces, it made a surprisingly large pile, and even after bringing home three backpack loads, there was still some left. I also cut up another, smaller, more-rotten oak nearby, as well as some very dry skeletonized red maple.
Other than conferring with Gretchen and taking some measurements, I never ended up doing any actual work in the kitchen. Gretchen and I had made plans to have dinner at Namaste, a new Indian restaurant in the southern fringe of Saugerties, and since I now had a small shopping list of things I needed from a hardware store, we stopped at Lowes on the way. There I bought blank electrical box plates, a half-inch ball valve (I noticed that they're all now sold with anti-theft tags), chainsaw chain oil, 50 feet of two-conductor 12 gauge Romex, and five gallons of high-end drywall joint compound (the kind that supposedly doesn't shrink as much when it dries). While we were there, Gretchen also investigated options for backsplash tile, drawer pulls, and a faucet for the kitchen sink. "Last time we bought one of these, " I said, referring to the faucets (which ranged in price from $200 to $300), "we were on a budget." The implication was that we no longer were. I was a little impatient to get out of Lowes, and not because of any indecisiveness about the faucets or the tiles (neither of which we pulled the trigger on) but because of all the English sparrows flying around in the building. I always wonder about those poor birds. Can they get out? And if they can't, what do they eat and drink? Their perky, unmusical chirps made them sound a lot happier than I thought they were.
When we arrived at Namaste, the place was full of people, all of whom were festively-dressed Indians (dot not feather, of course). They sat together at a long table while little girls in party dresses cavorted around, each of them taking turns looking after a toddler with enormous cheeks and big eyes. Gretchen thought the place might be closed for a private party, but no, it was open. So we took a small seat near the corner. It's common for Indian restaurants in this area to either never apply for a liquor license or to be perpetually waiting to get one, and it was no different with Namaste. I suggested to Gretchen that we walk to the Sunoco Food Mart just across a small parking lot to get beers. So, after placing our order with the young man on duty as a waiter, we went and bought gas station beers. Single beers in gas stations are always huge, so I ended up with a 24 ounce bottle of Sierra Nevada Torpedo, while Gretchen got a similarly-huge 25 ounce can of Rolling Rock. The two beers came to only about $4.50.
As for the food, it was a bit lacking both in terms of salt and spiciness, though the spicy onion condiment was exceptional and made everything it touched delicious, particularly the mulligatawny soup, which otherwise had the flavor of joint compound. Surprisingly, though, we couldn't actually get a fully-vegan meal. Everything was going great until our waiter admitted that the rice somehow had milk in it. We shrugged and accepted it, because we're not the kind of vegans who freak out about such things. These particular Indians were evidently North Indians, that is, from the Punjab region. I determined this from the fact that the music-heavy programming on the screen was Punjab-centered and that one of the men and one of the boys were wearing turbans, suggesting that they might be Sikhs. (Amusingly, in the evolving vernacular of my childhood home, "punjab" came to mean a board full of nails placed in a road so as to inflict tire damage; it is both onomatopoetic and a reference to the terrorism undertaken by Punjabi separatists at a time when my father and I happened to be dabbling in minor ecotage.) I think the problem with North Indian cuisine is that these people like to put dairy in just about everything.
Gretchen had assigned me an article in The New Yorker about blockchain, telling me she wanted me to read it and then give her the layman's digest over dinner tonight. Apparently her boss Jackie at work had told her that blockchain would eventually replace the internet, and we'd better get ready. Comprehending blockchain was kind of a tall order given that I'd had no interest in it up until now. But I read most of that article, did a little of my own research to clear up such uncertainties as "where is the ledger stored?" and "in Bitcoin, how does 'mining' relate to transaction authentication?" And today, while salvaging firewood, I'd listened to the audio of some YouTube clips wherein blockchain was explained by various people, most of whom had foreign accents. So by dinnertime tonight, I was able to give some explanation of blockchain. I explained private key encryption (which I do understand) and how performing hash digests on supplanting records (blocks) can validate a chain of provenance. I didn't get into such subjects as how exactly Bitcoin solves the double-spend problem, since I'm still not clear on how energy-wasting puzzle solving achieves this. And I still don't know how blockchain can "replace" the internet, other than that it could facilitate systems for bypassing meddlesome intermediaries like Verizon and their newly-granted Net Non-Neutrality powers.
Near the end of our meal, it became clear that the festive Indians at the long table were celebrating a birthday. They managed to call up an song called "Happy B'day" on the big screen while a disgusting-looking cake was brought out. Then the guests, starting with the oldest people there, took turns forking bits of cake into the mouth of the young man whose birthday it evidently was. I jokingly made the observation to Gretchen that years from now when we remember this event, we might remember it as having actually happened in India, since there were few cues to what we were seeing that it was taking place in Saugerties. It's great to be able to go to some restaurant and instantly be teleported to some culture very far away. That was always the great thing about going to La Pupuseria on Broadway in Kingston. By the time we left, we'd eaten way too much and had been unable to finish our enormous beers. The little boy wearing the turban ran after us on our way out to thank us for dining with them tonight. That was sweet.
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