|
|
|
Olive Garden as acid trip
Saturday, December 22 2018
This morning I drank my Saturday coffee with toast and banana bread, the latter of which someone had given to Gretchen but that she didn't want because it contained coconut flakes (which she hates). I then went into the forest west of the Farm Road with the Kobalt chainsaw to do some firewood salvaging. I first cut down a couple small dead white ashes west of the the Farm Road. Then I continued further west and cut down a medium-sized skeletonized oak three or four hundred feet from home. That oak was a bit tricky because it immediately became hung in a white pine. So I cut the bottom off, it remained hung, and I cut the bottom off again. This went on for three or four cuts until the dead tree was nearly vertical and very close to the tree it was hung in. Then I could just push it over with my brute strength. I should say that I'm always reluctant to cut the bottom off a hung-up tree, since such cuts can finish suddenly and with chaotic results.
Over the course of the afternoon, I managed to bring home the pieces of that oak one at a time, just carrying them in my arms (that is, not cutting them in the forest into stove-length pieces and using a backpack to bring them home). That one oak came to the equivalent of about three backpacks' worth of firewood, which is probably all I need to maintain the in-living-room firewood stockpile for the first week of winter.
This evening, Gretchen and I had a few shopping errands to run together. In preparation for leaving the house, we both showered together in our upstairs bathroom, something we rarely do. [REDACTED]
Most of today's errands were to take place at the King's Mall, Kingston's bleakest shopping center. We started at Marshalls, where Gretchen thought I should get some new clothes. I ended up selecting two pairs of trousers and several long-sleeved shirts. Usually I let Gretchen make all the decisions, even about the clothes I am buying for myself, and this is why I mostly just wear a muted palette of black, sage-green, and grey. Today, though, I was feeling in the mood for more flamboyance. So one of the trousers was burgundy and other was brown. As for the shirts, all of them had little patterns. One was red with tiny white polka dots, another had a dense repetive pattern of tiny flowers, and another had a geometric design that looked somewhat three-dimensional. I thought maybe Gretchen would try to veto at least some of those, but she was okay with all of them. While there, Gretchen also got a three pack of reading glasses and a toy for Neville to extricate treats from when he's bored at the bookstore.
There was a brief visit to "Mother Fucking Earth" (Mother Earth's Storehouse), mostly so Gretchen could buy me bulk nuts for my Christmas stockings. But the ruse was that she needed ume plum vinegar. While there, I went through a separate checkout line so I could get Gretchen a bottle of Cholula, her favorite hot sauce.
Next we went to the Verizon Store to inquire about a product called the Jetpack. It uses the cellphone network to provide broadband for places where it is otherwise unavailable. We have DSL, but at 3 megabits/second, it's not really even broadband. And Gretchen is interested in upping her consumption of streaming video content. The Verizon Store, being something of a poor man's Apple Store, is the digital analog of a Greyhound Station. We found ourselves seated on benches waiting for a genius (or whatever Verizon calls them). I noted that the benches lacked backs so as to keep us from getting too comfortable. Gretchen made the observation that the guy selected to help her is always the dud of the operation and she wondered why she never got a young hipster. Today, though, her hipster dreams came true. The young man assigned to us was wearing very bright tennis shoes, though I don't think his haircut was particularly fashionable. We soon learned that the JetPack wasn't for us. We could only use 15 gigabytes of data at 50 mb/s before it would be throttled back to 600 kb/s, or a sixth of what we get with DSL. 15 gigabytes is only about ten HD movies. We decided it wouldn't work for us. In other business, Gretchen lowered her phone's data plan by a gigabyte, saving $15 a month. That poor hipster Verizon employee is going to get fired; all he managed to get from us was a downsale!
With that out of the way, it was time for dinner. I'd successfully lobbied to have us go to the Olive Garden (which is next door to the Verizon Store). Gretchen was okay with that, though eating there for her would mostly be done ironically. But for me, it's a bit more complicated. Part of what I like about doing super mainstream things is that it gives me a better sense of how Americans really are. If all I ever do is eat at restaurants that have great vegan food, I'm stuck in a bubble. But Jesus Christ, the Olive Garden tonight was a culture shock! Nearly everyone eating there was pasty and overweight, and several people at a table nearby were too enormous to possibly fit into an airplane seat. And the things they were eating looked disgusting. We were so out of our element that it was a little like we'd taken LSD. Gretchen even thought there was something going on with our waitress' face that placed her somewhere in the uncanny valley. This weirdness continued as we sampled the breadsticks, which we decided probably didn't qualify as food. I pointed out that they represented the culmination of two forces, neither of which would produce something we would want to eat. They had to ideally maximize what the average American wants out of a breadstick while minimizing expense (since they are an item the Olive Garden provides without limit). The minestrone soup, on the other hand, was fairly good and the pasta was, dare I say, excellent. We had vegetables sprinkled into our marinara sauce, and it definitely made our pasta more interesting (and healthy). As for drinks, I went with actual margaritas, not the "Italian" kind (which are too sweet and quickly render the glass it comes in a sticky mess). I had two of those, telling the waitress when she asked that she should use the "crappiest tequila" they have.
Our final errand of the evening took us to the Best Buy in the Hudson Valley Mall. We were having trouble with an HDMI port on our old 42 inch flatscreen teevee (which we'd bought used nearly nine years ago) and Gretchen wanted to price out replacement options. We'd already decided the new monitor should be bigger and 4K, but other than that we were open to anything. After checking out the monster 60 inchers in the main area, we looked at the smaller teevees in a side aisle. Two different employees came by to help us out, but they didn't know any more about teevees than I do. Gretchen's tendency to defer to the expertise of such people in such situations can be aggravating, though she wasn't really doing much of that tonight. Ultimately, it was I who picked out our new teevee, an LG 4K 55 incher for $469.99. I expected them to put up a struggle when we declined their extended warranty, but Gretchen was definitive enough in her no that they didn't press the matter.
Then came the scene where we were trying to fit the damn thing in the backseat of the Prius. The dudebro had rolled it out to our car and was trying to make it fit, but the handles on the door kept making closing both of them impossible. But then somehow he tried pushing it tight against the back of the front seats and there the handles weren't in the way. It fit! I didn't have any legroom, but that's never an important thing for me, particularly on a ten mile drive.
Back at the house, we set up our new teevee. At first Gretchen thought maybe it was too big. But once she saw Colbert on it, it was as if he'd always been that size and she was happy. She was even happier when I discovered that the teevee was actually a smart teevee full of apps that could do lots of things without the DVR. One of those apps was Netflix, and, unlike the Netflix app on our new DVR, it successfully streamed HD movies using our crappy DSL. I don't know why an app on a DVR would fail when a version of the same app using the same network connection works just fine on a different device. But all that really matters in such a situation is results.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?181222 feedback
previous | next |
