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falafel for lunch
Thursday, January 17 2019
The other day the new guy Marc said something to me about wanting to go to that burrito place again, so I said maybe Thursday would be good. I also brought up the idea of maybe going to Rhinebeck for falafel, and Marc said something about liking falafel, which stands in contrast to other things about ehthnic food I've heard in the office ("I've never had Indian food" and "I hate Indian food"). So today I invited Marc to lunch in Rhinebeck. He ended up doing the driving. We talked about our mutual love of beater cars (his Suzuki has nearly 200,000 miles on it and my Subaru has nearly 215,000 on it). We also discussed the peculiar mess of some of the software we work with and the wonder that it works at all.
Cathy and Roy were working at the falafel place when we arrived. I got myself a falafel sandwich in pita, to which I added lots of small pickled peppers. Marc got himself some sort of plate that included hummus. He also ordered a pita sandwich to go for his wife and some baclava. Conversation with Cathy and Roy (the owners) focused mostly on the idiosyncrasies of the building, which had been built in the 1820s. The counter (which is level) was good six inches higher above the floor on one end than on the other. Also, the floor had suffered several damaging incidents (one of which had been a fire) and had been repaired with ovoid-shaped copper patches secured with numerous copper nails. Just before we left, Cathy gave us little shots of sweet middle-eastern coffee, and drinking these honed my mental sharpness in a way that the office's coffee robot never had. But inevitably, some time in the afternoon, I got bogged down in yet another aspect of the hellish software development project that has cursed me for going on two months now.
When I got home, the older lady Gretchen had hired to clean the place up was still working, and she would continue working for another couple of hours. It wouldn't've been so bad had she not been so Aspergery, which always an inane over-literalist response to everything anyone said. She also had some habits that I found grating and unpleasant, such as leaving the water in the sink running at full blast for no reason while she puttered around at other things. And her puttering was slow. Around the time the cleaning lady was finally leaving, Gretchen was cooking rice in the InstaPot and a tempeh-cum-cabbage stire fry on the stove top. I'd been thinking the light from the new chandelier was excessively bright, so I traded out its conventional SPST switch with a dimmer (technically it was a fan-speed-control switch).
I took 100 mg of diphenhydramine and went to bed early, hoping to partially make up for the lack of sleep last night.
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