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plans for the eclipse
Sunday, March 17 2024
Today after walking Charlotte and playing an abbreviated game of Spelling Bee, Gretchen took a bus from the New Paltz Park & Ride down to Manhattan to meet up with a friend to see the new off-Broadway musical teeth, a magical story about the intersection of fundamentalist Christianity, incels, consent, and vaginas dentatas. She would go on to eat an alarmingly terrible Ethiopian meal at a restaurant called Queen of Sheba.
Meanwhile, I continued work on the backend software for my new remote-control system for the cabin. I know that recently I wrote something about the value of always providing configuration for all the editors and list displays in such a system. But today I decided to implement a system that could provide such functionality (in possibly imperfect form) until the proper configuratins are created. In a lot of cases, imperfect editors and list displays are fine, and they can simplify a lot of software design. My tool system uses complicated objects to configure the tools, but I found I could automatically generate "good enough" configuration objects by just examining a table's schema.
At 6:30pm, I drove with the dogs down to Ray & Nancy's house to attend the dinner party in celebration of Nancy's 57th birthday. I brought a fancy birthday cake as well as that bottle of wine I described making yesterday. Also in attendance with Rebecca and her husband Lance and Kate as well as three other dogs: Rebecca and Lance's tiny Chihuahua mix, Ray and Nancy's dog Jack, and Hurricane, the little dog belonging to Ray's brother Kim (who is visiting the area on some sort of hush-hush ayahuasca retreat).
Over delcious palomas (drinks involving tequila and grapefruit juice), we spent a fair amount of time talking about the solar eclipse that is coming on Monday, April 8th. Rebecca and Lance have rented a place in the high peaks of the Adirondacks, while Gretchen and I have plans to drive north from the cabin into the stripe of totality (which begins just south of Indian Lake, an hour away). As for Kate, her plan is to spend the night in Lake George (which is southeast of the stripe of totality) but then either come to our place and go north with us or rendezvous with us wherever we end up. Unfortunately, Ray has to work on Monday, so he and Nancy will be missing this few-in-a-lifetime event. I've already bought a ten pack of eclipse glasses, so I plan to be doing it right. Hopefully it won't be cloudy and snowy, but in early April in the Adirondacks, anything is possible.
Dinner consisted of a kind of potato-cauliflower curry with rice, batter-fried tofu, fresh spring rolls, and a salad containing cucmbers (since Gretchen wouldn't be there). Over dinner, we had a fairly discussion about Sarah the Vegan, who I'd assumed would be there. But evidently she's become such a workaholic that she barely even socializes with Rebecca these days. (Rebecca had gradually replaced the rest of her social network a couple years ago.) If Sarah were happy, that would be one, thing, but instead she's made herself miserable and she doesn't even really do yoga anymore. The way Rebecca, Nancy, and Kate talked about her sounded as if they were on the verge of staging an intervention.
Later in the living room, Charlotte and Neville kept playing noisily on the couch while Kate was trying to have some quality time with Neville. Neville and Charlotte are together all the time time and mostly just cuddle. But something about the social situation compelled them to play, but mostly just with each other. Meanwhile, Rebecca's little dog had something of a little dog complex and kept threatening Charlotte and Neville whenever they came to close. She was, however, very sweet with me.
Later, after the others left, Ray showed me out to his studio, where he'd recently installed some bright LED tube lights that resembled fluorescent tubes. He's been able to spend more time out there lately now that he can run a space heater, something he couldn't do until I upgraded the subpanel in the adjacent garage. I noted all of Ray's paintings and drawings, many of which straddle the line between figurative and abstract. He's been extremely prolific and, as I told him, he could have an amazing show if he ever gets an opportunity.
Meanwhile Gretchen had just returned from her day in Manhattan.
[REDACTED]
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