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leftovers and gossip
Wednesday, December 18 2024
This morning before our cleaner came to clean our house, I went down the Stick Trail a short distance to the white ash I'd felled yesterday and used the firewood-hauling backpack to help me bring some of the chunks I'd cut back to the house before the rains expected later got them wet. The pieces weren't very heavy but they were bulky and kept falling out of the backpack, but I still managed to retrieve about seven or eight chunks, though some of those I carried in my arms, sometimes while also carrying pieces in the pack and sometimes not.
I always feel a bit trapped when the cleaner is here, as I hate getting in her way. I don't have to feel this way, but it's baked into my nature. So I end up holed up in the laboratory watching Butt Boy, a movie John Waters had recommended on Monday night (it was surprisingly good despite its goofball premise). Today I was in there with all three cats and both dogs. Meanwhile, Gretchen was off at work.
Towards the end of the cleaner's three-hour session, I snuck out and went to work on the stone wall at the bottom of the Woodshed Path. When I got back to the house, the cleaner was gone and Oscar was demanding wet food, as he does for most of every day. But in this case it really was time to feed him. Then I took the dogs for a walk, and Neville even came.
Gretchen had met with a publisher friend for drinks and snacks after work at Good Night, an expensive restaurant in Woodstock that I've never been to. So when she came home, all she wanted was rice to add to the remainder of what she'd been eating. She also had some juicy gossip about a celebrity, though the take-away from this gossip was about another celebrity: Terry Gross, the host of Fresh Air. It turns out she's much weider than she comes across, and she routinely asks inappropriate questions of her guests. But, due to diligence of her editor, she is presented to the world as the epitome of level-headed curiosity.
We both wound up eating Gretchen's leftovers with rice while watching Jeopardy!. Then we decided to watch a heist movie set in Boston called The Town, as it had come up the other day as a clue on Jeopardy! in a whole category about heist films. (Gretchen and I both like heist films.) As we watched the opening scene of The Town, I realized I'd seen it before. And then Jon Hamm made an appearance. But the film's hard-to-follow mumblecore dialog and, for Gretchen, generally repulsive lingering sex scenes designed by and for men, made Gretchen want to abandon it early. So instead we watched another episode of A Man on the Inside. The episode we saw tonight, the fifth one, was unusually poignant for a show that has mostly been comedic; it featured subplots about a woman losing her mind to dementia and a man (admittedly the show's most repellant character) getting bad news from his cancer doctor. (Up until this episode, the show had protrayed old age as being a perfect vacation.)
I hadn't painted anything in awhile, but I wanted to paint something for Gretchen to give her on "Baby Jesus Day" (or, if you prefer, Hanukkah). So today I painted painting of Charlotte on what, for me, was an unusually large canvas, a primed masonite board measuring eight by ten inches. I started out wanting to do it in false color, sort of like a Shepard Fairey thing, but less solarized. But I didn't like how that was going, so I switched to a more conventional style while leaving those original colors to peek through. I wanted the foreground to have my conventional jungle look (which owes something to Henri Rousseau), but I wanted it to be more autumnal. So I did an unusual thing, painting the background an unfocused mish-mash of orange, red, brown, and black and then painting plants over it in yellow and white. The result was very close to what I wanted.
I then stayed up late drinking boozy drinks and watching YouTube episodes on the Bushradical channel, which is basically an off-grid enthusiast named Dave Whipple who, with his wife Brooke, were featured in season 4 of Alone. But my interest in low-budget construction techniques is such that I'd seen his content before my binge-watching of Alone, particularly an episode where he and his brother build an outhouse. There's a calm meditative quality to the channel, which is facilitated by the acoustic guitar jangling away throughout. Periodically I have to avert my eyes, however, due to Dave's enthusiasm for fried eggs.
The Woodshed Path Stone Wall, viewed from the Farm Road to the southwest.
Click to enlarge.
Neville at the Chamomile Stone Wall.
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Neville is pretty small next to a four-foot high wall.
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Neville at the east end of the Chamomile Stone Wall. It ends close to the boundary with our downhill neighbors.
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The Chamomile Stone Wall viewed from the east.
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The Woodshed Path Stone Wall from the southeast. Its east end is the Stick Trail.
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The Woodshed Path Stone Wall from the northeast.
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Today's painting of Charlotte.
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