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I'm good at multiple choice trivia
Saturday, May 10 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
The plan today was for the four of us to drive to the Adirondack cabin to spend most of the weekend. Earlier in the week, the forecast for this weekend had called for rain, so the plan was to watch some movies that Gretchen wanted to share with our guests. These included Airplane!, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Office Space (which we'd seen before) and Wisconsin Death Trip. But then this morning Gretchen checked the forecast and now it was calling for sun and fairly warm conditions. So we decided to begin our drive as early as possible. We left so early, in fact, that Brian and I drank our morning coffees from travel mugs.
We took the scenic route through Middleburgh, where the leafing out of trees in the northeast Catskills happened to be in a particularly gorgeous moment. Unfortunately, it was so early that Love Shine Tea (the vegan café we like to stop at in Schoharie) had not yet opened when we stopped there.
As I drove us into Woodworth Lake, Gretchen and Kelly got out at the recycling shed with Charlotte and Neville with the plan that they would walk from there to the cabin. Normally Neville wouldn't take that walk, but today he wanted to.
After Brian and I carried in and put away all the stuff from the car, we immediately started drinking wine, even though it was noon. But, as I pointed out, it was five o'clock back in Scotland.
After Gretchen and Kelly got to the cabin, Gretchen immediately wanted to hike down to the lake. So off she went with both dogs, followed about ten minutes later by me and our Scottish guests on the Mossy Rock Trail. That trail was rather swampy in places, and it was a bit steep for indoorsmen like Brian and Kelly. (It would be nice to some day have guests at the cabin who can scramble around on the Adirondack landscape nearly as well as Gretchen and me can, though this really hasn't happened yet.)
Down at the dock, the wind made conditions a little less than ideal, although when the sun wasn't behind one of the scattered clouds, it wasn't bad. We were down there on that dock a long time nattering on about I forget what while the clouds slowly evaporated (I could see this happening for individual clouds overhead) until we were left with an absolutely cloudless sky. At some point I got into one of the kayaks and paddled out into the outflow bay, where I scared up a single male mallard duck. I also saw a kingfisher land in the tree overhanging the water on the north shore of that bay near the first outflow dam. Then I paddled out into the main part of the lake, briefly landing on the public dock to check out what a new sign facing away from the lake said. (It said that there was no lifeguard on duty and that no diving was allowed.) Meanwhile the others had gone back to the cabin to get more snacks.
When we finally got back to the cabin, we spent a little time out in the Adirondack chairs out front while the lowering sun bathed us in its heat. Kelly had brought a variety of card games for us to play should we be cabin-bound on a rainy day, and she thought then would be a good opportunity to play them. The first of these was called "Fact or Fiction," and were cards where various declarative statements had been written and we had to say whether they were "true" or "false" (not, interestingly, "fact" or "fiction"). After I'd figured out how the creators were trying to trick us, I managed to successfully characterize the statements nearly all the time, to the increasing dismay of the others. By the end there, they'd started adjusting their answers based on what I was saying.
Once the biting gnats became unbearable, we went inside and continued playing a different card game, one where we were to rank the relative sizes (or other metrics) of three listed items. Again, I soon found myself getting these right nearly all the time. I'm not generally this good with fill-in-the-blank-style trivia, probably because I'm not always great at recovering facts from deep within my brain. But it seems that I have retained a wide enough set of facts to produce correct answers from multiple-choice trivia with astounding accuracy. (I remember this phenomenon happening once before, the first and only time I ever played Trivial Pursuit in 1994 or 1995, when I delivered such an amazing performance of retained knowledge that I ended up going home for the night with a complete stranger, which was handy given that I was semi-homeless in Oberlin at the time.)
For dinner, Gretchen added a bunch of new veggies to that African ground nut stew she'd made Thursday night so we could have another meal of it. Unfortunately, the only rice we had in the cabin was old brown rice (which Gretchen thought tasted kind of old). But it was good enough to eat, and one can't be too picky when cooking meals at a remote Adirondack cabin. (Where food being beyond its expiration date is a common phenomenon.).
Later I cobbled together a makeshift movie theatre in the great room, putting a largish monitor on a chair and connecting it to my work-issued laptop, onto which I'd loaded media files of the movies we might be watching. We also brought out the bluetooth speaker whose audio-only interface seems to use the voice of Ice T. We then proceeded to watch Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, mostly because it stars our neighbor A as a fairly minor, though notable, character. I had no idea what to expect from it, but it wasn't like anything I'd ever seen before. It was full of martial arts fight scenes of low (that is video-game-style) consequence and textual overlays referencing its origin as a comic book. The action sequences were so numerous and unrelenting that watching Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was a mostly unpleasant experience, and I was very happy when it finally ended. That said, it was fun in places, and the romance at its heart was relatable to someone like me who once lived a young adulthood vaguely similar to Scott Pilgrim's. The unexpected vegan content was also hilarious for the four of us watching, since we are all vegans. But all of us agreed that we probably shouldn't have watched the whole thing. Gretchen also realized that she probably hadn't watched it all the way through in the past, as she had no memory of the last two thirds of it.
From left: Gretchen, my feet, Brian, and Kelly on the dock. Click to enlarge.
A view of the dock from some distance away on a kayak. Click to enlarge.
A bluejay near our bird feeder near our cabin. Click to enlarge.
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