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good behavior contingent on introduction
Friday, June 20 2025
When I got up early this morning to feed the cats, I noticed the wind was blowing strangely. I went outside and above me was a mix of dark clouds and clear sky moving mostly from north to south, though winds on the ground were chaotic, blowing very strongly from different directions but only over small areas. But those winds were so strong that I was concerned about being under the trees in the yard west of the house, white pines that at worst have only shed moderate-sized limbs.
As usual, I didn't feel terribly productive in the Friday remote workplace, but I was perhaps more productive than I usually am on a Friday. Meanwhile, our guest Andrea slept in very late in our basement master guestroom. She eventually came up and to say hello to me in my laboratory. She of course also hugged me. Usually that wouldn't be a problem, but Andrea is one of our two friends who wears an overpowering amount of scent (the other one being our neighbor up the street, who also happens to be named Andrea, though it's pronounced differently). After Andrea left, I kept smelling her fragrance, and I was finding it distracting and annoying. Eventually I threw my teeshirt into the dirty clothes basket and took a brief shower. Andrea's scent still lingered in the laboratory's air, but at least it was no longer on my person.
At the end of my workday, Gretchen, Andrea, the dogs, and I all drove out to Little Deep (the public forest in Woodstock along the Saw Kill east of the village). From there, we hiked in about a quarter a mile to the place just beneath a derelict dam that we call "Middle Deep." There was a group of three or four young women there in bikinis sunning themselves, but otherwise we had the place to ourselves, at least initially. I test the water and immediately knew it was too cold for anything but shallow wading. But when Gretchen arrived (she'd been a little behind the rest of us) she dove right in and went for a swim. At some point I cracked open a beer I'd brought and positioned some smooth flat rocks on the ragged surface of concrete aggregate (fallen chunks of the dam) so I would have something more comfortable to sit on. I then chatted with Andrea about an Ayahuasca experience she'd had in Mexico some months ago. She said it had helped her better come to terms with the people in her life and that it had been a very positive experience. I said that I also take drugs (such as cannabis) to use them as tools, largely to get what feels like an outside perspective on things I am going through.
Several other people showed up with dogs, whom Neville and Charlotte enthusiastically greeted. One of these was a chocolate brown pit bull and a wire-haired terrier with a weird face named Godot. By the time we left, Middle Deep was rather crowded.
From there, we drove to The Garden Café and had an early dinner outside in the garden area. Normally we wouldn't've brought the dogs, but this time we thought we would risk Charlotte making an ass of herself when some other dog arrived. We took a table as far back as we could and kept Charlotte back with us. But for some reason Neville didn't even have a leash, so he wandered into the middle of the outdoor dining area and lay on the ground about twenty feet away. Eventually a group arrived with a couple of dogs, and Charlotte started barking like she does. But all we had to do was let Charlotte meet one of the new dogs (the other was in a sling off the ground, so she didn't see that one) and she went quiet. She then wandered around among the tables dragging her leash until one of the tables off in the back objected, saying they don't like dogs. Their loss!I don't know what kinks remain in the Garden's supply chain, but I was able to order the tempeh TLT and an amazing potato-kale soup.
Since we'd gone to Middle Deep without thinking we'd be engaging in commerce, none of us had a wallet. But Gretchen has such a good relationship with that restaurant that she could just say she'd pay them when she got home.
Back at the house, Gretchen and Andrea watched some movie while I tinkered in the laboratory. I was drinking booze and had taken some diphenhydramine, and as the latter kicked in, I gradually lost my cognitive function. I was trying to make it so that multi-line SQL in a report could produce multiple canvases with graphs on them, but the necessary renaming of variables quickly overwhelmed my thinking ability and I had to give up.
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