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relieved by my racism
Tuesday, June 24 2025
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
After an unexceptional final day of work for awhile, I arrived home and met Christine, the housesitter who would be living in our house for the next sixteen days or so while we'd be in Sri Lanka. I'm always nervous about new housesitters, because one can never be too sure that they won't be crazy in some way or invite over their kleptomaniacal boyfriends (both things have happened). But I was immediately set at ease to see that the housesitter was east Asian. It's clearly racist of me to assume members of a specific ethnicity are unlikely to do the things I want a housesitter to do, but the relief I felt was genuine.
I quickly packed up all the things I'd be needing for the trip, which included small bottles of gin, pseudoephedrine, diphenhydramine, travel adapters and USB equipment. Somehow I neglected to pack myself any kratom. Since we'd be in a deeply tropical country in early summer, there was no reason to pack clothing any more elaborate than teeshirts and shorts.
Our plane would be leaving from JFK early tomorrow morning, so the plan was to drive to a hotel near the airport tonight and stay the night there. The drive to JFK is always an unpleasant one, what with the inevitable traffic jams full of angry, selfish motorists and the abundance of ugly scenery. There is, for example, a mosque whose main dome looks as though it had been made from a repurposed water tank. What with all the stop and go traffic, dicey merges, and frequent near-accidents, it is, as I said at the time, a punishing experience. Adding to the existential dread was a vision that was hard to shake from my head once I'd seen it: an immature raccoon running blindly through traffic, unable to see due to a small plastic bag covering his head. Traffic was doing what it could to swerve around him, but he looked to be doomed.
Our first destination was a ten-station EV charging complex near the airport. But when we arrived, there was a long queue of cars, mostly Teslas, each containing a very angry driver wondering why charging infrastructure in this country is so poorly developed. It took us awhile go get out of that mess after quickly deciding not to get a charge there.
Our hotel was the Five Towns Inn, and, despite the ugly landscape, somehow our room had a view out across a body of water (though it was probably full of shopping carts and people made to sleep with the fishes). I quickly discovered that the 60 watt USB-C adapter I'd brought to run my work-issued laptop was too weak to provide any charging at all, meaning that at some point I'd be needing o buy a more powerful one.
For dinner, we didn't want to go anywhere, so Gretchen ordered a food delivery from a nearby vegan restaurant called Alive Kitchen. That turned out to be a huge mistake; my faux chicken sandwich had absolutely no flavor at all and the mac 'n' cheese was so disgusting that we each stopped eating it after only one bite. Gretchen was similarly disappointed by whatever she'd ordered for herself. A big unexpected surprise, though, was a six pack of Hazy Little Thing IPA that Gretchen had somehow included in the order. Unfortunately, I only had it in me to drink one of those and the other five would end up being left for the staff.
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