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Duolingo-enabled conversation
Thursday, September 11 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
It being 9Eleven, the three of us then in the lunchroom court reminisced about that fateful day. And then there was some talk about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, though nobody there seemed to know who exactly he was. (Well, the King sort of did, and it's a tribute to his better angels that he wasn't too broken up about it.)
As I have before, I spent much of my workday trying to get access to a distant VPN so I can work my special magic on a database. But by the end of the day, I still didn't have access. But my de-facto weekend had already begun, and I was happy to get out of there and drive home.
Back in Hurley, Gretchen had decided not to go to pilates tonight so we could get to the cabin early. I ran around quickly gathering up all the things I needed (particularly some eight-bit Arduinos to use as I2C slaves) and then we headed off. But before we left the area, Gretchen wanted to stop by the Downs Street mansion to pick up some paint samples to help guide her through an outdoor renovation we'll be doing. While in the neighborhood, she also wanted to get the contact info for a guy who owns the other big brick mansion on the street, a guy from Brooklyn (or some such place) who owns 60 Kingston properties. They'd struck up a professional friendship on the topic of contractors, and she wanted to recommend the guy who will be doing the outdoor work on our Downs Street property. To get his number, she talked to one of his tenants, a Hispanic gentleman. Gretchen conducted the conversation entirely in Spanish, a tribute to the skills she's developed after a two-year-long streak of Duolingo practice.
We took the Middleburgh route for our drive up to the cabin, and for the first time ever, we stopped at a farmstand we'd considered stopping at in the past. It's about halfway between Middleburgh and Schoharie, and often advertises fruit such as blueberries. Today Gretchen caught sight of peaches and wanted to stop. The prices were extremely low and there was nobody there, so we paid for what we bought on the honor system. Had we wanted tomatoes, we could've gotten a lot of those. But we mostly just wanted peaches and maybe a jalapeño pepper. While we were there, another customer showed up, a friendly middle-aged white lady who was raving about the blueberries from earlier this season.
After that, the sun was sinking lower and lighting up the late summer flowers and foliage in a particularly appealing way. This caused me to tell Gretchen that I've decided I don't completely hate the fall, that I'd actually smelled the smell of fall a few days ago and it had made me happy. Fall, I explained, in addition to being a time of death, has also traditionally (for me at least) been a time of opportunity: a new school year, for example, with new people and new contexts. (Back when I was in college, for example, fall usually brought with it fresh new romances of various depths and memorableness, including the one I had with Gretchen in the fall of 1988).
As is the usual pattern, I let Gretchen and the dogs out at the Woodworth Lake entrance gate, and they walked the last mile to the cabin, while I brought in all our stuff and put it away. When Gretchen finally arrived, the dogs were not with her. So I took an boozy beverage I'd prepared with me and walked out to Woodworth Lake and then a couple hundred feet west looking for them. But they'd vanished.
Eventually this caused Gretchen and me to drive out in the Bolt to look for them. We soon found Charlotte walking cabin-ward about half-way back to the entrance gate, and Neville was several hundred feet behind her. Charlotte refused for some reason to get into our car, but she did run after her when we continued on to look for Neville. As for Neville, he was drenched and smelled like swamp. When he climbed into the backseat of our car, he left a visible stain. So we hosed him down before letting him into our cabin.
At around 8:30pm, our friends Jeff & Alana arrived to spend tonight and most of tomorrow. They got a little lost near the entrance to our driveway, so I went out in the Bolt to find them. And then I got a little lost too and ended up in Ibrahim's driveway. But eventually we all got to the cabin, where Gretchen had prepared a late dinner of cauliflower-cheeze soup and salad. Later all of us except Gretchen fixed ourselves boozy drinks and sat around the living room in front of a cardboard fire in the woodstove talking about subjects such as the career of Bob Mould. (Jeff had been surprised to see Gretchen at the Bob Mould show some weeks ago.) Because I had to work tomorrow, I pulled the ripcord on my contribution to the evening a little before 11:00pm.
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