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off to Zürich
Sunday, November 2 2025
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
This afternoon Gretchen and I would be driving to the Newark airport to begin another adventure in Europe, so I spent much of the day preparing for that in little ways, though there wasn't much to do. Yesterday I'd replaced the self-closing door screen of summer with a spring mechanism to ensure the front door stays closed, so mostly all I was worrying about was packing up the things I would be sure to need (this included both material items and things that exist as digital files.) I found out a little late that the solar hot water heating system was refusing to turn on when in winter mode (that is, when the boiler is on, as it usually is in cold weather if we're having a house sitter), and nothing I tried solved the problem. Perhaps one of the now-20-year-old relays at its heart had died. It didn't much matter, though, because all that does is heat the slab, and the amount of energy collected at this time of year isn't much.
Our house sitter arrived in the mid-afternoon. She's batty woman who doesn't seem capable of figuring things out for herself, but she seems to like our dogs, and that counts for a lot.
On our drive to the airport, I did the initial driving, and I had two close calls with other vehicles one right after the other. The second of these was the most scary, with a vehicle suddenly turning into my lane in a way that forced me into the lane to my right to avoid a collision. There happened to be a car there too, but it somehow avoided me. Gretchen said this was the scariest road event she'd ever been in, with the exception of the time in Milwaukee when she was sideswiped by a tractor trailer. She also thought the two incidents were related; that one of the cars was racing after the other one with some very strong motivation.
Gretchen took over driving at a gas station in Paramus where I'd stopped for a much-needed piss (though I did so against the wall behind the building). Gretchen had plans to have dinner at a vegan restaurant we'd been to before, and that might've been a place called Brick City Vegan. But Google Maps navigated us to a place we'd never been to before in the center of Newark. It was vegan, but much of its branding was about being "urban vegan" and the food was vegan comfort food with a distinctly soul vibe. All of the customers and employees except us were black or brown. This clearly wasn't a place we'd been to before though the restaurant might be part of a brand expansion of a restaurant we had been to before. It didn't matter; the food looked good, so we ordered some very fattening sandwiches (I had a spicy "chicken" sandwich) and even more fattening sides (such as a biscuit and a bowl of black-eyed peas. It was all very good, though one wouldn't want to eat that sort of thing very often.
Because of the ongoing government shutdown, we were worried about long TSA lines at Newark, so we'd budgeted something like three hours of airport time. But for some reason the TSA workers, though they were working without pay, were unusually efficient, and we sailed through security and then had to find something to do with all our unexpected airport time. At some point I looked into somehow getting a Europe-compatible SIM card (or perhaps an eSIM) for Gretchen's phone, but the vending machine refused to read my credit card, so I gave up and installed an eSIM using an app instead. I had to network-unlock Gretchen's phone first, something I'd been unable to do the last time I'd tried (in Northern Germany), but when it was easy to do from within the United States. Then I installed the eSIM (it cost only $4 for a three day one-gigabyte package) and hoped for the best.
Our flight to Europe was a non-stop Swiss Air flight to Zürich, Switzerland, and Gretchen had gotten us two seats along the side of the plane in the kind of plane that has rows in the 2:4:2 form, meaning there was zero chance we would have to sit with some rando. As usual for such flights, I delayed taking my ambien until after I'd drunk a small bottle of wine and eaten what I could of the special vegan meal (it was a pretty dreadful eggplant curry with rice and an unpleasant quinoa salad). As the ambien kicked in, I was watching Meghan II, a sequel to the robot-horror movie about a pre-teen fembot companion who goes berserk. The sequel tried to be more of an international action thriller, and it didn't really work.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?251102 feedback
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