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adequate Jewish Christmas at C Gourmet
Thursday, December 25 2025
It was about 10:00am when we finally got out of bed. I started a fire in the woodstove to burn the last few chunks of firewood in our indoor supply and then Gretchen and I did our customary Christmas morning gift exchange. I had a couple pairs of socks into which I had stuffed various things, though I also put some bigger things (some of which Gretchen had ordered for herself and given to me to give to her) in a shopping bag. Among the items she got were a rubber hot water bottle, a bunch of clips for securing open bags of food, a set of ingrown toenail tools, and the two paintings I'd made for Gretchen, including the one on a pepper grinder. That latter painting went over a bit better than expected, though admittedly it looked pretty good when it finally appeared, all bejweled as it was beneath layers of varnish. As for me, Gretchen gave me all my loot in a pair of snow pants (or sweat pants perhaps) with the ends of the legs tied shut. It included the usual mix of canvases, paint, brushes, paintbrush cleaner (which I've never used), candy, nuts, and various trinket. The trinkets included a cork containing an RGB LED and a rechargeable battery and a little cardboard bird one can assemble into a 3D object and hang from a ceiling. As for liquor, instead of the usual flask, Gretchen got me three tiny bottles, the kind you get on an airplane, containing various brown liquors such as Hennessy.
When Gretchen took Charlotte for her customary late morning walk, I set out with the big Kobalt chainsaw to process a medium-to-large size fallen white ash maybe 300 feet south of the house in that first gulch uphill from the Stick Trail before one reaches the Chamomile. I ended up bucking nearly the entire tree into stove-length pieces, leaving only the stump and a semi-rotten upper limb unprocessed.
Later Gretchen and I drove over to A's house (we drove so the dogs wouldn't follow us) to hang out with the people and animals over there for a couple hours. The mood was a bit somber there, though, as one of the two pet rats living there was in the process of dying on an incurable infection of her reproductive parts. Rats usually die of senescence by about age three, but this rat was only a year and a half old. A's daughter cradled the poor dying rat for most of the time we were there while the rest of us drank coffee and socialized. I hadn't been in A's house since a fairly massive renovation, so I had to look around to see what all had changed. I also chatted with Jamie briefly about solar hydronics, particularly how it functions in the elaborate overlapping heating systems of our house.
A month or so ago, Jamie got a new cat he named Maggie, a small adult female grey tabby, one where the stripes cover all surfaces (there is no white patch on the neck or belly). She seemed to like me okay, especially after Jamie gave me some sort of meat puree to extrude from a plastic sleeve. Maggie is friendly, but she's also got some spice in there, and occasionally without warning she'd take a swing at me.
Meanwhile A's parents had been staying at an AirBnB in Kingston, and they came over while we were there. At that point, some of us (A's sister and parents and me) all began drinking wine.
Early this evening, Gretchen and I began the evening part of Jewish Christmas, which always begins with a meal at a Chinese restaurant. At first we tried going to the Kingston Wok, which is where we've dined for the last several Jewish Christmasses. But that place was crowded and the wait was predicted to be 40 minutes at least, which was too long for us to be able to make our movie reservation. So we ended up going to the C-Gourmet, a Chinese restaurant that hasn't exactly left great memories. But it was nearby and there were very few people there. They'd closed down the main part of the restaurant and only had the casual dining part activated. That's the place where you order at the counter and then can eat in a booth, kind of like at Chipotle. I ordered a thing of warm sake and some sort of vegetable fried tofu dish. But the best item we got was some sort of noodle dish Gretchen ordered. She also got the moo shu vegtables, which I don't really understand as a meal. Overall, the food was perfectly fine for a Jewish Christmas. While we were dining, we talked some about the inflationary distortions happening to the economy because of the AI-bubble-initiated data center build out. I said that memory and other computer components now cost multiples of what they'd cost a year ago. Then, of course, there is the effect of all that energy consumption on the price of electricity. And even after the bubble collapses, all that special-purpose memory the manufacturers have retooled to produce (products for which there will no longer be demand) won't even have consumer applications. It will all be ewaste.
We also overheard two guys at a nearby table discussing various things, including a television series that they seemed to think was a movie and also Pluribus. Then they talked about the movie they intended to be watching: Marty Supreme, the same movie we'd be seeing.
Usually when we go to a movie theatre, the place is empty and we watch the movie almost as a private event. Not so with Marty Supreme. The theatre was so full that we had to take regular seats, as the fancy ones with built-in heaters and actuator-powered reclining mechanisms had all been taken. When Gretchen saw how far in the back our reserved seats were, we took some empty ones closer to the front. But inevitably the people who had reserved them arrived, and we ended up getting evicted twice before settling on some perfectly nice seats along the side. I didn't have great expectations for the movie, so I had (as usual) brought a flask of scotch (not any of the Christmas booze Gretchen had gifted me).
I didn't really understand Marty Supreme. It was about some young con man who is also something of a ping pong prodigy. We see him running his little scams intercut with scenes of him playing table tennis, all of them lit in the gloomiest way possible. I didn't completely hate the film, but when it was over I was very happy to get the chance to finally leave. Gretchen, by contrast, had a completely different experience. She kept turning to me to note how extremely unusual the film was being. And I kept admitted to her that I didn't get it, but that maybe it was because I am stupid.
[REDACTED]
The painting of Neville I'd done yesterday. Click to enlarge.
The pepper grinder I'd painted from several angles. Click to enlarge.
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