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the uncanopied sidewalks of Uptown
Friday, March 20 2026
Late this morning Gretchen had me take Lester to the vet for an annual checkup, mostly so we could get more of a prescription eardrop for his bad ear. Lester has had an incurable issue with that ear for many years now. It's filled with polyps that can be heard rattling around whenever he shakes his head, and they harbor various chronic infections which might be bacterial, fungal, or both.
Lester wasn't too happy about being loaded into the cat carrier, and he made a few yowling complaints on the drive to the vet. But then when he was out of the carrier, he didn't much mind being poked and prodded. He's a very indulgent cat, and will happily put up with being carried around by our neighbor's ten year old daughter. The vet checked him out and said he seemed stable. He'd lost a little weight, but his bad ear actually looked better than it had last time (probably the result of enthusiastic licking by both our dogs). I said that perhaps Lester has a problem with his kidneys, as the lumps in the litter box have grown large of late. So the vet palpated his kidneys and decided they might be a little small. I declined the rabies vaccine, and this resulted in me having to sign a waver full of scary bullet points about what can happen to a pet who has not received a booster shot, which the guy at the desk insisted on reading out loud in full from a tablet computer. Then it wasn't clear that I could sign because Gretchen was the only person on the paperwork, so she had to be called. It was a tiresome episode in perfect keeping with the many other things the private-equity overlords have been doing for years now to completely enshittify this veterinary practice. And the tiny bottle of prescription eardrops for Lester came to over $60, which makes it more expensive per ounce than injet printer ink.
Later in the day, Gretchen and I went into town to sign our tax forms (we'll be receiving an enormous five-figure refund this year), and then ran some other errands. I had some parts (and a caliper "core") to return to Advance Auto Parts while Gretchen was stocking up on Passover matzos at the Ghettoford Hannaford. Then we went to Lucky Catskills, the new Asian fusion place on Front Street in Uptown, for lunch comprised entirely of delicious vegan dumplings (which I slathered with oily hot sauce). Over the past few months, all the old canopies over the Uptown sidewalks and been torn down, revealing various architectural details that had been locked away for decades. (I hadn't known this, but the original installation of the canopies in the 1970s had been in response to competition from shopping malls.) I'd been mostly against removing the canopies, and I thought they'd afforded useful protection from the weather. But seeing Uptown without them (even with the ugly gash of weatherproofing in its place), I was starting to come around to them not being there. The canopies had introduced a certain gloom to the sidewalks that now was no longer there.
A new discovery today in Uptown was a bulk-only store called Folk Refillery & Supply that really spoke to Gretchen, who has been doing her best to eliminate as much packaging coming into our household as possible. That said, it's definitely a boutique shop typical of the fully-gentrified Kingston, and only wealthy people (perhaps including us) would actually shop there.
This evening Gretchen cooked up some asparagus, which we both ate with various scrounged-up food items. Gretchen ate roasted cabbage, while I busted into a pouch of split-pea-based Indian food, which I ate with toasted whole wheat flatbread. We ended up watching the final two episodes of the third season of Detectorists, and, at the end, realized it had been a truly magical show. It been a bit of a sleeper at first, but it had really blossumed as we'd continued watching. And the ending, when all the loose ends were tied up, was absolutely perfect.
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