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not scraping a pot of freshly-made soup into the trash
Wednesday, July 1 2026
When Gretchen drove off to Woodstock to work her Wednesday bookstore shift, I packed up the dogs intoo the Forester and drove out to Lowes to buy some more treated lumber and a $60 box containing 50 of those newfangled big-headed screws designed to replace lag bolts "in most applications." I didn't let the dogs out as I was tying the lumber to the roof of the Forester because there was just too much going on there: someone was drawing on the pavement and doing some sort of survey while a van waited for a parking spot in the shade to load a shit-ton of insulation.
Back at the house, our cleaner Kaya was there doing her thing, and the first thing I did was unload all that lumber. It was hot and the day was destined to get even hotter. Somehow, though, I was comfortable enough to work outdoors, installing two brand new four-by-four posts at either end of the southmost rail of the south deck (they're nineteen feet apart, remember) and then making a nineteen-foot two by four to span between them as the vertically-oriented component of a two-component rail whose cross-section will be either an L or a T. Of course, this piece later managed to fall while I was trying to screw it in place, and the impact created a little crack at its weakest point (the place where I lapped on some more two-by-four using a four-foot lap that was only 1.75 inches wide). So then I had to squirt in some Gorilla Glue and shoot in some more screws to strengthen that new weak spot.
A thunderstorm briefly threatened my work, but it was to the east and never came near enough for there to be any rain on my project. But I couldn't take the dogs for a walk while there was still a chance I could get caught in the rain. So instead I cooked dinner: a big pot of vegetable soup that included kale from the garden, potatoes, carrots, and turnips from the Woodstock Farm Festival (the first time I'd ever cooked with turnips). There were also two different kinds of noodles, one whole-wheat, but no mushrooms. And I just added the onions to the soup without sauteeing them first to see if being lazy that way would affect the result. It didn't seem to; the soup was great. But when Gretchen got home from work, the hot day had her not wanting anything hot, so she ate cold leftovers from last night instead. Had I been a character in the Boroughs and Gretchen not wanted my soup, I would've scraped the whole thing into a trash can (as Clarke Peter's character does with a freshly-made raspberry pancake his wife doesn't want in the episode we watched tonight). That trope in American cinema drives us crazy, and it models terrible habits to the people who watch.
Jumping back a bit, after I made the soup, there was a enough time before Gretchen got home to take Charlotte for a walk. Initially it seemed as if Neville might come too, but I saw him flop down early in the Woodshed Path and that was the last I saw of him. I ended up taking Charlotte for what (for me) was an unusually long walk: all the way to where the Stick Trail meets the Chamomile Headwaters Trail and then back homeward on that. There haven't been many flies bothering me as I've been working near the house, but the flies definitely were worse along the Chamomile Headwaters Trail.
I was feeling dirty and sore from the work I'd done today, so I took another refreshing luke-warm bath.
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