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avoid the word casserole
Saturday, April 30 2016
Hangover. I've had this problem in the past, but not during my recent controlled experiments with Adderall (and their relatives). It's not the Adderall (or Vyvanse or amphetamines) that causes the hangover, it's the drinking necessary to bring one down. If one doesn't drink too much, of course, there will be no hangover. But last night I drank too much, and I knew it before I went to bed. It was slightly affecting my balance, and that always portends a problematic morrow.
I had a business meeting today at Outdated at noon with Alex, the guy for whom I built that crazy webapp that integrates with Lightroom. It's a great app and I'm very proud of it, but it suffers from the curse of everything I build: nobody wants to buy it. I arrived first and got a bowl of Thai tomato soup and a cup of coffee. When Alex arrived, I had him buy me a vegan tempeh reuben. I don't know where Alex was when I could've used some income, but now that I have a fulltime job he'd set up a meeting with me and even brought a $500 check (he likes to pay me before I do the work). Fortunately, none of the work he was ordering looked to be that difficult or time consuming (given that his site runs on my Tableform "platform"). Down the road, he indicated there would be even more work with a group of people called "the Italians" who have some sort of stock photography application that could really use our functionality. But Alex has been talking about "the Italians" since late 2012, and so far they haven't given us any work at all.
Though Outdated is a pleasant place full of attractive young women, I didn't stay long after Alex left. As usual, I took advantage of my being out and about to pay a visit to the Tibetan Center's thrift store, which (despite what my friends have said about the place) has been a reliable source of treasures. Today's haul was modest: a nice rectangular steel box measuring 8 by 11 by four inches and yet another Android wall charger, rated only 700 milliamps. I got all that for less than $4.
This evening Gretchen and I had dinner with friends at Plantae in Tivoli, and as usual we caught a ride with Susan and David after parking at that semi-abandoned motel across from the geodesic domes on Route 28. The other couple at Plantae was Julianna & Lee, and we all ate at a big table at the top of the spiral staircase. The ladies all had one conversation while us gentleman had a completely different one, with almost no overlap or whole-table discussions. We guys talked about things like whether or not wine tastes better after many years. (David said he thought so, and I told my one anectdote on the topic.) David also had us whipping out our smartphones in hopes of answering several of his all-of-humanity calculation challenges. He wanted to know how much volume all the eggs in all the women on earth would occupy, but we lacked a few crucial bits of information to answer it, including the number of eggs the average woman has in her body at any one time (and Google was being noncommittal). We did, however, have the value for the diameter of a single human egg, which turns out to be a tenth of a millimeter.
As for the food, I ordered the taco appetizer and the enchilada casserole (though I agreed with Lee that "casserole" should never be used in a food's title or description, as that word has developed a musty unappetizing connotation). I found the food much better than I had the other two times I'd been here, but that was probably because I'd brought my own bottle of hot sauce. Plantae doesn't have good hot sauces on hand, and I'd brought the weaker of my bottles of Dave's Insanity Sauce (which I'd also had with me during my week in West Hollywood but which I'd forgotten to take to Outdated this morning). For beverages, Dave and I had gotten a couple beers from the store across the street, and when I'd finished drinking my Lagunitas IPA, I switched to wine.
On the drive back from Tivoli, Gretchen told a story I'd heard before about the time when she was fourteen years old and wanted to see Prince perform in Washington, DC. Her parents wouldn't let her go, so, in teenage despair, she dressed up all in purple and put garish purple makeup (in 1985 this was evidently in every bathroom cabinet) all around her eyes. As she told the story, she remembered that her bemused father had thought to document the moment, so she called him up and asked if he could find the picture. He later did, scanned it, and emailed it to her. This is what it looked like when kids who loved Prince cried:
(I would meet Gretchen only three years after this photo was taken.)
Back at the house, I experimented with a new drug that can legally be bought online. It's called Sceletium tortuosum. After reading the Wikipedia entry, I started small, with something like a 60 milligram dose. That had a mild (and not entirely pleasant) effect that wore off quickly, so then I tried a 500 milligram dose. But it was late in the evening and I might have gone to sleep before it had a chance to kick in.
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