I’ve set myself a number of tasks lately, two of which are to learn 2 things a week: one actionable (learn a new skill, etc), one informational.

For the informational task this week, I took a walk. Since history and research are two of my favorite things, and once a taphophile, always one, blah blah, I brought the camera down to Old Town Cemetery with the dog- that part being critical. The graveyard is in a probably-okay-but-seemingly-iffy area. Having somebody watching out for trouble while I was distracted wasn’t a bad thing.

In a cemetery of small tombstones, this odd pyramid mausoleum stood out, and although I admit having a prejudice against the style (thanks Nic Cage!) but went home to dig in and learn more about the Robinson monument.

Henry Robinson was born in 1782, and his early years aren’t well documented, but he first turns up as an officer on the USS Constitution in the war of 1812. Over the course of the war, the Constitution sunk four Royal Navy vessels, convincing Britain their former colony was a legitimate military force with a powerful navy. After the war Robinson became a merchant, trading primarily with France (and becoming good friends with Lafayette, the Revolutionary War hero) until his retirement in the 1830s, when he moved to Newburgh to become a gentleman farmer, tending 267 acres.

An active, enthusiastic man even in his later years, he founded several rowing clubs in town, two of which still exist today, and gained his nickname from yelling “bully!” when his teams crossed the finish line- a term that at the time was a cheer of encouragement.

Oddly, he’s best known for introducing goldfish to the United States- a mixed blessing to be sure. Referring to them as “those pretty fish,” he stocked his pond with the carp, but didn’t appreciate what releasing them would mean to the ecosystem. Although he’d initially convinced the legislature to protect the fish, they quickly became a serious problem, leading to stories like this from Albany in 1867- 90 miles upstream of Newburgh:

Ann, his wife, died before the Captain could provide her the mansion he’d promised her in life. To make up for it, he commissioned architect Alexander Jackson Davis to design this mausoleum in the new cemetery, a departure from Davis’ traditional Gothic Revival style.

With no next-of-kin to inherit, his farm’s land was sold off in parcels, the homestead being torn down, rebuilt and going through several hands before becoming the Desmond Estate, recently sold to the city of Newburgh by the College of Saint Mary, who’d used it as a center for adult learning. It’s unclear how much of the Robinsons stamp remains on the building, though the fireplaces are thought to be original.

The tomb fell into disrepair and was falling down when the cemetery commission convinced the city to restore it in 1999.

Old Town Cemetery was officially founded in 1803, but was clearly being used well before then because in 1898 the oldest stone still readable was dated 1759. It holds many Revolutionary War dead, and I foresee some interesting research coming from its confines. Below are a few more shots of of the grounds to give an idea of the age and surroundings.

Went out to lunch with a friend today, and heard words coming out of my mouth I’ve said too often: “I’m trying to get back to being myself again.”

We’d been discussing changes the last years have wrought, including traumas, disappointments, places both literal and figurative that neither of us would’ve pictured ourselves in.

And suddenly the absurdity of the phrase was so clear. How on earth can you “get back” to someone who no longer exists? Who’s gone through fire and flood, been to hell and not-quite-back? Do you pretend it hasn’t happened so you return to being that other person?

Not realistic. And to try would be to deny the lessons learned along the way. Time for a new phrase. And a new phase.

I recently unearthed a portable hard drive from years back. Exploring it has been wonderful, rediscovering photos and documents presumed long lost. Some are bittersweet, as these things always are, and some have snuck up on me in surprising ways. Like this.

What follows is a short piece of writing I did as penance. Working at a preservation non-profit in New Orleans post-Katrina, the demolition requests were never ending. Some had no hope of being salvaged, but many that could’ve been saved weren’t, due to so many short sighted reasons, bureaucracy and greed being high among them. We really did visit each one on the list before every meeting. Documented them, did what we could to save them, tried to find buyers, tried to find an viable reason to stay the executioner’s axe. There were wins, but so, so many more losses.

Meanwhile I was watching my friend and boss fall apart. Too much stress. Too few successes. Fighting and failing over and over was exacting a high price…alienation, paranoia, alcohol were all doing damage and I was losing patience with her. I sat down to do something to try and walk a mile in her shoes. It was a good start, but clearly veered off from exploring my friend to the people who were impacted on the ground.

Finding it hit me hard, though, and brought me back to that place and time.

She sat in the peanut gallery, only half listening to the ongoing hearing and clutching her sheaf of papers. Each of these twenty three slightly crumpled pages represented a house she was here to protest the demolition of.   

To prepare for the hearing, she’d visited thirty two houses, photographed and edited each,  talked to engineers and planners to differentiate between what could be reasonably saved and what needed to be sacrificed. Nine of those houses were just too far gone; these remaining two dozen were worth fighting for, and so she sat in City Council chambers once again, ready to argue for the city’s history and future.  
She’d already lost one of her borderline cases, a cute cottage on Piety Street. Like so many others, it’d taken water in the post-Katrina flooding. It’d all proven too much for the owners; even combining their meager savings, the insurance payout and the help available from the government, the elderly couple who’d lived there for forty years would’ve still needed to scrape up over $75,000 to put it right. There was just no way. They’d moved away, selling the house to the state.  
And once the state had it, what incentive did they have to repair and resell it? That kind of aggravation wasn’t really in their job description, never mind their budget.  So they’d knock it down, keep the lawn mown, hold the property until things turned around and maybe they could sell it to a developer. 

Who could you blame? The people who couldn’t rebuild? The government that hadn’t the money or patience for what could only be done as a labor of love? The Corps of Engineers who hadn’t maintained the hurricane defenses in the first place? Four years on and she had no more answers than she had at the start. All she could do was show up and fight, over and over, hearing the same arguments until she thought she’d scream. Six thousand, five hundred houses had been knocked down, each one ripping out a thread of the city’s fabric, altering the feel of the neighborhood and leaving yet another gaping hole in the streetscape. 

And each time, she heard the same things over and over. Does not contribute to the neighborhood or cost prohibitive, or her new personal favorite: Of little consequence.  

Of little consequence, my ass, she thought, gritting her teeth, looking at a photo of a house further down the agenda. The inspector had included that gem of a comment, and it was a house she was determined to save, come hell or… well, the hurricane had already brought the high water. It was only hell she had to face, then. Good.  

She didn’t play favorites with the houses she fought for; it was something she prided herself on. But this one went beyond favorites, straying into the foggy land of personal history.  

Jackson Avenue cut through the highest and the lowest of New Orleans’ society. It started at the Mississippi River, in the struggling middle class Irish Channel, and petered out in decidedly rough Central City neighborhood. In between the two sat the Garden District, the ultimate in upscale opulence.  

And that was the irony; this house sat, abandoned, just three blocks outside of the Garden District, where it would have enjoyed protected Historic District status and would have been snatched up in a heartbeat and renovated.  

Instead, this house where she had played as a child, when she lived just around the corner, also without that coveted protection of money, of privilege. A minute’s walk and a million miles away, she’d grown up not thinking about it much, instead making the best out of what she had, and the best of the best had been in that house on Jackson Avenue, where Miss Alavada lived.   

When her parents were fighting, or her dad was drunk, or her mother hadn’t had the money to buy groceries, Miss Alavada was an oasis. Her huge slobbery mutts ran amongst the carefully tended palms and roses, greeting her each time with a tongue bath. There was always something on the stove and few questions asked. She was the neighborhood social worker, checking on young and old, making sure everyone was okay.  She’d listened, consoled, advised, and fed three generations out of that house, taking in borders to help make the bills after her husband passed.  

And now, she too, like the couple on Piety was too frail to take care of herself, never mind anyone else, or the property.  Neighbors said Alavada never recovered from her exile, and now the property was up for demolition. The house was already flagged with Fire Department ‘do not enter’ warnings- Let it burn, is what they meant. Save us the trouble of knocking it down.  
 
 

Fast forward few years, and we had been desperately trying to stave off a massive demolition project that was going to destroy 27 square blocks of MidCity, a theoretically protected Historic District. There was a viable alternative to reducing a neighborhood that had fought its way back from Hurricane Katrina- reusing Charity Hospital, a behemoth that was ready for redevelopment and to this day sits abandoned in the middle of downtown- but the powers that be wanted new and shiny. There was so much money flowing. So much corruption. But we fought, along with many many others. Even knowing it was almost certainly futile, we fought.

And lost, of course. In many ways my boss lost herself in that fight, and as far as I know, never quite found her way back.

I still have friends in Preservation, and god bless those who continue to battle against the destruction of our history and heritage. May their successes be many, and be enough to carry them through the inevitable losses.

Every so often we’re confronted with past versions of ourselves.

In this case, it was Mr. Pixel finding an old piece of writing from when we were getting married. I’d actually started a little blog about the insane process of someone who really thought they were beyond that kind of nonsense, but really had a bunch of fun in the end, even though – predictably- the little backyard gathering became a couple hundred friends at a very nice venue.

It’s breezy, easy. Casually speaking of a very different version of myself, one that was almost certainly nicer. Very definitely happier and less stressed. But most importantly, back then, I just…wrote. It came naturally, as it had all my life.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be that carefree creative person again, certainly not while juggling everything that’s in the air now…but someday? Or maybe I can find a way to just channel her once in awhile.

  I had not been looking forward to this. No particular reason, but I suppose it might’ve had to do with the idea that once I told somebody- once I said it out loud- it would be real.
           You see it played as a joke on sitcoms, rom coms, and anywhere it can be gotten away with- some hapless guy panicking over how to pop the question. Get down on one knee in traditional fashion? Find some funny way that’s sure to charm the pants off her? What can he possibly pull off that will convince his beloved that he’s not a total goober and is worth the effort of pulling together a wedding?
           Greg never had that scene, but here I was, feeling that same sort of fear when faced with the fact of telling someone that we’d pulled the trigger. Or rather were going to load the gun in preparation for trigger pulling in a couple of months.
           The fact that I was now, somehow, getting married had evolved. Greg hadn’t gotten down on one knee, there’d been no big production involved. Yes, he’d given me an engagement ring some years ago, but that wasn’t so much about getting married as it was an overall commitment to our lives.
           We’d been driving back to New Orleans, post Katrina. It’d been a hell of a year. I’d spent the summer in New York City helping to care for my Grandmother, diagnosed with cancer. She’d died one month to the day before Katrina and I hadn’t been home long before we evacuated, eventually driving back up to NYC to crash in her not- yet- emptied house. We stayed there for two months, not knowing what was going on with our house, our city, our lives. On the day we arrived back home he gave me a gorgeous yet typically atypical ring- a large blue / purple tanzanite stone in a custom setting he’d had made in the Diamond District while we were in exile.
            “Oh,” I’d laugh in reply to someone asking if we’d set a date,” we’re just going to be eternally engaged.”
            I even had a theory- a theory which even my therapist shook his head at- that it’s actually more noble to live together and not be married. Think about it: if you’re married, you’re obligated to stay, no matter how annoyed you are with the other person. Oh, sure, you could always get divorced, but that’s messy and time consuming. Expensive, too.
            But when he (TWO EXAMPLES OF SERIOUSLY ANNOYING BEHAVIOR), and you’re still there, then it’s because you really, truly want to be there. You could just pull up stakes and leave if you didn’t. Therefore, both members of the couple can rest assured that they’re doing okay. Also, it gives more of an incentive to work out the problems, rather than letting them fester, because… well, better safe than sorry, right?
           
           Things started small. A comment here, a wistful sigh there, and after about a year of ducking and dodging it became clear that Greg now actually wanted to get married. It was never really clear what changed, why it was now important to him, but the comments started with the generic (“wouldn’t it be nice if…”) and when they were ignored moved into the more specific and practical (“you really need to get on a good medical plan.”).
           After a while it was impossible to come up with reasonable replies, other than the usual “I don’t see why we need some piece of paper,” blah blah blah. Even I realized how lame it was starting to sound. And worse, clearly Greg could tell I was starting to weaken, because he’d stepped up the comments.
            Finally, a few nights before, I’d broken. But I had a condition. We hadn’t had a vacation in five years- not since before the storm. If he wanted me to put in the work to pull off a wedding, I wanted a honeymoon.
            “A serious one,” I warned. “International. A REAL vacation. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but it has to be substantial- a minimum of a week.”
            He didn’t even pretend to think it over. I was almost surprised  he didn’t make me sign some sort of binding contract on the spot. 
            And now, here I was, about to tell the first person about this change. It happened to be my friend and boss, and I was wondering if an alcoholic beverage with lunch would be inappropriate.
            “So, I have something to tell you,” I said.
            “Oh God, are you quitting? You’re quitting. Dammit, I knew something was wrong!”
           “What? No, no! Nothing like that! Oh, no, Gina, really!” I laughed, “I gave in. I told Greg we could get married!”
            The look on her face said she thought maybe quitting was the better idea. “Really. A wedding? How…nice.”
            Slowly it dawned on me; I’d forgotten about an assistant she had two assistants ago, and the flip comment she’d made when I asked why she’d left: “She was far more interested in planning her wedding than doing any work.”
            “Well, when I say wedding,” I blurted, “I don’t mean fancy. Not at all. Very, very simple. Small. Minimum work, minimum stress. This will not take over my life, period. I will absolutely require time off for a honeymoon, though.”
           Gina had a look that said she suspected that I was perhaps protesting too much. “How small?”
           “Minuscule. Next spring, while Alison’s on break, Greg’s going to fly his daughters in. My brother and sister will come, I hope, and we’ll do it in City Park, for free, then go out to dinner someplace nice. That’s it. But I thought you’d want to know.”
            “City Park?”
            “Yep. It’s public property, so it’s free, and with all of those gorgeous live oaks? Natural beauty at its finest…and cheapest. I figure we do it at sunset, and it’ll be done and done.”
            She started to look a little more relaxed. “Well, I’ll be there too, of course.”
            It’s funny, isn’t it, how you don’t recognize the slippery slope until you’re halfway to the bottom?
           
           Gina took it pretty well, I thought, especially with her PTSD from previous betrothed employees. And like an alcoholic admitting his addiction, the first time the words “I’m getting married” passed my lips were the hardest.
            In fact, I went from somewhat sheepish to annoyed in short order as I discovered the worried conversations that had been going on behind my back for years, apparently. The wind generated from the collective signs of relief caused gale warnings.
            There were many, it seems, who were worried about me and the security of my future. It had been quite the topic, particularly with the slightly older ladies of the neighborhood who liked me well enough but had certain…concerns.
           
            We had never been a conventional couple, and I found it amusing to keep people guessing. When we moved to New Orleans, we bought a house style called, in local parlance, a “double shotgun camelback-” basically a duplex with a big hump of an upstairs. Shotgun style houses were so named because you could open the front door and fire a shot that would go straight through the house and out the back door without hitting each other because there are no hallways or breaks. Shotguns are long and narrow, with each room opening on to the next and the kitchen traditionally at the very back.
            It’s a style that was inexpensive to build and great for air circulation, but it meant that everyone would traipse through your bedroom to get to the room with the food in it. I was willing- eager, even- to throw myself into the New Orleans lifestyle, but there were limits. So we bought a house with three units, divided the upstairs apartment in half and dropped stairs in so I could have my messy bedroom kept private.
           And then we each took a half and happily had lived next door to each other for a decade, believing in the Katherine Hepburn adage that men and women should live separately and visit often. Our house has a huge yard with a perfect New Orleans courtyard in back, so our back doors are always open, and since we both worked from home most of the time we were in and out of each side all the time, but ultimately we both needed our office and our space, and I had a teenager to raise, so it worked out well. Meals are taken together, and- oh heaven- cooked by Greg.  Plus I had my dogs, and despite his many wonderful qualities, “dog lover” is not among them. “Dog tolerator” perhaps.
            There was just too much noise and commotion in my life for a full time writer to function, and after all that chaos I needed a place to escape to as well. Heaven. 
            The reaction when we explained the situation to someone was always, always the same: the husband would look confused, offended,even. The wife would look blissful as she imagined what life would be like if she could pull it off. “That’s brilliant” was something I heard more than once.
           
            Then there was/ is our age difference, not significant enough to be an issue, but we’d met online in the dawn of the internet age, when only geeks were navigating the web, so the average intelligence of anyone you’d bump into was significantly higher than the mean. There were no webcams, no online dating services, just a big, weird community. We started a writing project together and by the time we met in person nearly a year later, age was the least important thing involved. 
            We’d written all sorts of things, going back and forth, knew the other to be smart, funny and very very sharp. We were both recently divorced, and not looking for anything serious, but discovered that we had too much in common to let it pass.
            But when we met I realized I might be in over my head.
            You see, once upon a time, before he met me, Greg was a power player at a magazine you’d know immediately if I named it. And having learned that name, you’d look me up and down with an eyebrow cocked and wonder what the hell someone like that was doing with someone like me.
 
You might have guessed that I am not that sort of girl. I am not anyone’s idea of a trophy wife. Essentially I am, and I say this with some amount of pride, jumped up white trash. Smart white trash. Self motivated white trash. Presentable and articulate, but still WT.
 
He grew up an only child with cooks and English boarding schools, hearing classical music tinkling through his house. I grew up the oldest of three squabbling kids in the sticks, eating Rice-a-Roni with heavy metal rattling the windows.
 
We met somewhere in the middle- he’d burnt out on his high stress life and was writing & editing from home. I’d bootstrapped it out of the small town and improved myself. We met because I wrote silly fun things and he desperately wanted to work on something that wasn’t a dull, dry, business story. And so, slowly, he began pulling me up further while I dragged him down and got him to relax.
 
It’s worked really well when we’re on our own and with the friends we’ve made while together, though friends and family from the past tend to look at us sidelong. My family tends to be amused by the whole thing. His friends and family are much more split, and several of them feel their beloved Gregory has gotten the short end of the stick. They have made it plain that they were hoping he’d grow out of it, but now, alas, it seems they’re going to be stuck with me. So sad.
           
           The looks on their faces when they found out was almost enough to make it worth all the bother of getting married and it occurred to me for the first time that this might just be fun.

TheBrideConfides.com, 2010

Like everybody else, I’ve been watching the Haunting of Hill House on Netflix, which is excellent as long as you stop looking for very much actual Shirley Jackson in there. I may have to watch again, if only to see if they really managed to leave out the best quote:

Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

The idea of a house being sentient but not sane seems the most terrifying thing ever, and in some primordial way I still use it at a measuring stick. There’s a house on my block now that I would classify as not sane, and yet it’s absolutely the one I would renovate if I had the cash. Go figure.

Anyway, it was good- go watch it. Once it’s over, Netflix will then suggest you watch another of their series, called Haunted, which sounds like a fantastic concept. The preview made it sound like one of those shows where people share their scary stories of supernatural encounters- but with a budget! Most of those shows are filler done on a shoestring, so this had real entertainment potential.

That genre is kind of my dirty little secret, I love them, even through my sniggers. But I can suspend disbelief and really enjoy them…up to a point.*

“Haunted” takes that point and just obliterates it. The first episode had some serious plot holes, but it was when the second one started I found myself talking back to the tv in the first 90 seconds.

They start with this:

Already a red flag- all of those other shows start with “the following is based on,” or some such disclaimer. No disclaimers here, so…wow! Should be interesting! Click to embiggen!

Okay, so far we’ve been told they lived in the middle of nowhere with a psychopath daddy, a deluded mother and a lot of dead people, which they were told never to talk to anyone about. In the cutscenes, the kids are little- maybe 7 or 8, so okay, I guess we can forgive them at this point?

But now we continue, fast forwarding a generation. The sisters are older, and they’ve escaped. Somehow, despite knowing what their father is, the older one decides that it for sure is an awesome idea for her son to hang out with her father, who naturally starts to groom the kid to follow in his footsteps. As you do. We see scenes of grandpa encouraging the kid to knife an animal carcass, stick your head into its guts, dance around a fire, worshiping the devil. As you do.

Then, apparently grandma’s over it- they are retirement age, for goodness sakes, and he just won’t let up- so she smothers grandpa.

DING DONG, the witch is dead! The wicked witch, the…wait…what?

So everybody’s cool with their mass murdering grandma, who moves in with her daughter, there are no inquiries into grandpa’s death, and despite that everybody’s older, no one attempts to deal with any of this? And you further think it’s an excellent idea to just move on in?

At this point, it’s impossible not to have noticed that none of these people acted as if they gave a single damn about any of these victims. No mention of cops sniffing around, what the victim’s families might be going through, but this is the real WTF moment, when he moves in and finds “hundreds” of grandpa’s trophies:

So what does he do? Does he call the cops? Nope, let’s destroy lots of evidence instead, and continue to play ostrich:

He gets a dumpster, gets rid of everything and hopes to settle in to his happy home. Surprise! It doesn’t go as planned, things get spooky, mysterious bloody handprints start showing up everywhere, and he’s sure “they” are coming for him.

Still lives there, of course! Never notified anybody! No cops have apparently ever come around this vortex of the the damned, asking about all these missing people!

And then, the punchline:

Really? Really? You came on an internationally broadcast show to talk about the potentially hundreds of people you yourself say your family killed, while not one of you showed sympathy for people losing their lives, but you’d like some sympathy for yourself because you might lose your job? Frankly, I’d be more concerned about your credibility, which has definitely flatlined.

So, in the end I only have two problems with this: the living and the dead. And the producers, actually, who probably get classified as zombies, since they’re clearly braindead if they thought viewers would actually believe this tripe, or be able to forge any connection to the self-serving yahoos telling the story.

Again, I love a scary tale. And I love history. Plus I lived in a house for years where at least 17 people died in the last 50 years. We had some seriously weird stuff happen, which may be why I’m curious about these shows.

To paraphrase my daughter, “Mom wants to believe in stuff, she just needs some proof first, and that’s not how belief works.” She’s got a point. And I’ll actively try to give you the benefit of the doubt… if you can explain why you think bad things are happening, and even better, offer some proof those things actually occurred, I’ll happily go along for the ride.

If you don’t treat me like an idiot, in other words.This show forgot that one caveat.

*One I particularly loved when it first came out was where this chick psychically felt out a house while her partner does research into its history. Supposedly they don’t talk to each other until it’s all over to compare notes, but after a couple of seasons, plain old dead people haunting places must’ve gotten dull, because suddenly it was interdimensional visitors, portals, and everything had to get ramped up more and more, at which point I was out.

In the beginning, there were some pretty atmospheric episodes, though. I have a doll/clown thing, so this one stays in my mind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8ejd3sXo0A

I did a thing.

A fairly stupid thing.

An impulsive thing.

It goes without saying that this was an ill-considered thing.

While doing laundry.

A friend pointed out that it’s difficult for most people to accomplish this sort of mischief while doing laundry, but what can I say, y’all? I’m a multi-tasker. While the wash was agitating, I went around the corner to the Big Lots – to get a shower curtain, which I never did look at – and saw this…thing.

It was large.

Extremely ugly.

Also, exceedingly brown.

Just…the brownest brown.

Have I mentioned that I’m virulently anti-brown, as a rule?

Right on cue, up sidled an employee. “That’s something, isn’t it?” she asked, casually.

“That’s one way to put it,” I replied, dazzled by the drab.

“It’s on clearance. Returned. Too big for their space.”

“I can see how that’d be,” I commented absently, caught in its muddy vortex.

“Comfortable, though. Give it a try,” said the spider to the fly.

You know what comes next, which is this:

They gave me an extra 10% to take it NOW, and when I protested it wouldn’t fit in the car, they showed how it comes apart. Two kids shoehorned it in my car, where it took up every square inch. Getting it out of the car to the front hallway nearly killed me, and how it gets upstairs to the office/bedroom is something of a mystery at this point.

But ohmygod, is it the most comfortable thing I ever sat in. And half off! Plus 10%!

So where’s it going to live?

Well, that’s another issue entirely. About a year ago- more than that, come to think of it- my sister asked me, and I quote: “Are you a moron?” The answer, apparently being… kinda?

Here I have a large bedroom with a brand new king sized bed, waiting to be dealt with, and instead of dealing with it, I continue to sleep on the broken down, 14 year old memory foam (that had a 6 year warranty)little mattress in the small bedroom. The emotional reasons for this are somewhat complicated, but the practical ones are that it needs a LOT of work.

But I did do the offshoot room, the little office, and that was a big job, okay?

But to do the bedroom…carpets needed removal, then something to replace it, painting of walls and furniture, that horrible pitiful light needs replacing, on and on and on…and the scale is daunting.

I mean…look:

And yet, there’s now the world’s most comfortable, if supremely ugly, chair to consider, with no place for it to go…other than taking up the entire entryway. So my needle has gone from the “nothing” side to the buried-in-the-red “all” side, just like that. And that’s often how it happens. Last year I took several days off of work** and accomplished much in a short space of time, so I put in for 3 days off that, combined with the weekend gives me the better part of a week to deal with this.

And just to add a little spice to the mix- in case also working full time, plus dealing with the IRS and everything else at once isn’t enough…if I can get enough done before my days off in the first week of October, maybe we’ll actually go away for a night or two instead. I haven’t spent a single night out of the house in 2 1/2 years, so that’s a worthy goal.

All because of a big, ugly chair.

* As for the cover image, not 100% applicable. But where energy/motivation = glass contents, it sort of works. Also, one of my favorite Pratchett quotes, so like a cat that decides “if I fits, I sits…”

** It must be something about this time of year, because the day after I posted this, the “on this day” feature started popping up pics of exactly this time last year, and what I accomplished in those 3 days. It gives me hope for the 3 days I’ll be taking this year:

1st/2nd floor steps: carpets removed, sanded, painted, new hallway flooring:

Upstairs hallway: carpet removed, cleaned, new flooring:

Revolting but useful table: (1st pic in collage is *after* cleaning and sanding. Never did tile before in my life…

Several awful lights replaced (those butterflies…):

The new plan is that once a “weekend” (my days off being Thurs/ Friday) we will do A Thing. Get out of the house, do something fun, something different, no matter what. After a rocky start at the beginning of the summer we’ve finally begun exploring our “new” environs.

This week’s outing was to Storm King Mountain’s Art Center. I knew it was a huge sculpture garden (500+ acres huge), but not how very very abstract it is.

I have come across this problem before, where abstract art makes me feel rather… unsophisticated. This, for example, is called Iliad:

Why, yes, the fall of Troy is exactly what that brought to mind? hmmm…

But then there’s “Frog Legs”

Which, while visually interesting, left me tilting my head like a dog that doesn’t quite understand what you’re trying to tell it. One suspects the artist did this on purpose. I can never quite shake the feeling that we’re playing a surprise game of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” with this sort of thing.

The scope of the place is amazing, and if anything made the massive sculptures pale in comparison to their even more impressive surroundings, which is built in as a feature, not a bug. There are references to global warming, mother nature, and our impact on the earth everywhere- the curators definitely consider the grounds to be the largest canvas, cultivating wild grasses and flowers everywhere.

The day was gorgeous, and I’m glad we went, even if it left me feeling a little provincial with more of an appreciation for the nature than the art.

I genuinely loved several things at Storm King, although possibly not in the way the artist intended- my fav was a bronze fountain that I dubbed “Even Cthulhu gets thirsty:”

It’s a little hard to see, but it’s melty bronze in different shapes and watching the water come down in constantly changing patterns was mesmerizing. A fountain is on next year’s garden to-do list, so we may have to try some form of recreation here.

Also very relaxing was the kinetic sculpture “Sea Change,” which we watched for a long time:

George Cutts speaks about his sculpture Sea Change at Storm King from Storm King Art Center on Vimeo.

After spending hours listening to people wax rhapsodic at the Art Center (well, not so much ‘people’ as the tram’s guided tour), for dinner we ended up down the road apiece in Fort Montgomery, just outside of West Point.

It was a down n’ dirty place, same owner for over 25 years, same ancient clattery cash register that I desperately wish I’d thought to take a picture of (“It’s a genuine National! You usedta couldn’t get parts for it, but now they’re collectable, so it’s all on eBay,” the barmaid of 30 years said with amazement). Cash only, and it being a non-weekend night the only food on offer was Sysco’s finest, but fried up hot and brought out quick.

And it was the first and only time my Jack and Coke was proffered with a bendy straw:

And served with a flag paper placemat, because West Point, duh.

All in all, I’m a big fan of big contrasts, so it was a great day.