Today I worked from home and got a lot done. Travalon went into work earlier than usual, so I walked alone on Governor's Island at lunchtime. He got home from work earlier too, and when he did, I changed into an appropriately autumnal outfit, grabbed Niko, and hopped in the car. We drove to the Dorfhaus (which apparently means "village house," since Jilly Moose looked it up), and when we arrived, Jilly Moose was there, and we took photos of the sunset. Here's mine.
Here's hers.
In this photo, you can see lights in the top window:
We were soon joined by Cecil Markovitch, the Single B-Boy, R Van the Terrible, and the guy Travalon and I spent Thanksgiving 2020 with, who apparently doesn't have a name on this blog. (Yet.) I was a little sad because there was a flamenco guitar concert tonight, but Travalon went to my Irish extravaganza last night, so I owed him a night to do what he wanted, and he loves to talk to Nameless Guy about classic rock bands. Literally all evening the two of them talked about this. As usual we had an hour and forty minute wait, but for some reason I wasn't mathing well in my head today, so I was thinking we wouldn't eat until 8:30. We found a large enough table for all of us behind the back bar, and we got some appetizers (a giant pretzel and cheese curds), and some people had pre-dinner drinks. Finally it occurred to me that we would be eating around 7:40, so I don't know where that extra hour came from - did my brain take a trip and find itself in another time zone? The buzzer to notify us that our table was ready went off not long after that, so they were accurate in their timing.
I'm not a big one for fried fish, but the breading at the Dorfhaus is light and delicious. Of course they brought out the fritters first, and I had two, plus my whole bowl of coleslaw, so by the time the fish came out, I could only eat a little of it, and virtually none of the German potato salad. (I despise the picnic-type potato salad you usually get, but the warm, vinegar-based German potato salad is wonderful.) I did share an after-dinner grasshopper with Travalon, and everyone else got their own ice cream drink, except for Nameless Guy. There was an oompah band playing all evening, and R Van the Terrible, Cecil, and I all agreed that a little of that music goes a long way. Still, while I would have preferred flamenco, live music is always fun. I was a little afraid R Van would bring up politics, but she was perfectly behaved all evening. Suddenly Cecil turned to me and asked, "Do you have Travalon tied up tomorrow?" I didn't want to say in front of R Van that we were going to the protest, so I said, "I can't talk about that here!" but they all misinterpreted that to mean that I was implying Travalon and I would in fact be engaging in bondage tomorrow, and they thought that was hilarious. Crisis averted!
However, the funniest part of the evening was probably when I was telling them all the story of how Rich, Kathbert, and I were hiking at Indian Lake County Park and it was a bit muddy, so when I was about to go down a hill, Kathbert said, "No, let Rich go first - he's going to fall, and you don't want him to fall on you." He gave her his patented Wounded Puppy look and started going down the hill... and promptly fell on his keister. His pants were so full of mud that he took them off and tried to wash them at the pump, so under his neon melon-colored rain poncho that said "Diocese of Madison" across the back, his legs were bare to his socks. He looked like he was going to flash someone. And every step he took, the rain poncho gave him a little wedgie, and not long after this adventure it fell apart, probably out of humiliation. When I got done telling the story, Cecil said, "I want to hear Rich's side," so I checked the Rich Tracker on my phone, and he was driving on the highway, so I called him and put him on speaker phone. He related the story so closely to the way I had that R Van the Terrible was shocked, even down to the wedgie and the color of the rain poncho. (He did throw in some details I didn't know or remember, like that the poncho was from World Youth Day in Denver in 1993, and that we had driven to the park in Kathbert's car, which is why he was so intent on not getting it dirty.) You would have thought he'd heard me relate it... and upon further reflection, I do think that is exactly what happened. While his mother is a wonderful storyteller, in general Rich has trouble conveying events in chronological order or in a coherent way, and he gets hung up on weird details and then leaves out important ones. (True story: he once told me someone we knew had her baby, and it was so many inches long and so many pounds heavy, born at this exact time... but he couldn't tell me the name or even the gender.) But I tend to talk in anecdotes (Tiffy says this is because I'm Irish, although our college friend who is as German as it gets also does this), and Rich may have heard me tell the story so many times that when he was called upon to relate it, his recounting was so eerily similar to mine. Anyway, that's what Travalon and I decided as we drove home.
Famous Hat
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