Because I'm A Fucking Caveman

So yesterday, The Friends and I drove up to this place called Wright's Farm in Gardiner, NY, and went apple-picking. Katharine and I had devised the idea the previous weekend, and during a boring Monday or Tuesday at work I googled a bit and got some people on board. The weather ended up being completely perfect for our plans -- there'd be pretty much non-stop rain up in tha Tri-State for the past two weeks or so, but it cleared up completely and the temperature rose to 70 degrees during the afternoon. I'd never gone appling before (at least, not that I can remember), and it turned out to be a whole goddamn lot of fun. I took some pictures with the dij:

Tom's so happy he just doesn't know what the fuck to do.

The donut-making machine, as seen through the window of the store. The donuts get sort of squirted out fully-formed from this mechanical mixing bowl and then slowly floated down this stream of simmering oil, which cooks them along the way.

The ground was kind of marshy from it having rained the past 2 weeks straight, and lots of apples had already fallen off the trees. Alternately gross and pretty.

A ladder going nowhere; has Farmer Wright been raptured?

Sadly, on the last day Ted became feral.

Here's how it works: You pay like $5 and they give you a bag and send you up to the orchard, which is like a square mile of rows of apple trees, and you just fill the fuck out of your bag. I can't tell for sure, but I think they had about three types of trees -- there were yellowy-green apples, shiny red ones, and then these sort of dusty-looking pinkish-red ones. Maybe those last two are the same kind, I dunno. There were also a whole crapload of apples that had fallen off the tree, and which I guess they recommended you not pick up, so we whipped 'em at each other. Some of them were all mushy and rotten. After we filled up our bags (and took an embarrassing number of vanity photos), we headed back to the store area to drink cider and eat cider donuts, which taste about as much like cider as Apple Jacks do, but are also just as tasty as Apple Jacks. I snagged a jar of raspberry applesauce and we got a couple of jugs of fresh-pressed cider to mull with rum back in Brooklyn, and then we hit the road again. So, in closing, I've told you about picking apples in upstate New York, and if you like apples and picking apples, I hope you will consider picking apples in upstate New York the next time you go on a weekend trip to Gardiner, NY.

When we got back, some people took naps; I played X-Men Legends on Tom's old new X-Box. Then we went over to Katharine's to make the cider. There was some confusion over how to add the mulling spices we'd bought -- it comes in these nice looking little pouches that almost look like teabags, but it turns out that you're supposed to untie them and just empty that shit into the pot. The cider was really good, and we all drank some while we watched the first two episodes of Extras, which is reasonably funny. Then everybody went to a bar, except me -- I went home, because fuck that.

M-Biddy pulled the ill drop-in on Wednesday and we hit up the 12th St. B&G for some type good meat dishes. Tom came over and Luisa comped us Stripes at his behest, which turned out to be... not so good, though it did feature this choice bit of dialogue (from the "bonus" material, approx.):

Harold Ramis: I don't want to shoot anybody, I'm a pacifist!
Bill Murray: So you're saying even if some guy's raping your sister and you've got a gun, you don't do anything about it?
HR: This is my sister we're talking about; you practically raped her yourself one night.

Friday I went out with my boss and some co-workers to this really great New Orleansian restaurant called Stan's Place over on Atlantic and Bond -- they snagged their chef a month or so ago from Louisiana after he was left homeless by Hurricane Katrina, and apparently he's still sleeping on one of the owners' couches. Whatever the story, that guy can cook. I ate a whole goddamn Cornish Game Hen stuffed with some kind of oyster-mushroom compote. Jesus. Everyone should go to that place because they just started serving dinner and it's been pretty empty so far, according to my boss, who is a repeat customer.

I gotta get a new digital camera, I'm telling you. This old Olympus 360DL from 1998 homphs down batteries like nobody's business, plus the pictures it takes, while fairly high-res, have his weird prismatic washed-out quality to them, like the lense is covered in a thin layer of dirty soap. It would be nice to have something a little bit better, maybe that could focus itself and do some of that digital zoom shit.

The apartment is full of flies. It's really weird. I've emptied the cat box and taken out the garbage and done the dishes, and they keep showing up. The fly-swatter's been doing overtime -- I killed like 4 yesterday and twice that many this afternoon, even a couple of them fucking on the side of the fridge. I wonder if my downstairs neighbor is dead.