Home again, home again, jiggity jig

Landed at JFK a bit before noon Sunday after three weeks in Spain. Caught a cab home. House still standing; different flowers blooming in front yard than before we left.


Unpacked suitcases. Repacked suitcases. Drove 4+ hours north to friends' house. Slept a lot. With five friends and two other cars, drove north another hour or so into the path of totality, found parking place near a restaurant/resort and gas station, and sat around for a few hours waiting for an eclipse.

We were worried that there would be too much cloud cover, but as it turned out there were only a few high, thin clouds. We viewed the increasing amount of eclipse variously through eclipse glasses, in a camera obscura, by projecting through binoculars onto a white piece of foamcore, and by projecting through a kitchen colander ditto. A breeze sprang up, the air got chilly, the light got weird, and then in a matter of seconds the last sliver of sun projected on the foamcore disappeared, the sky turned midnight-blue, and a cheer went up from the crowd. We could see the eclipsed sun perfectly, with a fair amount of corona and one persistent red flare. We could also see Venus nicely, maybe ten degrees away from the sun and moon; I gather some other planets were supposed to be visible too but I didn't spot them. Anyway, after two minutes or so, several more flares or Bailly's-beads or something appeared next to the first one, then merged into a blaze of white and totality was over.

Within seconds, cars started moving, jockeying to get out of the parking lot and onto the road. We waited for the majority of them to leave before getting in the car ourselves. One of our friends had picked out a restaurant a few miles to the south where we could get dinner, gave us its name, and we all hit the road in our various cars... except that we couldn't get any cell phone service (it's a remote area, and there were suddenly thousands of cell phones trying to use one tower). So after crawling along the interstate for half an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic, shalmestere and I took the relevant exit and stopped at a gas station to ask where the restaurant was. The lady behind the counter gave clear directions, and we got back on the road. In another heavy traffic jam, presumably people trying to avoid the heavy traffic jam on the interstate. It took another half hour or so to crawl a few miles to the restaurant, where we found we couldn't get a table for seven and started looking for someplace else to eat.

Most restaurants in this part of upstate New York exist to serve weekenders and summer people, so since this was neither a weekend nor summer, they were closed. After a bunch of walking up and down the road, and continuing trouble getting cell signal, we found a place where we could at least sit near one another, and had dinner while waiting for (hopefully) the worst of the traffic to subside.

Left the restaurant just before 7 PM. Traffic was indeed less bad than before, but in the first two hours (mostly on interstate) we travelled 63 miles. Including stops for gas and driver-switching, we got home at the stroke of 1:00 AM, thoroughly fried. Fall down go boom, in own bed for the first time since March 13-14. Both have to work in the morning, but at least we don't have to physically go to our respective offices.

A peculiar restaurant experience

After watching the eclipse yesterday, shalmestere and I and the five friends in our watch party stopped at a restaurant for an early dinner to (hopefully) wait out the worst of the traffic. [Complications of finding a restaurant elided.] We ended up at a table for four, with the other three sitting at the bar a few feet away.

It was resort-town pub grub, not a lot of variety on the menu, but some things that looked potentially good. I ordered "bang bang shrimp", and the other three people at my table ordered a fancy hamburger, one of them "no bun" to avoid gluten. A reasonable time later, a waitperson brought my shrimp and a hamburger, then went back to the kitchen and brought the other two hamburgers, then went back to the kitchen and brought two lemonades, then went back to the kitchen and brought two Cokes, then went back to the kitchen and brought me some silverware and a napkin. No silverware or napkins for the other three people.

I guess I could imagine thinking a hamburger doesn't require silverware (although they were fairly large and thick, and came with French fries that arguably required silverware too, at least at a place with real silverware and cloth napkins), but the customer with the bunless hamburger certainly needed it, and everybody needs napkins. So we pointed out that other people still needed silverware and napkins, and the waitperson went back to the kitchen and brought another set of silverware and a napkin. We asked for silverware and napkins for the other two people too, and the waitperson went back to the kitchen and got those. I almost felt bad asking again for the "water all around" that I had requested at the same time as our drinks orders, and didn't make an issue of it when only two waters arrived. They were clearly short-staffed, and apparently had no serving trays at all, hence all the deliveries of exactly two handfuls of stuff at a time, but really -- under what scenario does it make sense to provide napkins and silverware to fewer than all the customers? This only means you need to make more trips, which exacerbates the short-staffed-ness problem.