I let the pot pie burn.

Splashing out yesterday, early afternoon when I returned from Gov Is, I got some cash from the WF ATM and bought a whole pint of Pinnacle at the Chinawoman’s. I went through that fairly quickly. After downing half of it (cutting it with blue Gatorade from the race setup) I conked out and slept for six hours. Alas, I had put a Blake’s chicken pot pie in the oven at 400º for what was supposed to be 40 minutes. It was completely carbonized when I found it.

So later on I cooked up a couple of the chorizo sausages I got at Whole Foods yesterday. I sliced up the two avocados and found they had largely gone bad (a day or two late). I ate the fried sausage bits with arugula and a cut-up apple (the apple from the pre-Hallowe’en Gov Is races). Pretty good. I can do that again. A bit of salad awaits me still in the fridge.

My weekend work was characterized by constant reassignment. I found out in the last couple of days that I was going to do Timing. I had visions of setting up five sets of four timing mats, along with decoders and generators, all in the space of an hour or so. Turns out I only had to work on the split, the halfway point of the 10k on Saturday. Sol (pretty girl who is head scorer or something) sent a message on Teams that the generator should be started because the battery on the decoder was down to 60%. I didn’t see this because I had no signal over by Liggett Hall. Or thought I had no signal. And just before this happened I was dragooned by Marco and Michele into doing portapotty duty: that is, there was crowd of maybe 150 people waiting to use the carseys, and we were splitting them into two orderly lines, while Senka (large Russian? woman) and I directed each line to the vacant conveniences, the ones with a green wedge in the latch indicator. Occasionally people wouldn’t turn the latch and they were caught by surprise. Oops. But we got through them all in the last 15 minutes before the race. Then the little Korean butterball came over to set up the generator after the race started. I spent a half-hour with the bicycle guys, waiting to see when the last runner would pass the split. Well we never found the last runner, because we anticipated more when there weren’t any more. Afterwards I had to detach the mats, turn off the generator, collect the cables, pick up other generators and plywood, and fire extinguisher towers, etc. I was out of there by 12:15.

So that was Saturday. Something similar on Sunday, except no timing duties, and I was more directly under Holleran, who had assigned me to setting up the sound. Something I’ve never done. You unzip the speakers and put them on the tripod. Then attach the AC cord to the generator, and start the generator. The one generator I tried to start was bum, for some reason. Low oil, said Mr. H. Meantime I’d been alerted on the ferry that I’d have to do marshal duty. And thus I did, back at the Oval, where the warmth of the sun was a pleasure. I counted about 750 runners coming through, but was told there were about 1100 starters. Curious about that. The special treat for this weekend’s races was doughnuts, or as they call them, “donuts.” Fortunately they had plenty of glazed and apple cider ones when I got through marshaling. After that I took down the speakers and tripods, gathered them up with the generators, loaded the trucks.

Michele asked me yesterday if I’d be up for driving a truck to Prospect Park soon. I said yes. I think that’s the 7th, something about cocoa. Driving a panel truck at 2 or 3 in the morning should be a novelty. There’s another race the following weekend in Central Park. Bigger one, I think. I haven’t seen any communications yet about that. Fortunately these are both a few weeks off.

Print and TV news these days is mostly about Trump’s cabinet appointments. Negress calling Pete Hegseth a “White Supremacist,” lots of warm support for RFK Jr’s healthy-food initiatives. That Waltz or Weitz guy, congressman from Florida, is considered very iffy as Defense Secretary. Elon and Vivek heading department cleverly called DOGE, something to do with efficiency.