GOOD DOG!

It rained like hell the whole next day. Oh, did it rain. It let up in places, but basically, it rained so hard in the morning that when R and I were off the tug in the afternoon, the Rondout flooded and we couldn't get back till the tide went down again. And when might that be, I gently enquired of R around 5ish, when we were sitting down by the old Freeman building and watching the water still rising. Dunno, she said. Some time tonight. Or maybe not tonight--who knows, she added. Oh, great, I thought, glumly. Holiday Inn in Kingston at best, and all my stuff is back on the tug.

R was not that worried, though, so we went to the Ulster County Mall (sterile, but *warm* and light) and watched "The Departed," which was snappy and nicely distracting for our poor flooded selves. I had not called Hal to tell him I was coming up (I admitted it later, we laughed about it--but this was an old friend weekend, not a brother weekend). Anyway, I was half afraid I'd run into him, this being the apparent Saturday night hotspot of Kingston (he said he was there the following weekend, actually).

At 10:30 we were back down at the river's edge, where the access road was now just a shallow lake instead of a mile long deep one. Her husband came out at the cel phone's ring to guide us back on the labyrinthine adventure back onto the tug (which was even less fun in pitch darkness with just a flashlight's beam between you and a drop into the river).

R's husband "dogged down the hatch" (shut the doors firmly, turning all those latches in the picture above) and we sat talking for another hour in the now warm tug or so as the dog turned and curled in onto herself.