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windfall of alone time
Friday, March 4 2011
car issues
This afternoon I drove the Honda Civic town to run some errands, and along the way I noticed the car's temperature gauge kept spiking an an abnormal way. The car's cooling system has been suspect for a couple months now, ever since I detected a slow leak. A couple weeks ago I'd added some of that goop for sealing radiator leaks and it had seemed to work. But the temperature spikes seemed ominous. So I had a look under the hood, and found that the cooling fluid reservoir looked to be gummed up from that radiator sealing stuff. Also, the rubber hoses to and from the radiator weren't manifesting the palpable large temperature differential that they should have. I was worried I'd stopped up the cooling system.
I needed a place where I could work on the car while letting the dogs run around, but aside from home, there aren't many such places. There is, however, the West Hurley Park, which, though well out of my way, has a parking area set back far from the road. So I drove all the way out to the park, watching the heat gauge the whole way. I found I could keep the gauge from spiking by running the heater, particularly during and after long drives uphill.
In the parking lot of the park, I took the opportunity to dump out the muddy goop at the bottom of the plastic cooling fluid reservoir. Unfortunately there was no running water at the park, so I couldn't do a perfect flush. But I was able to unclog the rubber hose connecting the radiator to the reservoir. Then I took a walk in the forest with the dogs, giving the car enough time to cool so I could open the pressure cap on the radiator and check its manifold. It looked clean, so I started feeling more hopeful. I added more cooling fluid and drove back into Kingston. Now, happily, the car seemed to be cooling itself almost normally.
I'm not a bad friend if you're living with me. I'm helpful, funny, conversational, and even generous at times. But if you're not living with me, it's a completely different story. Without your taking the initiative to reassert yourself in the model my brain keeps of my social framework, it's as though you don't exist. It seems that for the most part I don't crave human companionship beyond Gretchen and the people she whose friendships she cultivates. Consequently, most of my friends these days are actually Gretchen's friends. If someone is important to me but not to Gretchen and she has no reason to maintain the relationship, it gradually fades away, Facebook notwithstanding. However, there are a few people out there who value my friendship enough to overcome my neglect. One of those is Mark, whom I know through Ray and Nancy. He's the guy whose chief interests include photography, radical hacker politics, and baroque conspiracy theories. Today he'd driven up from the city to go skiing with Nancy, but this evening he called and invited me to come down to Ray and Nancy's place to hang out, so I said sure. For Gretchen this amounted to an added windfall of alone time.
Ray had made another one of his glorious fusion dinners, this one involving a chick pea curry and couscous. I don't know if it was part of the authentic cuisine of any actual country, but if it was, I'd locate it somewhere in North Africa (perhaps Libya).
Once I'd shown up, Mark finally had someone he could drink
[REDACTED]
with. He'd bought a whole "suitcase" of Yuengling in cans. It's a surprisingly mediocre beer, though I think it tastes better from a can than from a bottle. I forget what all we talked about, but I do remember Nancy and me having a good chuckle about how horrible that band was that we'd seen at Keegan Ales the other day. Oh yeah, and then, during dinner, Mark started whining like a four year old because the chick pea curry was too spicy. It seems Ray had put in one two many habañero peppers, though everyone else could handle it.
One of Mark's favorite gadgets is a generic television turner-offer called a TV B Gone. You point it at any television and click the button and it cycles through all the power codes of all the television models it knows about (which are a lot), generating the necessary infra-red sequences to shut the damn thing off. It makes for a particularly fun time when executed inside (or just outside) a sports bar on a Sunday night. To keep the perpetrator from immediately being lynched, the latest models of the TV B Gone are made to resemble iPods, although the eight or night huge LEDs across the top look a little out of place. Mark seemed to think that these LEDs were for show, but I showed him otherwise. I had him look at the TV B Gone through a digital camera, which can see in the near-infrared that consumer electronics remotes typically use for sending their signals. Neither Ray nor Mark seemed to be aware of this technique, and as I recall the latter's observation went something like, "Whoah!" Then Ray and Nancy's television in the living room (around the corner and not in direct line-of-sight) switched on. Evidently the TV B Gone uses some powerful IR mojo.
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