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house rented II
Monday, March 14 2016
That junior vet who had taken tissue samples from Eleanor's swollen lymph nodes called today with news from the last test done on those samples. The news was not good: the likelihood that Eleanor has lymphoma was over 90%. This likely means she has less than three months left to live. It was bad news, but not really unexpected. Gretchen took it a lot worse than I did, immediately and tearfully fussing over Eleanor in a way that probably disturbed her. It looks like we'll be putting Eleanor on the steroid prednisone, which is a way to make her comfortable and give her a month or more of comfortable life. For now, Eleanor still seems perfectly happy and healthy, in other words, "She's still got it." But who knows with these things? Cancer is not always the easiest thing to predict. I should mention, by the way, that, though cancer has afflicted and even killed a number of people we know, this is the first potentially-lethal cancer in our "family" since Gretchen's maternal grandmother died of it. (My maternal grandfather died of colon cancer in 1958 and my maternal grandmother recovered from two different cancers. Also, Caliche, the cat of my early childhood, died of cancer in the early 1970s.)
This evening, Gretchen and I would be showing our Wall Street rental house to a number of potential renters Gretchen had lined up using an ad on Craigslist. On our way to that, we made a detour to the Sherwin-Williams paint store on Albany Avenue pick out some sort of yellow for painting our kitchen (in Hurley, not on Wall Street). Gretchen had already picked out a sage green called Koi Pond for our living room as a means of doing something about the white that has been growing increasingly dingy those walls since 2002. A nice plump woman attended to us as we looked at the sample. When I said that I wanted a yellow with "a bit more saturation," she was taken aback to be hearing someone familiar with color theory jargon. Later I elicited some revulsion from both Gretchen and the paint woman by saying a color resembled Donald Trump. The color we selected was a warm modestly-saturated yellow called Butterfield.
Our tenants had vacated the house for a couple hours to allow us to show it to prospective renters. They'd done a good job of cleaning it up, though there was a rust-colored stain that needed to be scrubbed out of the bathtub using Comet. There was also a constellation of nascent brown stalactites, some about 3/8 inch across and as much as a quarter inch long on the ceiling over the tub, and these, whatever they consisted of, took some effort to scrub away.
The front door of the house has a problematic latch that keeps falling apart, making the door difficult to open. This evening I found a wrench and a screwdriver and used them to get the door open. When I did, I found three of the prospective renters standing on the porch. The fact that the door latch was falling apart didn't seem to concern them much. Two of those three people were a young couple whom Gretchen showed around while I gave Claudia, the single older lady, a separate tour. She was, as Gretchen soon identified, a drip, making little disparaging comments as she walked around. The half bath I'd installed was "a quarter bath" and she wanted to know if there were three bedrooms. Really? She thought a house with $1400/month rent would have three bedrooms?
We ended up giving tours to four separate couples, all but the last of whom definitely wanted it (and I think they were dispirited when we told them everyone else wanted it). The house is evidently much better (mostly prettier and cleaner) than any other rental on the market in that price range.
Had one of these couples offered a little more rent, we would have picked that tenant over the others. But short of that, we had to think with our guts. I liked the middle couple the best. She works as a high school Chemistry teacher down in Newburgh and he works as a chemist at a company up in Albany. But then Gretchen googled that company and found that they make pharmaceuticals and there is some testing on animals. You don't want to be anywhere near such activity if Gretchen is standing in judgment of you; indeed, the quickest way to get Gretchen rooting against you on Jeopardy! is to fail in some respect regarding the rights of animals (by expressing a fondness for meat or cheese, by having a purebred dog, or even by having a hobby that involves the use of wool yarn). But when it came to picking a tenant for our house, I thought such shallow analysis was horrifying. "There's no way to know what exactly he does at that company, and don't want to disqualify him because of what you've found." I don't know why, but Gretchen soon came around to my point of view and in the end we accepted the chemists as our new tenants.
Later, Gretchen started watching the very first episode of a new golden-age television show called Hap & Leonard, starring the actor who played Omar on the Wire and that curvy wonderland of a woman who played Joan on Mad Men. It hooked me from the start with its opening car chase scene in the aftermath of a bank robbery. After that, though, it was a bit slow, and I gradually became aware that the writing and direction weren't all that good. Also, as Gretchen pointed out, it was trying very slightly too hard.
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