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news of a WiFi freakout
Saturday, September 10 2016
These days Eva and Sandor live in a contemporary Japanese-influenced house near Susan and David a little east of the village of Woodstock, though they still own their old on Maverick Road. Plagued by numerous overlapping problems and receiving scant attention as Sandor and Eva focus on the new place, it has been empty and neglected for over about a year. Today I met Sandor over at the Maverick house to help him move a washer and dryer to the new house. The house was looking abandoned enough that I thought there might be a danger of punk rockers taking it over as a squat. The grass in the yard was long, there were vines growing up over some of the rooves, and, most post-apocalyptic of all, someone in the neighborhood just to the west had erected a large sign supporting Donald J. Trump for President of the United States of America.
The were a few unexpected glitches in what should've been a routine disassembly. The screws in the "stack kit" holding the two together had stripped heads, and I didn't have quite the right tools for detaching the gas line to the dryer. I was eventually able to get the latter detached, but I almost ran into a limit when unscrewing the cable: the amount of twisting the flexible hose was willing to sustain. We loaded the dryer into my Subaru and the washer (which was much heavier, perhaps due to antifreeze that had been added as a winterizing precaution) into Sandor's CRV. We drove over to the other house mostly via the street with my favorite name of all in the area: Witchtree.
Though it's not quite finished, Sandor had already moved his parents into the in-law apartment in the new house's basement. The floors are still mostly bare concrete, but there's a big screen teevee, a working bathroom, a finished bedroom, and a way to make coffee. Sandor introduced me to his mother, a gracious woman with a Hungarian accent. There was also an older man there, though Sandor didn't introduce me to him. I assumed he was Sandor's father. He smiled, but didn't have much to say. The washer and dryer were to be stacked in a overbuilt little stall in the very center of the apartment, a place that otherwise would be perfect for surviving a counterattack by the Chinese after Donald J. Trump flips out in hour three of his presidency.
The only glitch in unloading the appliances came when I was wheeling the washer down a bumpy trail from the driveway. I must've hit a root or something, which tilted my load enough to topple it over, dropping the machine face-down on the rocks. It was a little scratched up and there was a strange piece of plastic whose provenance could not be determined, but it wasn't as bad of an accident as it had initially seemed. After that, we transported everything with both of us holding the appliances.
When that task was done, I hung out for a little while with Eva and Sandor in the dining room. Sandor made coffee in the most laborious way possible, using a hand-grinder to grind the beans and a french press (though that's a technology I actually prefer), and I ate a small piece of leftover vegan cheese cake. I was a little hungover from last night, and the caffeine was arriving to my brain unusually late in the day, so I was definitely not at the top of my game.
On the way home, I stopped at the Tibetan Center thrift store, though there was nothing there for me[REDACTED].
On the drive home both to and from this morning's appliance mission, I saw a large flock of turkeys along Dug Hill Road. They'd been further north this morning, but on my way home they were just north of Reichel Road. I snapped a few photographs with my smartphone.
Turkeys crossing Dug Hill Road. The sign and road in the background are for Reichel Road.
Meanwhile Gretchen had gone to the Fishkill State Penitentiary to visit an old Bard Prison Initiative student.
The day was hot and humid in a way that it seldom gets in this climate. At some point I took a nap in the greenhouse upstairs. It wasn't any hotter there than it was anywhere else, despite the fact that the sun is now low enough to get in through the south-facing windows after about 4:30pm.
Gretchen had something she'd arranged to go to tonight, so when Susan and David invited us and Eva and Sandor over for a barbecue, only I could go. On the drive over, I stopped at Hurley Ridge for tea, lemonade, and a six pack of Dale's Pale Ale. Susan and David had said not to bring anything, but I had some old poblano peppers that the seed library guys had brought to our party back in August.
While we were waiting for Eva and Sandor (who were traveling on foot), Susan was pointing out issues with the house. There was the bluestone wall a contractor was building next to the path to the front door that Susan thought was too tall for purely visual reasons. More fundamentally broken was an abandoned chimney in desperate need of repointing. Susan had gotten an estimate of $7000 for the job. She's always got contractors giving her quotes like that. There's a lot of overhead when living in that world.
As always, David was manning the grill, sizzling up his favorite kind of vegan burger patty. It was nearing the end of twilight as we sat down to eat. Susan was especially proud of a bread salad she'd made, and I was the first to scoop some from the large Ikea bowl containing it. Then Susan went to dole it out to others at the table, but it suddenly failed in the clutch of her hands, shattering into several piece and spilling its contents halfway between plates in from of Eva and Sandor. Initially everyone was pretty sure the salad was not contaminated by bowl shards. But, as I pointed out, there's a big difference between bits of ceramic and bits of glass. I already had my salad, so perhaps it was easy for me to say, but I decreed that the salad was probably still safe to eat. There were grumblings of disagreement, mostly from David, but evidently I'd made an unexpectedly-convincing argument, because Susan (the person at any table most likely to reject suspect food) ate the salad anyway. (This probably also had something to do with the fact that she had made it.) But eventually something went crunch in her mouth, and she decided to put the whole thing into the compost.
Though they live near each other, Susan and David are mostly still friends-by-proxy via me and Gretchen. Tonight, though, they had a lot in common to discuss, especially the contractor scene in Woodstock. Both have become familiar with most of its characters, at least in the high-end scene. They also know something about a local interior decorator. Hearing the mention of such a professional made me feel a little like a rube in the American class hierarchy. But it also made feel proud that I had somehow married a cultured woman who nevertheless didn't feel the need to contract with the services of an interior decorator.
I thought Susan was being a bit crazy with her æsthetic problems with the bluestone wall along the walkway, but later in the still-incomplete basement bathroom, I could see her point about the massive vanity framework that had been built for the space. It would've worked, but the scale of the bathroom called more for small individual pedestal sinks. Susan also had complaints about the dimensions of the shower stall, a lingering indecisiveness-cum-buyers'-remorse that David must find deeply irritating. He's the one who has done most of the work on these things.
At some point this evening I asked the assembled why none of them have (or at least ride) bicycles. They live a short bike ride from Woodstock, and none of them drive daily to a job (all but Eva work exclusively from home, as do I). Unlike me, most of their errands can be run in Woodstock, and there is no serious topographic impediment. Sandor and Eva insists there is a hill, but that's no excuse. As for Susan, she seemed to be concerned about all the additional gear beyond the bicyle one needs to ride it. But that's only true if you make it that way (or haven't kept in touch with the person you were when you first discovered the value of a bicycle). It's a fun crowd, but they're a lot more concerned about issues of safety and propriety than I am.
David had made a fruit pie, which I ate a tiny sample of (it was great, but my gut was already full of burgers and beers). And at some point Eva brought up an interesting issue that recently came up in the Onteora School District. It seems a group of older parents became alarmed about the WiFi installed in the schools and organized a protest against it. Being largely technophobic, they restricted publicity for their cause to a petition drive (I actually found omething on Change.org too) outside local health food stores (where similarly-nutty anti-vaxxers can be found) and to the printed pages of the Woodstock Times (which might not be read by anyone younger than 40). One of Eva's colleagues at the multinational cosmetic concern for which she works is an engineer working remotely in Hurley, and he took to baiting the anti-WiFi crazies, and what followed was a long, increasingly heated exchange on the Woodstock Times' letter-to-the-editor page between him and the head of the anti-WiFi agitators. This continued until the head of the anti-WiFi agitators was found dead following a kayaking accident on Onteora Lake. At that point Eva'a engineering colleague became paranoid he would be suspected for having been involved in the death. Meanwhile, the others in the anti-WiFi group had discovered that Eva's friend "works in computers," making his views on WiFi easier to dismiss. As I mentioned earlier, all of us work mostly from home, and four of us (all but Susan) depend on the internet for our livelihoods, so the idea of WiFi as a threatening force struck us all as goofy, medieval, and comically luddite. At that point, I compared it to anti-vaxxers, and, more instructively, paranoia about genetically-modified organisms. It was all fun and games until I said that; everyone there except David had gotten on-board the anti-GMO train without giving in much thought. I allowed that the massive corporations like Monsanto which do the genetic engineering are evil, but it's mostly for other reasons (such as sociopathic enforcement of intellectual property interests), and that there was nothing in GMO that nature hasn't done thousands of times on its own randomly. If there's any problem at all with GMO itself, I said, it's that it occasionally produces foods with not all the expected nutrients. But the best defense against that, I said, was eating food from a range of sources.
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