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errands with Sandor
Sunday, September 11 2016
Despite it being the fifteenth anniversary, I didn't think about 9Eleven much today. The weather today was rather different from how it had been on that fateful day, beginning with showers accompanied by strong winds. I ran out early to fetch some things that needed to stay dry and then to put up the windows on the Subaru, which were still down from my drive home last night. The rain cleared out by the time Gretchen and I normally get out of bed, leaving sunny conditions that were decidedly cooler than they'd been yesterday.
Gretchen did not take Neville when she headed off for her Sunday shift at the bookstore. The understanding was that I could bring him later or not, depending on how my day went. Meanwhile, Sandor was insisting on taking me to Beer World and buying me beer as compensation for my having helped yesterday with moving the appliances. I'd protested that he and Eva are always doing me favors (like picking me up and driving me places or taking Neville to the bookstore), but he would hear none of it. So today, after taking a recreational 25 mg dose of ground-up time-release amphetamine salts, I arranged with Sandor to come over so we could begin a set of errands that would include a trip to Beer World.
Our first destination was the brick mansion, where the tenant in #2 had complained about window issues and an outlet being switched by a light switch. That tenant has been a high-maintenance headache from the start, and there's been some crazy mixed in there as well. A couple weeks ago, Gretchen put a letter in her mailbox about an electrical billing issue, and the tenant complained that Gretchen had snuck into her room and placed that letter on her bed unannounced while she was there. How does one respond to an accusation like that? When you're dealing with people who don't preserve memories correctly, there's no telling what they're going to accuse you of. This was part of the reason I thought it best to bring Sandor along on today's landlording visit.
Once at the brick mansion, I did other things as some sort of avoidance of the principle task. I installed new, brighter LED floodlights on the garage in back and then showed Sandor to the new, super-efficient gas-powered heating plant in the basement (a grey box with pipes and wires going into it, otherwise featureless aside from a constantly-glowing color display about the size of a smartphone).
Finally we marched up to the second floor and I knocked on the door. The tenant was inside with her dogs, talking on the phone with her son. She wrapped that up quickly and then explained that she'd already fixed the problems and that she'd been in the process of replying to Gretchen's last email, which she'd sent on Saturday saying I'd be coming over today. The tenant then launched into a long rambly monologue about her problems with the windows, perhaps as a way to justify her email on Friday. "Is there any I can look at today?" I asked. She directed me to a kitchen window that was a little tight. I used a chisel to remove some paint until it seemed to be working perfectly. Next, the tenant showed me a window in the bathroom which was stuck in the up position. One of its counter-weights inside the window frame was stuck in its raceway. I jerked the window down repeatedly in hopes of dislodging it, but it wasn't going anywhere. So I went and got a screwdriver and pried at the cotton rope attaching the weight to the window sash, but that only seemed to cut into and weaken the ancient rope. After a few more desperate tugs at the sash, I thought I saw a bit of movement on the rope. Was I making a progress? Only a few tugs later, the weight broke free of whatever reef it was beached upon and the window behaved normally once more. I proceeded to spray a bunch of lithium grease into the hole where the sash cord disappeared. As for the electrical issue, the tenant said she had someone who would be coming by to rewired the outlet, but I had my doubts that would be possible. Both outlets in the box were switched by the switch on the wall, which suggested to me that there was no unswitched power available in that box. She didn't really understand the hard reality I was explaining, so I put it another way, "You're probably going to have to use an extension cord." She proceeded to bitch and complain about extension cords and how much trouble they are (seriously?), but it didn't matter. If that outlet box didn't have unswitched power, getting unswitched power to it was not the sort of job a landlord would do for a tenant.
In any case, my job there was done. I gathered up my things and Sandor and I headed down the stairs. We didn't get far before the tenant, like Columbo, made a last-second appearance behind us and said she had one more thing to say. She said that she'd noticed a semi-hostile tone in Gretchen's recent emails, and that she'd asked the others in the building if anything she'd said in recent emails had been of the sort that warranted such a tone, and that they hadn't thought so. I didn't really know what to say, and, in that moment, I'd completely forgotten about that crazy accusation the tenant had made of Gretchen sneaking into her room and putting a letter on her bed. [REDACTED] To Sandor, of course, the tenant had come off as a reasonable person, and I had trouble remembering all the crazy specifics necessary to counter that impression on our drive to our next destination.
Our second errand was at Home Depot, where I wanted to pick up some long pieces of pressure-treated lumber for use in creating a better, less treacherous way for our cats to get up onto the solar deck. Sylvia loves to go up there, but she's getting old, and I'm worried some day she'll slip and go bouncing down the roof. The chief part of any such build would be a long, wide plank atop a long two-by-six running between low spots on the solar deck's southeast and northeast supporting pillars. There would be a way to get up on this plank from the rail of the laboratory deck at the north end and a way to get up to the solar deck at the south end. Sandor helped me select and load the four or so pieces I needed. As we did so, a Home Depot employee walked by and warned, "be sure to use gloves when installing that stuff; if you get a splinter it gets really badly infected." But that made no sense at all; pressure-treated lumber contains chemicals to forestall the growth of micro-organisms. Maybe what he meant instead was that the body reacts to the pressure-treated chemicals in some bad way. I don't know; I've worked with a lot of pressure treated lumber, never with gloves, and I can't remember any incidents resulting from pressure-treated splinters.
Ultimately, I drove Sandor to the destination this really was all about: Beer World. There wasn't much going on there in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. I decided to take full advantage of the beer tap area and have one of the employees pull me a few samples. Ultimately I decided to get a growler of the Jai Alai IPA, the best they happened to have on tap at the time. Meanwhile, Sandor was off in the German beer section; evidently this time of year makes him crave the brews of Octoberfest (though I have little fondness for the beer styles of my father's peasant teutonic ancestors). Samdor insisted on paying for all the beer despite my protests. On the drive home, I was noticing that the air conditioner kept petering out and producing either hot air or uncooled air. Popping up the hood, I discovered that the little copper wires designed to force clutch closer to the compressor so it would be in reach of an electromechanical actuator had apparently flattened over time, an now the gap had widened to the point where initiating the cooling has become an unreliable process.
Back at the house, Sandor went his way, I unloaded the lumber, and then I immediately drove to Woodstock with the dogs so that Neville would get to have a several-hour shift as a bookstore dog. While there, I mentioned the things said by our tenant about Gretchen's emails. "Did you throw me under the bus?" Gretchen asked, and I said I didn't remember what my reply had been but that I certainly had not. Then I went off to the nearby hardware store looking for supplies useful for defiling Donald Trump yard signs. The only response that makes sense, and I believe it the duty of everyone to carry through on this, is to make them look as though they'd been smeared with feces. I couldn't find any brown spray paint, though there was, however, brown caulking compound, which will actually work better as faux excrement when slopped around with a stick.
The dogs had been farting so badly that I stopped at the West Hurley Park both going to and coming back from Woodstock. If it solved anything, it only did so on the drive back home (and, clearly, Ramona was the one who'd been dealing it).
I'd had all these plans for what I was going to do today, but all the errands combined with the drinking turned it into a kind of a wastebasket in time. I salvaged it somewhat at the end by spontaneously making a bean glurp using tempeh and kale from the blighted plants in our garden. I'd neglected making a starch, so when she came home, Gretchen whipped up a pan of couscous. These were the things we ate while watching the last two episodes of the recent season of Orange is the New Black.
[REDACTED]
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