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the choice of the meat man
Saturday, September 17 2016
Neville slept fairly well through the night despite his injuries. This morning when I took the dogs on a walk, he gladly came along, plodding along with me and not joining Ramona on her side adventures (which he normally would've done). The best such side-adventure happened where the Chamomile Headwaters Trail passes nearest Funky Pond Summit (the second-highest prominence on the West Kingston Quadrangle). Ramona could be heard to the west barking at something. My initial supposition, based on her enthusiasm, was that it was a bear. And it's probably best to get her away from a treed bear. So I walked over to where Ramona was and saw her looking excitedly into the canopy of a tree. At first I didn't see it, but then I did: a black blob far out in the small limbs high in the tree (it was probably a chestnut oak, but I don't remember). It was black and the size of a small bear, and the ears were consistent with a baby black bear, but then I saw the long tail. Then I knew it was a fisher. Since a fisher is not a dangerous animal and there was no chance it would be coming down, I left Ramona there to bark at it and Neville and I headed for home. Not far from there, I found this natural formation in a rotten log:
Gretchen and I have a running joke about how we should have a little white board with boxes labeled "Days since Neville last peed on the bed" and "Days since someone at the brick mansion called us needing us to do something." Today I'd arranged to deal with a matter related to that second one. The woman in 1L had emailed saying, and very apologetically, said she couldn't open a window to let in the cooler air that has come with the change in the season. (The apologetic attitude was probably a consequence of how cooly businesslike Gretchen had been with the kooky woman in 2, who then discussed it with the others in the house. But Gretchen is decidedly warmer with the tenants who have not shown themselves to be insane.)
I took both dogs with me on the drive into Kingston and brought lithium grease and a chisel. The problem window in 1L was impossibly stuck, just as the tenant had said. But I knew now from experience that the only way to get these windows to work is to repeatedly force them up and down as far as they will go. As I did this, the tenant hovered near by, constantly yammering her ideas about what might or might not be wrong and the reasonableness of the small thing she actually needed me to do. Finally I had to tell her, "This'll probably take me awhile, and I need to keep at it." With that, she went in the other room and left me alone. With great effort, I was able to force the stuck sash nearly to the top of its range, and then I sprayed the track beneath it with lithium grease. Then I forced the sash all the way down, and when I did that, a loose wedge-shaped sliver was left on the track. I plucked it off, and from then on the sash could raised and lowered with almost no effort, its weight perfectly balanced by the weights hidden in the wall. This is how old-style windows are supposed to work. When they're working properly, there really is no equivalent in modern window technology. This was a much better outcome than I had expected, and both the tenant and I were overjoyed.
While in town, I drove out to Home Depot to get hardware for hanging Benjamin (the big steel bird sculpture Gretchen got recently from her parents). I needed cable, cable clamps, sturdy eyes, and a swivel hook of some sort. I also got some groceries at the ShopRite and booze at Miron liquor, where I tried out a new single-malt scotch called Lismore Speyside. It was $24 for 750 mL.
While I was in the neighborhood, I thought what the hell, so I got myself a burrito from Chipotle. I got it the way I always do, with sofritas and guacamole. The guy directly in front of me in line was wearing a bright red teeshirt from Malafy's Meat Processing LLC, so I assumed he'd be getting himself the meatiest burrito known to mankind. But no, he ordered a vegetarian bowl built around black and pinto beans. It's anecdotal, sure, but instructive nonetheless: the professional meat guy doesn't get meat when he has a choice about what to have for lunch.
Neville's condition seemed to deteriorate somewhat throughout the day, perhaps as the pain of all that road rash caught up with him. By this evening (after Gretchen got back frm the City) he was occasionally shivering, and it wasn't particularly cold. But he wasn't whimpering, and occasionally he seemed to be able to sleep.
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