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nothing worth thinking about
Sunday, December 11 2016
This morning I drove over to the Brick Mansion in Midtown to investigate a problem with water leaking from the bathroom of one apartment into the ceiling of the kitchen in the apartment below. The apartment from which the water would've been leaking is the one in which our least-pleasant tenant lives. I'd originally planned to go investigate the situation yesterday, but the tenant said something in a smarmy email about her personal space being sacred and that she'd prefer to be around when the landlord is in her apartment. Gretchen had tried to get me to go over anyway and pretend she hadn't checked her email, but I didn't want that torque on my relationship with the tenants.
My first stop was apartment 1L, the one with brown spots on the ceiling. Fortunately, this ceiling was a dropped-ceiling installed to conceal the disaster that was the original ceiling. I lifted up a panel and had a look around, eventually graduating to a tall ladder and a prybar so I could carefully pull off acoustic tiles from the sagging expanse of the original ceiling to look at plumbing in the floor overhead. There were stains here and there, but nothing was damp to the touch, suggesting there was no ongoing leak. To be sure, though, I went upstairs to 2 and ran the tub for awhile while the tenant (dressed in a bathrobe) yammered on with little complaints about her apartment, particularly the paint job. She said that if certain paint isn't used, old stains have a way of bleeding through. The bathtub didn't produce any leaks, so then I flushed the toilet in 2 six or seven times, and again there were no leaks. The lack of active leaks delighted the woman in 1L, who'd been concerned the problem might be from a toilet. As someone who is clearly a clean-freak, that would've really gnawed at her psyche. But how to explain the emergence of brown stains? Perhaps, in accordance with the tenant in 2's theory, they'd worked their way through a primer with insufficient stain-blocking power.
Any day one investigates a possibly-expensive problem only to find it's not a problem at all is a good one, and I was feeling elated on the drive out to 9W. As I thought about it, it occurred to me that the best explanation for the evidence I'd seen was that the annoying tenant in 2 had clogged her toilet and it had overflowed. She wouldn't want to admit to such a thing, so she came up with the tale about cheap paint failing to block stains. Oh well, it doesn't matter much; as long as there is no ongoing problem with the plumbing, I can rest easy. At least about that issue.
At ShopRite, I bought some groceries: beans, beer (Southern Tier IPA, which I've decided I like), sea salt, La Banderita tostadas, almond & cashew milk, Annie's vegan burritos, antacids, and a bottle of kombucha. There'd been a post-Thanksgiving run on generic antacids, and ShopRite had yet to re-up, so I was forced to buy name-brand (Tums). I would've bought soy milk instead of almond and cashew milk, but ShopRite only had disgusting flavored soymilk in stock. No, I will not buy "very vanilla." The biggest surprise of all was ShopRite stocking kombucha. You can't even get that at Hurley Ridge Market (despite all its hippie Woodstock customers).
On the way out of ShopRite, I randomly ran into Eva and her mother-in-law (Sandor's mother). They'd just bought a bunch of wholewheat pasta. ShopRite's customer base is so white-trash that I never see anyone I know there (though I once saw Ruthy U., the locally-famous folk musician), so this was a bit of a surprise. Out in the parking lot, I let the dogs loose so they could say hello. It was such an energetic impromptu dog party that it drew the attention of another dog lover who happened by as well. He didn't look like your typical fruit-shaped ShopRite customer either.
After getting some more LED lightbulbs, plug-in light sockets, and one-to-three outlet expanders at Home Depot, I drove out to the Tibetan Center's thrift store to see if there was anything for me. Sadly, there wasn't.
When Gretchen returned from the bookstore (and dinner at the Garden Café with the Eva I'd run into earlier), it was snowing enough to make conditions on Dug Hill Road mildly treacherous.
Later I suffered through the entire interminable 90 minute season finale of Westworld. I am not going to be watching Season 2. I can tell that watching the show is an empty experience because, though it aspires to be deep and mysterious, it leaves me with nothing worth thinking about as I'm drifting off to sleep.
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