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frozen food in a toaster oven
Tuesday, May 9 2017
This morning I went to the Brewster Street house, mostly to do a couple electrical tasks. I met William, the son of the woman who'd rented it, and he really seemed like he had his shit together. He was putting in curtains while watching a sports talkshow on the enormous television in the living room. Meanwhile, the new plumbers were down in the basement redoing the main sewage pipe, which had been bungled by the cut-rate plumbers who had preceded them.
My first task was to install a pull-string switch in the lamp that goes above the bathroom sink. This involved drilling a hole and doing a minimum of wiring. But the task was so simple that I didn't even bother to turn off the electricity on the circuit before doing the job. The only trouble I encountered was that the chucklehead who'd installed the screws in the wall on which the lamp was to hang had put the screws the wrong distance apart.
My second task was to hook up the microwave oven to the wires coming out of the wall behind it. I intended to install a box to contain those wires and a duplex outlet, but then I discovered the wires carried no electricity, and there was no way to make them start carrying it. The solution to this problem was to reroute the cord from the microwave so that it could reach a duplex box in the wall beneath it, the same one the gas range plugs into.
My last task was to provide an outlet for the tenant to plug a space heater into so they could have some heat in this unseasonably-cold May (the house's furnace won't be operational until the gas company redoes the gas line weeks from now). My original plan was to install a new outlet in the living room, taking advantage of the wall that had been opened up to redo a plumbing line. But there was already an outlet where I needed one; all I had to do was change the circuit breaker it was on from 15 to 20 amps. I also established that it was on a different circuit breaker from the television. As I worked in the live circuit breaker box, one of the plumbers stood there watching me, probably secretly hoping I would electrocute myself and provide a story to tell his friends.
By this evening, it was looking like the worst of our problems with the Brewster Street house were behind us. Once we get a paying tenant in unit #2 in the brick mansion, this landlording thing won't seem to be quite the stupid idea it's been seeming like of late.
[REDACTED]
Towards the end of the workday in my remote workplace, I relocated to Susan & David's place to spend the night and dogsit their dogs Olive & Darla. On the drive over there, I stopped at Hurley Ridge Market for things like vegan sushi (containing faux crab), a frozen Indian dinner, and a frozen burrito. I always forget that Susan & David for some reason do not have a microwave oven, though it turns out that it's possible to cook a frozen Indian dinner or even an Amy's frozen burrito in a toaster oven. The key is to toast it for a couple minutes, let it bask in the residual heat for ten minutes or so, and then toast it again. It's not very energy-efficient, and the cardboard tray might char around the edges, but it works.
Since I'd last been there, Susan and David had had a lot of painting done in the front of their house, and they'd had some walls finished around the stairway down to their basement master bedroom suite. But that basement suite is still unfinished more than two years after it was started. It only looks like 20 minutes of work remain left to do, but at this rate it may never be finished.
Meanwhile, tonight's Trumpian bombshell was that the President had fired the James Comey, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, using the justification that he had been unfair to Hillary Clinton during the investigation of her email-server non-scandal. Evidently Trump is so poorly-advised these days that he actually thought this justification was going to fly, that Democrats would say, "well, at least he fired that bastard Comey!" instead of immediately suspecting that Trump was trying to quash the ongoing investigation of possible collusion of his campaign with Russia.
I kept pouring myself fresh cocktails of orange juice and gin as I absorbed this juicy news. Eventually I took a bath in Susan & David's tiny upstairs bathtub. They have a much nicer tub downstairs in the unfinished suite, but I wasn't sure it was fully operational yet.
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