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no motherless babies starving
Thursday, May 11 2017
This morning I drove out to the Wall Street house to fix a bathroom cold-water faucet, which, I discovered, suffered from a problem of an entirely mechanical nature. The handle had a hole in it with little knurls in it that matched up with little knurls on the stem it fit on. But these knurls must've worn down to the point where they no longer provided any friction, so the handle no longer turned the stem. As I drove to Herzog's for supplies, I thought how I might fix this. Maybe I'd fuse the handle to the stem using JB Weld (a kind of epoxy). But that might be bad; what if I needed to take the stem apart for some other issue? Fortunately, Herzog's had a lot of options for fixing this particular problem. The option that seemed to work for me was a set of "universal" handles that contained screw-tightened vises inside them. This worked great, and I would've replaced the other handle to make them both match, but the hot water handle had the opposite problem; the screw holding it on was stripped and couldn't be removed. Some idiot had probably JB-Welded that handle to its stem anyway.
Today ended up being sunnier and slightly warmer than other recent days, at least when one was in that sun. But it's still cold in the house, and I've been making plenty of use of my space heater. Fortunately the laboratory is on a 20 amp circuit breaker, and despite the computer, five monitors, the hot water tea pot, and that ten amp space heater, the laboratory circuit breaker never trips. I don't think it has tripped once in the entire time (over 14 years) it has been in service.
As always, there are phoebes who have made our house and yard their territory for the season, and there's a phoebe nest on top of the outdoor light above the garage doors in the same place as the ill-fated phoebe nest that Gretchen would go on to write a poem about. Today I noticed an eggshell just outside the nest that was trapped in nest material and hadn't fallen to the ground. It was white with brown flecks, and looked a little big for a phoebe egg. So I looked up "cowbird egg" and saw that such eggs look a lot like that one. Using a mirror, I looked into the nest and saw a single large pink chick with several small white eggs, eggs that looked rather different from the one cast from the nest. Clearly the remaining eggs were phoebe eggs and the chick was a cowbird chick. Had I been a more meddlesome sort, I would've fed that fucking cowbird to the cats. But I decided to let nature play out as it wants to. As long as there are no motherless babies starving to death, I am willing to leave well enough alone.
This evening Gretchen and I went over to Susan & David's place for a small dinner party involving just the four of us. Susan was making an Asian noodle & tofu dish that would prove to be wonderfully delicious. But before all that, Gretchen gave a long and detailed telling of our recent travails with the Brewster Street house and landlording in general (the eviction of the deadbeat tenant from unit #2 in the brick mansion). Other subjects of conversation included the foolish and self-defeating antics of one Donald J. Trump and David's research of his father's experience as a POW in World War II, a story that is informing a creative project he is now working on. Gretchen and I ended up being there until something like 11:30pm. Had I not suggested it was time to leave, there's no telling how late we would've been there (although David was being pretty honest with yawns by the end there).
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