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cottonwood cotton and a gamboling coyote
Saturday, May 27 2017
After Saturday morning coffee, Gretchen and I drove in separate cars out to our multi-unit rental property, the brick mansion on Downs Street mostly to clear out the garage in back. It had been mostly-unused since buying the house, but the new tenant lined up for #2 is a weaver and wants a place to put her loom, and will give us $100 extra per month to use the space. There wasn't much in there aside from the malfunctioning refrigerator from #1L, construction scraps, old slate shingles, a can of moldy drywall joint compound, and a bicycle of unknown ownership. Gretchen was also there to show the attic apartment (#3) to prospective renters, three of whom said they would be coming by to check it out. While I wrestled the old refrigerator into the back of the Subaru without the assistance of hand truck (it was surprisingly easy), Gretchen showed the attic apartment to a heavily-tattooed gentleman with, he'd confessed up-front, a bad credit history. He took one look at me and asked if we'd ever played together in a rock 'n' roll band. I was wearing my NASA teeshirt, but my hair is pretty rock 'n' roll these days, so I could understand his confusion. "Sometimes I get drunk and pick up a guitar, but that's about it," I said.
Gretchen's two other prospective renters flaked out in the worst way possible. They didn't show up, but they didn't attempt any communication either. They're now dead to us. Not showing the attic apartment to those people meant Gretchen could help me clean out the garage. We got nearly everything out of there, and I even used the moldy joint compound to fix a couple bad spots in the stucco interior wall.
We sat for a time out on the brick mansion's front porch waiting in vain for the last prospective renter. It was a nice warm day and Downs Street was alive with activity. A group of little kids across the street (all either black or mixed-race) were doing what little kids used to do when I was a kid before LCD screens were first invented and then got cheap: skipping rope, staging short foot races, and pulling their bikes out of a bike pile and riding up and down the street. Meanwhile, a guy ran a yardsale out in front of the three-unit rental next door (to the northeast). He was blaring mostly classic rock and attracted a steady stream of potential customers. I should've gone over and looked at the Dobsonian reflector telescope, but I've got enough crap as it is. A group of Hispanics walked past, and the guy broke out of the group to inspect an ugly faux-wood television stand Gretchen had dragged from the garage out to the street. "You're not taking that!" one of the women in the group declared in English. "Porque no?" Gretchen asked in rhetorical Spanish.
Eventually Tara, the soon-to-be-evicted resident of #2 rolled up in a shiny Kia SUV. In a whisper, Gretchen asked me how she could she afford that if she can't pay her rent? Tara scowled at us as she walked past us into the building. For someone supposedly suffering from stage IV cancer, she looked pretty good. "Nice that you can pay for all that when you can't pay us rent," Gretchen declared in a loud voice.
Both going to and coming back from Downs Street on I-587, what might be the shortest interstate in America, I noticed a constant flurry of cotton blowing in the wind from the cottonwoods along Esopus Creek, which runs between I-587 and Kingston Plaza, the Uptown shopping center featuring Herzog's and the "Ghettoford" Hannaford.
After taking the refrigerator home, I unloaded it into the driveway for a few days of prime white trashitude and set out in the Subaru again to get some supplies for the low deck to be built just east of Gretchen's library. On the way, I went well out of my way to see what was at the Tibetan Center thrift store. The place was crowded with shoppers, but the stuff available was disappointing. I found a small double-sided makeup mirror, one side of which was concave, and I always buy concave mirrors when they are available.
At Home Depot, I bought 320 pounds of dry concrete, two twelve foot treated two by eights and two twelve foot treated four by fours. Carrying such lumber on the Subaru's roof is not difficult at all, though some guy seeing me loading it up there asked if I needed help. He then proceeded to tell me about his bad luck (2012) and good luck (2016) with various production years of Subarus.
On the drive back home on US 209, I saw what looked like a reddish stray German shepherd wandering around on the pedestrian trail that runs along the east side of 209 past Hurley all the way north to where 209 crosses the Esopus. As I slowed down, perhaps to offer assistance, I realized this was no conventional dog but, instead, an especially large coyote. When he saw me slow down, he gamboled away in a wild, alien way one never sees from a domestic dog.
At some point today, I saw what looked like an especially large phoebe up in a tree, so I snapped a picture with my Nikon camera. Once I had to picture, I could identify the bird, which turned out to be a great crested flycatcher. See for yourself:
(Click to enlarge.)
This evening I wanted to smoke my pot, drink my Pabst Blue Ribbon, and fiddle around on some computer, but Andrea is still staying here and I didn't want the house to smell like backstage at a Neil Diamond concert. So I went down to the greenhouse upstairs, a perfectly comfortable place that gets far too little use. Pretty soon there were three cats on the mini-deck outside: Celeste (aka "the Baby"), Celeste's big fluffy friend Oscar, and the new cat Charles. I hadn't seen Charles quite this far afield in the outdoors, and I knew the front door to the house to be shut (and I was pretty sure he hadn't mastered the pet door). Eventually I managed to lead him back to the house and get him in. Oscar, though, hung out in and around the greenhouse for awhile after that. I let him in and he snuggled for awhile despite the heavy cloud of pot smoke. Eventually he wanted to leave, and I let him out.
Then, hours later after I'd fallen asleep, I could hear him meowing and experimentally manipulating the greenhouse pet door. It's not an especially complicated apparatus, but Oscar isn't the sharpest knife in the chandelier. He was determined, and that was really all it took, and when he eventually made it through he was proud of himself. He snuggled some more, but eventually decided it was time to go. I was asleep, so I don't know when or how it happened, but he evidently also figured out how to leave the greenhouse via the pet door as well.
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