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increasingly-desperate calls of late-season katydids
Sunday, October 15 2017
While Gretchen and Neville the Dog were doing their Sunday shift at the Golden Notebook in Woodstock, I spent much of the afternoon cleaning up the house in preparation for the coming week. Gretchen and I would be going up to Albany for her surgery and Kate (and then, possibly, Ray) would be serving as housesitters. And then Gretchen and her parents would be coming down to Hurley. So the house needed some cleaning. I worked on all floors, even taking a dilute bleach solution to mold-spotted surfaces. I also vacuumed up a great many long-legged spiders. Sorry, guys!
My housekeeping chores even extended into the outdoors. You probably don't know this, but my laboratory has its own compost pile comprised mostly of used tea bags. When it's big enough, it attracts fruit flies, and I have to bury the whole thing in the garden. While I was was burying that, I also buried the five gallon bucket of urine-soaked pine needles at the outflow of the laboratory's urinal system. I'd been neglecting that last one for weeks, and it had steadily been overflowing, making the parts of the north end of the house (depending on wind direction) smell like a secluded spot in an alley.
When I was done with my cleaning, I made a pan of chili using an onion, a two pound can of black beans, lots of fresh ripe tomatoes straight from the garden, two pickled jalapeños, and a can of pink beans in olive oil sauce (a newish Goya product I'd mistaken for a regular can of beans). I don't know if it was the olive oil sauce or the cooked-down flavor of all those ripe grape tomatoes, but the sauce ended up with a great umami savory quality. I also cooked up a box of Barilla bow-tie pasta (part of my secret santa gift from Cameron last Christmas). The combination was exactly what I was craving. It was still fairly early in the day (only about 4:00pm), so one could call the meal lupper.
Gretchen returned home soon after I'd finished watching parts of two different episodes of Mr. Robot. She was really excited about the pasta con chili I'd made.
Later as I was taking a bath in the basement bathroom where I always bathe, I kept smelling an unpleasant cheesy smell. The basement is full of funky odors that come and go. Partly this is an effect of the mold, though the dogs and cats go through phases of shitting and pissing down there, and sometimes there's also an animal rotting unseen behind a piece of furniture. Eventually I found what might've been a source of the stank: a couple dried-up loafs of dog shit in the Gunther Room (near the boiler room). Later when I was cleaning that up, I saw evidence of multiple pissings into that carpet. That's the last room in the house with wall-to-wall carpet, and it had survived for years without ever being a target of bathroom-needing critters. Evidently the spells that had protected it had come to an end. (The shitting and pissing had almost certainly come from Neville, who tries to find a place indoor to go when it's rainy outside.) Still, I didn't want to rip up that carpet now, not with all the other things up in the air right now. So I dumped water on all the piss spots I could find and then vacuumed up that water with a wet vac. This is not a perfect solution, but it might at least buy me some time before I had to install vinyl faux wood tiles in there.
At least the weather was being merciful on me even though I just been kneeling in diluted dog piss. On the several occasions I went out into the night to dump water or fling mummified feces, I found conditions not too dissimilar from the way they would've been on a night in July. The main difference was the increasingly-desperate calls of late-season katydids.
Late tonight, I did some experiments and eventually figured out how to get a Macintosh communicating painlessly with The Organization's VPN.
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