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first lawnmowing of 2018
Friday, May 11 2018
Gretchen's friend Marissa would be coming up from Manhattan tomorrow with her two young children, and that meant we had to get the house in shape for their arrival. It wasn't just the dust bunnies and cobwebs that had to go; we also had to wash all the bedclothes because (as is always the case with white kids these days) the little boy is allergic to creatures other than himself (and probably peanuts and failure as well). Gretchen also wanted me to mow the lawn, which would be the first time it would be mowed since probably some time in September. The last time I'd tried to mow the lawn with the electric lawnmower, it had died in a way that suggested a failure of a massive bridge rectifier it uses to turn wall current into electricity suitable for its DC motor. I'd actually gone and bought a replacement (or perhaps two) immediately, but never gotten around to installing it. The problem with GreenWorks devices (one of many) is that they are difficult to disassemble. In the case of the lawn mower, the plastic cover over the motor is held on with six torx screws, some of which are at the bottom of deep wells. This necessitates the use of a long fitting on the driver to remove them. But because the wells are a bit wide, it's easy to miss the torx socket in the top of the screw and end up blinding twirling the torx tip in the gap between the head of the screw and the plastic wall of the well. Further complicating matters, when the cover is reattached, it tends to flex in unhelpful ways, misaligning the wells with the tapped threads of the lawnmower deck beneath it. Today, though, I went through the bother of removing the plastic cover. I quickly discovered that the problem was not a blown rectifier but the simple detachment of a wire. I crimped its connector to make it tighter and re-attached it. Then I went through the ordeal of re-attaching the stupid plastic cover.
As I was doing these things, a FedEx guy delivered a large box. As he dropped it off, he remarked on the enormous sizes of the cats he'd seen in the yard. He also asked something suggesting he was in awe of the house's solar panels: "You're off the grid here, huh?" He'd evidently seen big fluffy Oscar and then saw Clarence (who is thin from age but nevertheless has a big skeleton). After the FedEx guy left, I looked at the box and saw it was of a product called MuscleEgg. I didn't think much of it initially, but something about it suggested it must be a non-vegan dietary supplement for body builders. (It was.) Then I saw that the address was wrong; it was supposed to have been delivered to someone on Hurley Mountain Road. The FedEx guy returned about then minutes later, apologized for dropping off the wrong box, and replaced it of with an even bigger one from VeganEssentials. That's the Gretchen I know!
The day had started cooler, but by now it was sunny and warm. Eventually I mowed most of the lawn, though I didn't bother with the north end beyond the garden patches.
Later I did some vacuuming, though Gretchen handled most of today's cleaning jihad. All of this household activity was greatly facilitated by a new policy in my remote workplace department: Fridays were to be reserved for large projects requiring greater focus. Ironically, though, I found myself completing a fair number of small projects in among my household chores. Work on my "big project" will have to wait for Sunday, when our weekend guests are gone and Gretchen is at work.
I should mention that earlier this week I received my first kratom re-up in months. It's been hard to buy kratom of late, since credit card companies are unwilling to handle transactions for grey-market substances, particularly with Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. But KrakenKratom recently implemented something allowing purchases with electronic checks. All I had to do was proving a routing number and an account number, and the purchase went through. Unfortunately, they don't have simple powdered kratom in stock (there had been a salmonella contamination scare), so I had to get a different product, a concentrated powder of "nearly pure alkaloid." I'd had a quarter teaspoon of this the other day and it provided a good buzz. Today I had a bit less and didn't notice it as much, mostly because I was so physically active. Kratom is the kind of substance you want to take when you're more sedentary.
This evening, Gretchen and I celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary by driving up to Saugerties and dining at Rock Da Casbah. When we arrived, we were the only customers, though some guy with a big stand-up bass was preparing for a solo show, making a series of very loud, very irritating microphone checks. Our waitress was about 50% woo-woo and 50% white trash, and the combination kind of worked. As always, we had the Hey Jude pasta dish (somehow it's $22) and veggie burger (with fries!), both of which we split. For drinks, Gretchen had a hot toddy, while I had first an old fashioned (crowned with a bourbon cherry) and then a manhattan. Our conversation lingered for awhile on the state of leadership at my employer [REDACTED] and then moved on to the amazing fact that we're all still alive given that we take advantage of technologies built by fallible human beings. Gretchen cited an airplane crash that had resulted because of a tiny piece of something in the engine that had made a tiny fractional amount too thin. This reminded me of something I'd learned in the book Antifragile: jet engines look so complicated that it's often assumed that they were built according to existing theories. But the fact of the matter is that they are the result of tinkering by people with more practical than theoretical knowledge, and the theories generally came along later to explain things that had been built. Gretchen wasn't entirely sure what a jet engine was, so I mansplained (at least to the best of my understanding). I'd read somewhere that a lot of the thrust from a jet engine actually comes from the movement of propeller blades inside it, sort of like those of a prop plane.
At some point, a few people straggled in and sat at the bar and the guy with the bass began to play. He was actually rather talented with getting a range of sounds out of his instrument, often plucking and bowing it at the same time. But when he started to sing "Tomorrow Never Knows," everything was lost beneath the terribleness of his voice. He sounded like a joke contestant on American Idol. Our wacky waitress came over to apologize.
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