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landlord landscaping
Saturday, October 6 2018
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
My guts were still in fairly bad shape when I awoke this morning, and they remained that way throughout the day. Though I hadn't drunk that much last night, in my head I felt like I had a mild hangover. But if one includes the feelings in my gut as hangover, it wasn't exactly a mild hangover at all. Evidently (and I've had clues that this is a problem but have never been completely sure) if one eases a hangover by drinking alcohol, one will still get that hangover (and it will come the next day), even if the amount of alcohol used to ease it is not enough to actually produce a hangover on its own.
Despite all this, I was able to eat some buttered toast and drink some coffee this morning.
I had some landlording chores to do, so in the late morning I mustered all the tools and supplies I would need (this time remembering a chisel and a level). My first visit was to the Brewster Street house, where I quickly built a detached bottom step to deal with the fact that the porch's jacked-up staircase now had a bottom step that was too high. I dug into the sandy ground and used rocks to make the step as solid as I could, but it still wiggled. So then I tried to drive steel stakes through it. Unfortunately, those stakes hit rock somewhere and I couldn't drive them flush. So I ended up cutting little metal straps (the kind used for hanging pipes in a basement) and used these to secure the steps to spikes I had been able to drive into the ground at the side-stringers of the staircase itself. This made the new bottom step very solid, so I considered my work here done.
By this point I really had to piss, and there was no obvious place I could do that. So I ended up stopping at the nearby Rite Aid, because drug stores always have bathrooms.
I'd forgotten the layout of Kingston and thought I could cut over to Uptown from off Pine Grove Avenue. But that's impossible; there is a railroad track the blocks everything from Broadway nearly to the Rondout.
Eventually, though, I'd made it to the Wall Street rental unit, where my assignments were mostly related to landscaping. There were tree branches and vines supposedly stressing the roof of the garage, and the tenant had been forced to give up on trimming the bushes in the back due to their height. So I'd brought an electric chainsaw, an electric hedge clipper, a step ladder, and a saw on a pole. Using the step ladder, I was able to climb up on the roof of the garage. Things weren't too bad up there, but I cleared all the vegetation off anyway. Most of it consisted of Virginia creeper (covered with bitter grapelike berries) and American bittersweet wrapped around dead remains of trees. The chainsaw made it all fairly easy.
Next I got up on the step ladder and used the powered hedge clipper to cut the sprung tops off all the bushes. It was hard to say what species these bushes represented (they looked like a member of the honeysuckle family) because they were shot full of other bushes, such as Japanese barberry.
Not knowing what else to do with all the removed vegetation, I crammed it into the back of the Subaru. I would've tied it to the roof, but I figured it might come off in bits and pieces, leading to my getting pulled over and getting a ticket for my expired inspection sticker.
The tenant was there, and I had her show me some cracked windows in her bedroom that she wanted me to deal with. They'd probably cracked back when heavy trucks were detoured from Washington Avenue during the sinkhole crisis of 2014-2017. All I could do today was take photographs.
Back at the house, I dumped all the vegetation just west of the driveway about 30 feet from Dug Hill Road. It didn't actually produce much of a brush pile and will quickly rot away to nothing in that otherwise unused (and swampy) spot of real estate.
The other day I'd made a backup of the SSD in my workplace HP Envy x360 laptop. Yesterday on a whim, I'd tried to boot a Core-2-Duo-based Thinkpad with that drive. It had completely refused to boot, so today I'd tried booting a HP Elitebook 2740p (of which I have three). Amazingly, the computer booted all the way out to a usuable desktop without complaint with the transplanted OS from a very different computer. The Chrome web browser even worked, and YouTube videos even had sound. I'm not used to Windows being able to do that; in the past this would always fail, usually after lots of annoying errors about missing drivers (and perhaps licensing issues). It's possible the licensing issues will pop up at some point, but in the meantime it's amazing to know that, in a pinch, I could take a good drive out of a bad Windows 10 machine and it would work in some other random computer, assuming that computer is of recent-enough vintage.
By this evening, my guts were so uncomfortable that I climbed into bed early, amusing myself as best I could with YouTube videos. By this point, I felt less like I had a hangover a more like I was suffering from some kind of stomach bug or extremely bad gas.
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