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covering the pink
Saturday, April 3 2021
It was too cold to drink our coffee outside (and yes, I had real coffee), but there was a enough sun that I didn't have to start a fire for it to be reasonably comfortable in the laboratory. The Saturday morning panagram for the New York Times Spelling Bee was "jointed" with "o" in the middle, a combination of letters that made me quickly lose interest in looking for words, since there didn't seem to be many.
Meanwhile, our tenant Heidi, who had moved into our Wall Street rental 11 months ago after renting it sight-unseen during the height of the pandemic, had already moved out and Gretchen had find a nice pair of young adults to take her place. Heidi had always been something of a psycho, passive-aggressively making mild complaints but then not wanting us to come over to fix them. She'd also made a bunch of alterations to the house that she'd promised to reverse before moving out, but of course she hadn't, claiming her guy Jose had coronavirus and couldn't do it. Some of her alterations had been good, such as ripping all the carpet out of the upstairs, revealing a mostly-good wooden floor. But she'd repainted the kitchen in austere black and white, covering up the cheerful cherry red. And she painted the larger of the upstairs bedrooms in a pastel pink that few tenants would be happy with. Finally, she'd torn out all the lineoleum in the upstairs bathroom, leaving a wooden floor in need of some serious waterproofing. When I heard about the bathroom floor, I told Gretchen we would have to be tiling that bathroom or something, because we couldn't leave it the way it was. Between that and the trouble of having to paint over the pink bedroom, it was looking like Heidi would not be getting any of her security deposit back. When Gretchen informed her of that this morning, she replied with an email saying okay, but she's not a rich woman and had worked hard for every dollar she has. Then she sent a nastier email saying she'd been foster child and was quite familiar with abuse, but she was happy to finally get all this behind her. She also said something about never having lived in a house before where she couldn't use the front door, a problem she'd insisted was absolutely fine with her. Whatever, lady, we're just trying to rent a house here.
This afternoon, Gretchen and I drove out to the Wall Street house to do some inter-tenant cleanup and painting, something we don't normally have to do. Heidi had left the house in pretty good shape, but there was that pink bedroom that needed repainting and Gretchen thought I should get the front door lock working. I had a deadbolt I'd salvaged from my workplace, which had had to change all the locks a year and a half ago after firing an employee. The installation would've been easy had the threads for the bolts on the Wall Street door matched the lock mechanism from my workplace, but they didn't quite, and I hadn't brought my tap and die kit. So I forced the bolts into the incompatible threads, going about as far as I could, backing out, brushing off the threads on the bolt, and going back in. Surprisingly, this technique actually worked. Unfortunately, I later learned, this fix wasn't all that I needed to do to make the front door fully-operational. But it was a start.
Most of what I did at the Wall Street house was repaint that pink bedroom. Gretchen had responded to an ad on Instagram to buy a paint roller system where the paint is poured into a bottle at the center of the roller, a bottle whose walls are made of a permeable sponge. This makes for a surprisingly-effective roller system, though it doesn't lay down paint quite as thickly as a conventional paint roller. Its advantage, though, is the complete absence of drips and mess. Its rather thin application of paint was kind of a problem when trying to conceal a color as strong as pastel paint, but I managed to do it over the course of several hours and what I would call "one and a half" coats. Meanwhile Gretchen had been cleaning up the basement, but she eventually joined me to paint the parts of the wall that my roller couldn't reach, which included the bases of a great many nails. We'd brought the dogs, who weren't finding a whole lot to do in the empty house. Even that spot of carpet in the pink bedroom that Ramona liked to piss on was gone. Where it had been was now just a fucked-up spot on the floorboards. As for the upstairs bathroom, I thought the wooden floor looked pretty good and that we might be able to cover it with polyurethane and call it a day.
I had a hankering for a fat sofrito burrito, and having done all the work we could do with the equipment we'd brought, we decided to end our town experience with a stop at Chipotle. We arrived at the perfect time there, just before 6:00pm (that is, the tail-end of lupper). Only one woman was in front of us in line and nobody was in the restaurant (partly because its dining room was still closed for the pandemic). We brought out dogs out to join us in Chipotle's small outdoor-seating area, where there was plenty of burrito bits of the ground for them to snuffle at and eat, though eventually I had to put Neville back in the car because he was shivering; it was a little cold to be eating outdoors, particularly now that the sun had disappeared behind Mavis Discount Tires. By this time, a huge dinner-time rush of people had descended on Chipotle, and as the people waited in line, they'd been fussing through the glass over the dogs. A man with his two kids came out to the dining area and they were delighted when Ramona came over to sniff their chips and beans from below.
By the time we got home, I'd developed some sort of problem with my left ear. Sounds heard with it were grating and distorted at certain pitches, and this was giving me a overall feeling of malaise (though perhaps this was just a heightened version of the usual Saturday afternoon caffeine crash-cum-kratom-related dysphoria). Since it was possible that the problem was the sudden blockage of my ear canal with ear wax, I tried using two different kinds of ear drops. But none of this really seemed to help. I think the problem was actually neurological or in my inner-ear.
Using six screw eyes and six identically-cut pieces of wire, this evening I was able to suspend a stainless-steel wire grid from the shelf overhead (when I'm sitting at my main workstation, Woodchuck). This created a new, transparent shelf for storing flat-ish bulky items like drones and other remote-controlled robots. The grid had originally come with our kitchen's "farm sink" and was supposed to be placed in it, though I'm not sure for what purpose. It works much better as a shelf.
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