I took another 150 milligram recreational dose of pseudoephedrine late this morning and eventually gathered up the dogs for a landlording chore at the Wall Street house. Neville was a little slow to get in the car, so while Ramona was waiting for him to get his shit together, Diane the cat leaped up into the backseat with Ramona. Ramona is extremely tolerant of all Diane's nonsense when, for example, she blocks Ramona from getting up and down the staircase or the little set of steps I made for our bed. But this time Diane had gone too far. Ramona had never ridden anywhere with Diane in the car, and we wouldn't be starting today. So she growled at the little black kitty seriously enough for Diane to immediately leave.
Our first stop was at Herzogs, where I was hoping to get a nice brush for polyurethaning the Wall Street house's upstairs bathroom, but was surprised to find it was closed (later I would realize that this was for Easter Sunday). The Subaru was making a harsh grinding sound from the rear every time I braked, so I went to nearby Advance Auto Parts to get two sets of brake pads (though I probably also need replacement disks).
At the Wall Street house, my first project was to try to get the front door to unlatch when the thumb trigger on the outside Art-Deco thumb-handle was depressed. The latch could be made to move a little, but not much much. So I tried to disassemble it as much as I could (not very much) and then squirted all the WD-40 I could into the various mechanisms and then exercised them. Before too long, I had the door unlatching from the outside. I often lump WD-40 together with duct tape and superglue as a product that doesn't live up to its cultural reputation, but here it had worked a miracle.
I spent the next few hours painting the last details of the upstairs bedroom. Not only did I have to complete the painting of the tops of all the walls, but I had to fix all the little fuckups that had accumulated along the way (they're easy to make when you're not using tape, which I find to be too much of a bother). By the end there, I was finding that every time I went from stooping to deal with a paint can to rising up to paint near the ceiling, I'd see noise in my visual field and feel a wave of weakness, sometimes with a rising hiss in my ears. This indicated perhaps a drop in blood pressure or some issue with blood sugar (I hadn't consumed much more than a single Stewarts-brand energy drink). Since I hadn't been able to buy a good brush and was now getting towards 4:00pm, when I was done with painting, all I did was clean my brushes and return home.
Back at the house, for some reason I decided to investigate a red plastic sleeve that Central Hudson had placed on one of the high-voltage conductors on the powerline coming up Dug Hill Road. They'd apparently done this to insulate that wire from a nearby white pine tree, but I quickly realized the sleeve was a foot or more from where it would need to be to do any good. Indeed, the cable was rubbing against the tree, producing sparks and visible smoke.
[REDACTED]
I suspect this very issue was the thing that had caused the small brush fire that the Hurley fire department had had to extinguish a couple weeks ago. That fire had happened directly beneath the sparking tree.
A little video I shot of the powerline zapping the pine tree today.
About an hour after Gretchen got home, the Zoom call Powerful was on ended, and the three of us went out for dinner. The plan tonight was to introduce Powerful to La Florentina and its sformato (which we call "purple pie"). We hadn't been to La Florentina even once during the pandemic, and, this being the traditional night of post-Passover "breakfast," it seemed fitting to go to a restaurant famous for its pillows of steam-filled bread. The day had started out cold and cloudy but had transformed into glorious sundrenched springtime, and the evening seemed likely to be fairly warm, at least for people wearing jackets, and we'd initially planned to eat in La Florentina's small outdoor space. But nobody was there when we arrived well after 6:00pm, and one of the staff said there probably wouldn't be many people. Again, this was probably due to it being Easter Sunday. So we decided to eat at an indoor table like normal people. Gretchen ordered all the usual things, including two salads, a soup for me, two steam-filled breads, two purple pies, and a half-litre of the house merlot. It was hard to tell whether Powerful really liked the sformato like we did, but he sure did eat a lot of it. For my part, the soup was so thick and I ate so much bread that by the time the sformato came out, I could only eat a token amount. Two other tables eventually became occupied while we were dining, one by a mixed-race couple and another by an Asian couple, and they were far enough away from us for me to feel okay despite it being an ongoing pandemic.
On the drive home, I saw a canid cross Wynkoop in front of us, heading south to north. I slowed down to get a good look at him as Gretchen insisted it was a deer, but by then it was obvious to both of us that it was a coyote, who stopped, turned his head, and watched us as we slowed down. "He's got a long neck," Gretchen declared. I've only ever seen live coyotes on seven occasions in the 18.5 years I've lived in Hurley township, but two of them I've seen crossing Wynkoop. (Other coyote appearances: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.)
Back at the house, I puttered around the laboratory, continuing to clean and organize. At some point I fixed myself an alcoholic beverage of fruit juice spiked with Grave's Grain alcohol, the first alcoholic beverage I'd fixed for myself since January 24th. As I've discovered in the aftermath of other long alcohol fasts, I found I was drinking my beverage much more slowly than I would have had there been no alcohol fast. It seems all the little reflexes behind drinking had whithered away.
