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rent in Kingston
Tuesday, April 13 2021
It was yet another gorgeous spring day in the Hudson Valley. This is turning out to be the best spring we've ever experienced. In most years, it's normal to get a fair amount of winter weather lasting well into April. But we've had springlike conditions for much of March, with only the occasional isolated cold day since.
No place in America saw real estate inflation as high as that which took place in Kingston, NY during the pandemic. This was driven by all the pandemic refugees fleeing New York City. They came here willing to spend anything for any sort of house or apartment. Responding to this, Kingston re-assessed lots of property, including our Wall Street and Downs Street places. Gretchen tried to buffer this inflation by not passing it on too quickly to our tenants, most of whom are good tenants whom we would prefer to keep. We do, however, have one terrible tenant, the nurse who lives in our Brewster Street house (whose value has not yet changed). She's routinely late with her payments, has a constantly-changing roster of marginal people living with her (whom she probably charges rent), is a bit of a slob, and demands by far the most maintenance visits of any of our tenants (though that's partly due to the house, which had been abandoned when we bought it). The other day, Gretchen announced to the tenant that she would be raising the rent. It wouldn't be by much, but it seemed fair given Kingston real estate values and the fact that we'd never raised her rent in the four years she's been there. The tenant is wily one, and thought perhaps by ignoring Gretchen's email, the problem would go away. So Gretchen ratcheted up the communications, demanding acknowledgement. And as the tenant continued to ignore her, Gretchen got angrier and angrier. Finally, in consultation with me, Gretchen gave the tenant six-weeks of notice that she would have to move out. This was perfectly in keeping with out existing arrangements, which included a month-to-month lease that either party could get out of with 30 days' notice. This seemed to do the trick, and the tenant finally started responding, hurling invective and insults over various digital communications channels. But we don't care; she still has to find a new place to live.
I was out of pseudoephedrine and wanted to get some more, though I still don't want to drive the Subaru when its brakes are as bad as they are. So after work, I drove the Nissan Leaf to to Uptown to see if I could buy non-Nexafed pseudoephedrine at the CVS. In recent years, I'd come to believe that real pseudoephedrine could only be bought in Dutchess County. But then when I'd tried to buy pseudoephedrine at the Hannaford in Red Hook, they only had the stupid Nexafed. Maybe Nexafed was only a Hannaford thing, and CVSes were still selling the real deal. That wouldn't make any sense if the goal was to reduce the production of methamphetamine in certain regions, since the meth cookers could just get their raw materials at CVS, but it's the kind of thing that can happen when there is no real central authority. And indeed, it turned out the Uptown Hannaford had good old pseudoephedrine, just like grandma used to take. I could barely understand what the prescription desk employee was asking when he wanted to know how many pills I wanted, since he was wearing a face shield and two masks, but eventually the transaction happened. I also bought some herbal tea and bottle of 70% isopropyl alcohol (the pandemic seems to have eliminated the 90% from the retail market).
While I was in Upown, I thought I'd look to see what sort of storage and containerization options were being sold both by CVS and Walgreens. But neither had anything except things like cash boxes (which are great as boxes to contain homemade electronics, but they're too expensive for use actually storing things).
I was dressed in shorts and flip-flops, and the weather at the Kingston Plaza felt at least ten degrees warmer than back on Hurley Mountain, which made the evening feel balmy and summerlike. I made a rare walk down a breezeway to the scrappy backside of the Kingston Plaza, wondering if I'd find some thrown-out (or otherwise free) storage options, but there were none. Someone had Chevy Bolt back behind the Cornell Extension, and it was being charged by a portable 120 volt charger. That was going to take awhile!
Back at the house, Gretchen had cooked up some batter-fried cauliflower "wings," and they were better than such things typically were. Football player Aaron Rodgers has been hosting Jeopardy! of late, and he's grown on us. The other day he managed to work in a joke about Willie Nelson's pot smoking that Alex Trebek would've never attempted, and it was funnier than anything Trebek had said in his entire career.
Today 16 gigabytes of DDR3 RAM arrived today for the newest incarnation of my headless development box Wolverine, and I soon had it running with 22 GB of RAM. This definitely helped when compiling TypeScript in Node, but I got greedy and wanted other things. One thing I wanted was to be able to do was see changes to Node-served web pages from a browser on Woodchuck (that is, not inside a Remote Desktop window). It turned out that getting this working was easy; all I had to do was issue ng serve --host 0.0.0.0 --disable-host-check, which would allow me to see the pages from a URL starting with http://wolverine. Since I could also do all the editing across the network using Sublime (my favorite text editor), I could do nearly all the development work on windows on Woodchuck while keeping all the processing (and super-slow VPN) on Wolverine. Wolverine could also provide me access to the various Windows 10 features that I'm normally prevented from using on Woodchuck (which runs Windows 7 and which I will only change if I am forced to).
Eventually I'd like to get Taxinator compilation working on Wolverine as well, and once that happens, I can clone its boot drive and replace my work-issued laptop's boot drive with that clone, at which point it will be much more useful to me than it presently is.
To get all that going, though, I had to shuffle some drives around. This evening, I tried to create a new boot drive for a laptop that Gretchen occasionally uses (it's a Core-2-Duo-based machine given to me last October by Gretchen's parents), but I ran into a number of problems that wasted hours of my evening. I'd taken diphenhydramine at about 8:00pm, but these issues kept me up until midnight. I kind of like the feeling of staying up while on diphenhydramine, but I have to be careful because that drug makes me highly-intolerant of annoyances, and I have to be very careful not to snap at Gretchen over nothing when I am in that state.
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