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Don meets Google Assistant
Tuesday, July 27 2021
location: room 325, Howard Johnson By Wyndham (a motel), Staunton, Virginia
My first destination of the day was Cranberry's, a health food store/eatery in downtown Stauntan that Gretchen and I have patronized when visiting Staunton in the past. Though it was still early, I could order off the lunch menu, which meant I could have a burrito with my oat milk cappuccino ($16.90 total). I'd neglected to remember that one has to tell them to hold the cheese, so the burrito wasn't vegan, but I ate it anyway. I sat at a small table in front out on New Street watching people doing their morning things.
When I got to Creekside, I simply parked it and went for a walk down to the floodplain, then along Folly Mills Creek past the fen, and then up the side of Muellers' Mountain to the old road that loops around it. I was hoping to find the horses to see what shape they were in, but I didn't come upon them until I got back to the barn, which they were in, evidently to get out of the sun. They looked healthy, maybe even a little fat.
I climbed up into the honey house attic, still hoping to find some interesting technological relics, but the only stuff worth taking was a few banana-jack boards dumpster-dived from UVA in the late 1990s as well as a board full of high-current relays (which are always useful).
It's easy to sneak stuff from the house and honey house (the latter stuff is technically mine, but I don't want any conversations with my mother about it) because of all the overgrowth to hide behind and my mother's failing eyesight. As I was putting stuff in my car, I saw a mystery car in the driveway. It turned out that Joy Tarter had come out to the house, as she usually does. Her main concern with my mother is her medical problems, though she's also been very helpful getting my mother's taxes paid and bringing home groceries. I found her chatting with my mother on the cluttered front porch of my childhood home. She's a fit woman in her early 70s and she clearly likes my mother a lot even, which seems strange to me given how unpleasant for me it is to be around my mother. (He sense of humor is terrible, she prattles on endlessly about stuff she's told me a million times, and she never wants to have any conversation containing real information.) I don't really remember what Joy and my mother were talking about today, but it probably circled around back several times to the amazing tale of how Lyle M. had vouched for us yesterday, and how embarrassing Don had been in reaction to that (with Hoagie being inufficiently self-aware to realize she herself had been at least as embarrassing).
Joy didn't stick around too long, and after she'd left, I again made bagels for Don and Hoagie. This time I included Gardein vegan "chicken tenders" and slices of Bubbies pickles. They gobbled up this stuff with gusto.
At some point I couldn't help myself and brought up Sara L. Kesterson, the woman who had written thousands of IOUs to Hoagie and, in so doing, made off with what seems to be over $100,000 (though it's hard yet to know for sure how much). I told Hoagie I'd found the IOUs while looking for necessary documentation and that I'd told Gretchen, who said she would be contacting a lawyer. Hoagie initially did the thing where she said she didn't want to talk about it, but the issue was just so big and it was so clear that I already knew the huge shameful thing, so we did talk about. It was the first time we'd talked about anything of consequence since the 1990s (if ever). Hoagie naturally tried to minimize the whole thing, denying against the overwhelming evidence that it was that much money and even saying that she knew this was money that would never be repaid. "But I can't just do nothing," I explained. I also expressed concern that Sara L. Kesterson was likely ripping other people off and this would continue until something was done. (By this point Gretchen had talked to a lawyer, who'd suggested it was probably something for Adult Protective Services, since there was no valuable collateral offered for the borrowed money and Sara L. Kesterson likely has very little money at any one time, living grift-to-grift like others live paycheck-to-paycheck.
Later I drove Don out to Waynesboro, the nearest Cricket cellphone store, so I could add him to my cellphone plan. Don had been getting service for his phone from Great Call, but it uses the Verizon tower network, which doesn't work inside Creekside. Joy Tarder had advocated Boost, which uses the AT&T tower network, but so does Cricket, which is what I had. So I thought I'd add him as another line on my account. We were the only customers in the Cricket store, though there were two employees. For whatever reason (and it may not've been true) I couldn't just put a new Cricket SIM card in Don's old phone; I had to buy a new one. The only flip phone they had was a $70 model, which suggests they're taking advantage of the inherent monopoly they have with Cricket customers. Don didn't think much of the new phone; its screen was slightly smaller than his old one and it didn't appear to have the ability to serve as a flashlight. But it was, as I said, our only option. I had to call Gretchen to get info about Don's old Great Call plan in order to transfer his phone number, but once I had that, everything happened quickly.
Don's favorite bookstore is Books-A-Million in Waynesboro, so while we were there, we went to Books-A-Million. It's a big store for one without a national brand. Don marched straight back to the science & nature section and pored over what was there. It took him a good twenty minutes to decide on a book, but it was unpriced, and when he found out how much it was, he deemed it too expensive (despite the over $100 he'd gotten from City National Bank yesterday). This suggested at least a little impulse to budget, which seemed like a good thing.
On the drive back to Creekside, we stopped at Don's favorite grocery stores. First we went to the crappiest of these, the Dollar Tree just north of the rotting husk of the Staunton Mall. I waited in the parking area, illegally parked in the one spot of available shade as cars manuevered around me. Don appeared before long with lots of plastic bags full of groceries (he's far too disorganized to use cloth bags). Then he wanted to go to his second-favorite grocery store, the slightly-less-nasty Food Lion up on the hill across Greenville Road, to get things like bananas. So again I waited patiently.
As I was helping Don move the groceries into Creekside, I was dismayed to see that a depressingly-large fraction of what he'd bought was chocolate candies, despite the fact that there was already a half of a cubic foot of those same candies already in Creekside's one good refrigerator. I was incensed, saying things like, "You shop like a little poo-poo-pants five year old!" To make room for all the stuff that Don had just bought requiring refrigeration, I removed rotting and unwanted food from the fridge. It wasn't hard to find. I also mopped up a half-inch-pool of dark brown "gravy" that had formed beneath the sliding vegetable drawers at the bottom. I didn't use my nose as I was doing these things, but it's possible that had been contributing to the trailer's horrendous failed-refrigerator fragrance.
At some point I enter phone numbers into Don's phone and then showed him how to do things that were different from his old phone. In so doing, I discovered that it had Google Assistant on it. Using that, I asked (with my voice, since the numeric-with-letter keyboard was unusually hard to use) about dinosaurs. It obediently brought up Google search result and a voice-over about dinosuars. Don was delighted, and it seemed certain he would be asking his phone about his many arcane interests.
Back in Staunton, I checked into Hotel 24 South (the old Stonewall Jackson, the hotel Gretchen and I had stayed in back in January). My room was so much cleaner, nicer, and quieter than the HoJo had been. There was no refrigerator, but if you got ice from the ice machine down the hall, that was good enough. Once I was moved in, I took my electric scooter out for another ride. This time I ended up at the alcohol beverage control (ABC) store, the only way hard spirits are sold in Virginia. I was the only customer, and the very nice lady working there, on hearing that I was in search of gin, tried to get me to buy an expensive bottle of something her customers had liked. I opted for a cheaper bottle from an unknown Virginian distiller.
Getting back to room 202 requires a long walk from the elevator, and along the way I heard an ominous dry cough in one of the rooms. "Covid, variant Delta," was my snap diagnosis. [The next day I would hear someone playing a cello in another room.] I spent the next few hours drinking by myself (at first gin on the rocks, and then mostly white wine). I also ate a modest amount of cannabis. All of this was on an empty stomach, so the cannabis only took a couple hours to kick in, and I spent some time in a delightfully-altered state, watching teevee and posting things on Facebook. In so doing, I learned that Folly Mills Creek Fen Natural Area is a place I can tag locations with on Facebook (perhaps because it has a Wikipedia page). There are quite a few photos tagged with this location, but they are mostly from the more-famous Folly Mills Falls (38.09826514N, 79.09917144W), which doesn't have a Wikipedia page.
When I was pretty-well sauced, I decided to walk down Beverley Street to do some drunken socializing and maybe get in trouble, perhaps at a bar. It was about 11:00pm at the time, and most places were already closed, but Clocktower Eats & Sweets had some people standing around in front of it. As I was about to walk in, a woman standing there told me they'd already had last call. So I stood around talking with her and a couple men. Jokingly, I referred to Staunton as "Stahnten," which is the way people who aren't from around here pronounce it (instead of "Stantin," as the locals pronounce it; it's a great example of a shibboleth). We then all talked approvingly about the renaming of various landmarks and institutions that had been named after Confederate Civil War generals (this includes Hotel 24 South, which used to be called the Stonewall Jackson, and Staunton High School, which used to be named after Robert E. Lee). Eventually I let on that I was in town to deal with my mother's advancing dementia. At some point one of the men, who happened to be African American, tried to discreetly ask me for money, and when I said goodbye to him and the others and headed back towards my hotel, he decided to walk with me to better ask for money a second time. That seemed kind of sketchy, and I decided to alter my route. I also lied to him and said I wasn't carrying any cash (which was almost true). Eventually he gave up on me and headed off in another direction.
The bank of Folly Mills Creek on the floodplain south west of the house.
Note the metal units of a riding ring Hoagie installed (now being taken over by sycamore trees).
Click to enlarge.
Emerald ash borer limb death in the fen.
A large chinquapin oak that used to have a gate hanging from it.
It long ago swallowed the hinges for that gate and its replacement.
The building with the rusted roof is my childhood home.
The white dwelling is where the con artist Sara L. Kesterson lived.
Click to enlarge.
Pileated Peak, viewed from above "the goat pasture." The red building is a barn that was built circa 2005.
Click to enlarge.
Hoagie in Creekside today.
Click to enlarge/widen.
Don in his natural habitat, at Books-A-Million in Waynesboro.
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