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light switches instead of pull chains
Sunday, August 1 2021
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
I'd returned to the Hudson Valley to find cooler weather than is normal for this time of year. After the dog-breath humidity of Charlottesville, it was good to be in cooler, drier air. There were a few clouds, and this evening it would even rain a little, something that doesn't seem to have happened in my absence.
I took the dogs on their walk this morning, and as I approached the house on the mountain goat path behind the woodshed, I encountered Diane the Cat. That was a little further into the forest than she normally goes. And I've seen a coyote on that same trail, only closer to our house.
Late this afternoon, I went off to do some landlording chores at the Brewster Street house. I went out of my way on the drive there to go to Home Depot, where I picked up a bunch of hardware allowing electrical wires to be run on the outside of walls. The goal here was to install at least some light switches in the rooms on the second floor, all the lights of which must be turned on and off with pull chains. I've never actually installed such hardware, but it made sense here, since the walls are all plaster and lath and I didn't want to tear them all up.
When I arrived at the Brewster Street house, it still had a long row of furniture and trash on the curb along the street, where was soon doused by a brief shower. It wasn't clear if this was trash or intended to be taken to storage (which Eileen's son had suggested last night). The house was mostly empty of stuff, though there was still plenty of trash and even some furniture. Our friend Kristin's husband Tafa was there with another guy painting the dining room and a few other parts of the downstairs.
I went to the second floor and soon figured out how to install a switch in an existing electrical box to control the light over the bathroom sink. The switch would be a little far from the bathroom door, but it would be a huge improvement over the pull string and it was so easy to implement that I could do it on the live circuit. (I couldn't get to the basement at the time because of the painting happening in the kitchen.)
I then went into one of the larger bedrooms to install a switch using the outside-the-wall conduit system. It installed fairly easily, though, again, the switch ended up being a little far from the door because I didn't want to cut more than two legs of conduit and I wanted it all to be square. By this point two of the member's of Eileen's extended family (a squirrelly white guy and a kid who had once lived with Eileen and who might be the squirrelly guy's kid) had come over to do some last-minute cleaning and perhaps stuff taking. They were quiet towards me but friendly. Gretchen tells me Eileen is moving in with her sister, so all these extra people are going to need other places to live.
Our friends Jeff & Alana were having a party over at their place, and while Gretchen was feeling too socially fragile to go, she encouraged me to. So after Gretchen returned from hanging out with her childhood friend Dina (who had rented a AirBnB in the area), I drove over to Jeff & Alana's in the Chevy Bolt. There were only about seven or eight people left when I arrived, and I got the feeling everyone was at the limit of how drunk they typically get (though the only people I knew there were Jeff and Alana). The kitchen contained every drink imaginable, and pretty soon I was drinking something Alana had fixed for me. I found myself talking some guy who said he'd gone to a small college in Ohio, and I knew even before he said what it was that it would be Oberlin. Other topics of discussion included Metallica and the nose-picking habits of Lars Ulrich. Even though I knew I would have to drive myself home, I kept drinking anyway because it's kind of miserable being drunk people and not drinking. At some point I realized I would have to go or I would really be too drunk to drive. But of course I already was too drunk to drive. I drove home without incident despite that (and I felt I drove okay). But when I stumbled into bed, Gretchen could immediately tell that I was trashed, and she was horrified that I'd driven in that state.
[REDACTED]
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