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world's largest tarp
Tuesday, August 3 2021
I went to the office today, driving the Subaru because Gretchen was taking the Chevy Bolt to a recall (I was hoping we'd get a brand new battery pack, but they didn't end up doing anything). When I got to the office, I found I was the second to arrive, as Jason riding his bicycle from Rhinebeck had beat me. Knowing the Bubbies is now open on Tuesday, I set off on
foot to get a burrito with great anticipation. But Bubbies was closed for the week, according to a sign, to make better arrangements for all the business they're now getting. So I walked to the Historic Village Diner and got a veggie burger with fries instead.
After work, I drove to the Home Depot to get more supplies for the Brewster Street house. This included a big plastic lattice perhaps for under the front porch, a new backdoor locking mechanism, and more over-the-wall electrical conduit.
Out at the house, much progress had been made on the painting, both downstairs (where Mustafa and his guy were nearing completion) and on the second floor (where Eric, the guy who had painted our Wall Street house inside and out, was getting things done at a slower pace). Interestingly, Mustafa and his crew are from Senegal, a country Eric has visited so many times that he, a white guy, can speak some Wolof.
All the trash on the curb (was it all trash?) had been taken away by the City, though there was a fair amount still, including a broken flatscreen left in the backyard and a mattress & box spring leaning against the front porch. My initial task was to make the backdoor lockable again, something it had stopped being either due to settling of the back porch or measures taken to counter that settling.
Eventually Gretchen arrived and began puttering around, mostly cleaning. In so doing, she discovered that Eileen, our horrible former tenant, had absconded with the house's lawnmower as well as a motion-sensor light that simply plugged in (and, not being nailed-down, was easily removed). Meanwhile, Mustafa and his team had discovered that the front door could no longer be locked. In violation of her lease, Eileen had replaced it with a stupid battery-powered numeric-entry system that now didn't seem to work (perhaps because it had been intentionally broken to secure continued access to the house). So I had to make a trip out to Home Depot to get more dead bolts. I got a big one that I thought I might need to cover the huge hole made for the electronic system, but that proved incompatible with the holes in the door. Happily, a conventional dead bolt managed to fit the hole, though the wood in the door and jam was so destroyed from so many different latching systems that I had to spend considerable time improvising ways to put screws into too-wide holes and that sort of thing.
At some point Gretchen struck up a conversation with the guy who'd bought the house next door (the one to the north that had been owned by a pair unpleasant grifters). He was from Brooklyn, I'd learned earlier this week, and he has a cute brindle dog and often hangs out on his front porch with a laptop and a beer. Gretchen decided to introduce his dog (Levon) to our dogs, though she kept Ramona on a leash because of how bad she can be with new dogs. They hung out for a time in the backyard, where Gretchen learned the owner had discovered his house is full of termites after buying (after only seeing online photos!) at the height of the pandemic-inflated housing market. At some point Ramona picked an unnecessary fight with Levon and had to be returned to the Bolt. One of the last thing we did was fold up the world's largest tarp, which was occupying the place where Eileen had installed an above-ground pool (without our permission, of course). It was covered with rocks and sand, smelled like anærobic decay, and was most unpleasant to handle. Before leaving, I rolled up a hose that Eileen had left and put in the basement. If she was going to steal our lawn mower and motion-sensor light, I was going to keep that hose.
Back at the house, Gretchen heated up some frozen pizzas and baked tater tots (which I've never much liked) and we watched Jeopardy!. the first time I'd watched it in over a week.
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