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proof for incentive units
Friday, August 6 2021
I drove to the Red Hook office in the Bolt with my electric scooter specifically so I could charge the Bolt for free at the Red Hook Town Hall and easily get back and forth to the office. It turned out, though, that the office was unusually full of people, two of the six of whom (that latter number includes me) I suspect of not having received a coronavirus vaccine (since those two haven't been wearing masks). All was going nicely until I happened to notice an email about some "incentive units" that had vested this week and that I (like the five others in the company who had received them) had cashed them in at the earliest possible opportunity so as not to risk losing them (despite the penalty of short-term capital gains). This came to an unexpected windfall in the low five figures, but of course there had been a problem with mine. They'd been made out to someone named "Gus," though all my official documents have me as "Karl." The email wanted me to send some documentation of my name, but of course none of that was on my workplace computer. So I called Gretchen hoping she had access to a copy of that. Unfortunately, I did so at a bad time, when she was melting down about several things at once, including (now) the fact that National Grid had gotten back with a price for running electricity to our Adirondack cabin that was so high ($40,000) that we'd decided to go back to making the whole thing off-grid. Gretchen only had a 600-pixel-wide photo of my passport, so I thought she should get a higher-resolution one off my computer. But there'd been a power outage, meaning Gretchen would have to start up my computer and I'd have to explain in detail how to turn on the main monitor and drill down through my directory structure to get to images of the IDs (there're in K:\poo\docs). I tried to give the necessary instructions as calmly and thoroughly as possible without being patronizing or leaving out key details, but soon Gretchen was accusing me of being an "asshole." I didn't want that sort of energy around my main workstation, so I said don't worry, I'd just come home. I didn't want to be in that overcrowded office anyway.
Back at the house, I did a small amount of work before realizing I needed a photo of a notepad on my desktop, which I was fortunately able to get a colleague to take for me. Later Gretchen and I had a videoconference with a solar installation company we'd talk to earlier, back when we were assuming we'd be attached to the grid and wouldn't need such things as a storage battery. Now, though, we would need a battery and even more solar panels, and it wasn't long before we'd signed on to a ~$35,000 installation, one that would be a $10,000 cheaper after all the various tax breaks and such. We'd also need a generator to make it through the winter and cloudy periods, but we'd be getting that from somewhere else.
Another important thing Gretchen did today was go through some of the papers I'd yet to go through from my childhood home. One source of relief was the discovery that my mother still had an account with over $300,000 in it in 2020, several years after the bout of Sara L. Kesterson parasitism had passed. Gretchen also found some delightful graphics and pictures, which I will share at the bottom.
This afternoon Gretchen drove out to the Brewter Street house to meet up with the new tenant so she and he could show it to various potential housemates. One of those turned out to be vaccine resistant, having bought into the disinformation that they cause reproductive problems in women (this is, sadly, a common belief among the selfishly health-obsessed, particularly those into woo-woo and New Age pseudoscience, irrespective of political affiliation). Gretchen called me to ask what I thought about such a potential tenant, and I said that should be a deal breaker. Resistance to vaccines in 2021, as I later posted on Facebook, is a proxy for crazy. We don't need crazy in our rental properties.
Later Gretchen and I drove with the dogs to Woodstock, where me met Gretchen's old girlfriend Barbara and one of Barbara's friends from Pittsburgh at the Garden Café. (They're in the area on vacation, mostly doing various outdoorsy-type things.) There we had a typical Garden meal while exchanging stories from our recent life. Barbara's mother had recently died, so some of those stories were from the funeral. Before we headed back home, Barbara and her friend had us look at some straps that had started failing on the back of their vehicle. (These were straps to hold a bicycle rack.)
Gretchen and I stopped at the Hurley Ridge Hannaford for groceries on the way home. Interestingly, we were among the very few outliers not wearing masks. It looks like people are taking seriously the resurgence of coronavirus in the form of the Delta variant. Soon we'll be wearing masks in stores again as well, to signify our allegiance with the non-crazy if nothing else.
pictures rescued from the hovel
A birth announcment my mother apparently created soon after I was born.
The details of the announcement.
Me on Natchez the horse, 1976 or 1977. Such photos are rare, as I quickly lost interest in horseback riding once I found out how much prep was required to go slower than one could on a bicycle.
Makeing whole-wheat-crust pizza with my brother Don (in the back) and Nathan VanHooser (in the jersey) in the late 1970s or very early 1980s.
pictures taken today
Neville (second dog from the right) meeting other dogs in the middle of Woodstock. That's Getchen in the polka-dotted dress.
Such a good boy!
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