Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   car fluid leak, speaker fix, and a tenant of a different kind
Sunday, August 15 2021

location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY

This morning I drove the Subaru up onto blocks so I could get a good view of its under-carriage to see where the fluid it had been leaking might be coming from. It continued to leak as I ran the engine, but I soon determined that this was just dripping of fluid that had pooled atop a plastic under-engine panel. From all indications, whatever had produced that pool was no longer leaking, though there was some lingering wetness at the top and side of the coolant reservoir. I'd put a lot of cooling fluid in there back during the transmission fluid leak, before I knew which kind of fluid was leaking. Perhaps the Subaru had heated up so much on the climb up Dug Hill Road after the two-hour road trip from Woodworth Lake that the coolant had expanded enough to overflow the reservoir. If that had been the case, then there was nothing to worry about. Until I know more, this will be my default assumption. But I will be very careful next time I take that car for a drive.
Meanwhile, one of the speakers in Gretchen's MP3-playing headphones was dead, so I opened it up and found that the tiny circuit board on the speaker where the wires from the amplifier are soldered had delaminated from it completely, tearing away the tiny winding wires of the speaker. There was no saving it, so I had to find a replacement. Fortunately, I have lots of old headphones in the laboratory, and I was able to salvage a speaker out of one of them that was an exact geometric replacement (in terms of physical dimensions). Its magnet was significantly smaller, but the sound it produced was not noticeably inferior.

Today the new tenant moved into the Brewster Street house. We've had all kinds of tenants at this point, and this new one is proving to be of a familar variety: the demanding-but-responsible tenant. (This contrasts with the last tenant, who was both demanding and irresponsible.) Responsible is good, but demanding can be a drag. Ideally a tenant knows how to do basic things to maintain his or her home and recognizes that no house can ever be perfect, particularly in a rust-belt city like Kingston, NY. Yesterday the tenant was annoying Gretchen by pointing out various flaws in the house, such as a cracked window pane on the back porch. Today this sort of thing continued, with the tenant discovering mouse turds in the kitchen and, later, saying there were so many mouse turds in the stove that perhaps it "couldn't be used." Anyone who has actually lived in a house knows that mice come and go and leave their turds everywhere. Anyone expecting a house to be entirely mouse-free probably has minimal exposure to the world outside a meticulously-cleaned suburban home. Gretchen is the one who has to deal with the tenants, and at the time she was also trying to do her bookstore shift, so I understand why, at a certain point, she had a bit of a meltdown over it. But the tenant actually responds well to being sternly told that what is being requested is impossible, so there's hope. And he's unlikely to run up a $1500 water bill, so there's also that.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?210815

feedback
previous | next