|
|
|
Little Cow
Tuesday, August 17 2021
I drove to the office in Red Hook today in the Chevy Bolt, plugging it in at one of the public charging stations behind the town hall and then riding to the office itself on my electric scooter (with my laptop in a shopping bag). I was, as usual, the first person in the office.
My boss Alex brought his dog Winnie to work today, and it was the first time I'd seen her since she'd suffered a freak accident in the forest near the Hutton Brickyards where she impaled herself on a sharp stick and ripped a football-sized hole in her skin. The healing since then has been slow, with some of the loose skin undergoing necrosis and falling off. But now she just has a small patch of furless scar tissue; it's maybe the size of playing card. Alex came ill-equipped for hosting a dog and got some dog food and a collapsible cloth water bowl from me.
For lunch, I recovered the Bolt from the town hall and drove it to Bubbie's, where I ordered a vegan taco. I also bought some spray-on degreaser from the hardware store in the middle of the village. The burrito wasn't great; it seemed to have reverted back to the quality of the burrito I got back during the height of the pandemic about a year ago. Also, its contents were so segregated that some bites consisted almost entirely of guacamole while others were mostly rice.
Meanwhile Gretchen had plans to visit our friend Falfel Cathy at her place south of Rhinebeck, and the only car available was the Subaru. I was nervous about her taking it after its leak of mysterious fluid following our recent Adirondack trip, but apparently it experienced no problems at all. I even had her swing by my workplace to drop off a shopvac for some post-work landlording I had in mind. Gretchen entered my office, which was (at the time) like a tomb. I hadn't turned on the light and nobody else had either, yet there I was (with four other colleagues) silently doing whatever it is we do. Colleagues Jason and Jon are now so concerned about the Delta variant of coronavirus that they're now wearing facemasks at their desks. It looked, in short, like a setup for a horror movie. Gretchen wondered where Alex was, so I took her upstairs to see him and Winnie. Alex then proceeded to tell Gretchen all the things that are happening in his life, none of which he'd told me. All his kids are employed and have jobs, even Eli (who also happens to be part of a thruple). Better still, because of his incentive units from the company (he owned up to getting about ten times what I received), his and his wife's retirement plans are back on.
After work, I drove driectly to the Brewster Street house to do a little post-tenant-move-in work. I installed a hose holder near the outdoor spigot, spackled over some spray foam out in the back porch, used te shopvac to slurp up lingering mouse turds in the kitchen oven, and then used some degreaser to attack some of the lingering grease. But the tenant had apparently scrubbed the oven pretty well, because there wasn't much left to scrub away (despite the horror I knew it to have been only a few weeks before). I also took measurements of a cracked pain of glass and photo of the furnace air filter. I was hoping to avoid the tenant entirely, but he arrived just as I was carrying my last stuff out to the car. I could see what Gretchen had disliked about him; the guy had an arrogant prick vibe about him, cutting me short when I would say things and responding "of course" at the most insulting possible opportunities, though he also tended to quickly revert to reasonable. If he pays his rent, he'll probably be an okay tenant. Also, he likes crickets so much that he wants to delay his backyard plans until they're done singing, which seemed unexpectedly sweet.
After I was done at Brewster, I went to the Downs Street house, where I saw an unknown gentleman carrying a six pack of microbrew into the house. "What apartment are you in?" I asked, and he responded "Number 3" as though he feated I wwould serve him for delinquent child support payments. "Oh, I'm here to repair your wall," I told him, and so he let me in. His housemate (or is she his girlfriend?) was home, and she was super nice and got me a piece of cardboard as I started scraping the loose stuff off the part of the wall needing repair. This wall lay beneath the bottom of a roof valley and had been subject to repeated leaks, most of which are probably inevitable and unfixable. I was dismayed to find that some of the plaster was still moist from the last roof leak, though we'd had some crazy recent storms. With some fibreglass mesh and drywall compound, I had the wall looking much better within about five minutes. As I smoothed out the drywall compound with my six-inch taping knife, I found myself thinking, "I'm really good at this." (This is not something I've ever thought when working in Angular or C#, though maybe I have when working in SQL, vanilla JavaScript, or PHP.)
The tenants in #3 have a pet rabbit named Little Cow, and she kept hopping over to me while I worked. I don't know much about rabbits, but my sense is that they're not normally so extroverted and curious.
On the way home, I went slightly out of my way to get a well-earned road beer from a Citgo beer cave, in this case a 19.2 oz Sierra Nevada Big Little Thing Imperial IPA.
[REDACTED]
I took diphenhydramine for the first time in quite awhile before going to bed early. My next memory was Gretchen freaking out because Neville had just peed in the bed. In the past, Neville has peed in the bed when it's been raining, but in this case there was no apparent reason for him to have done so. We ended up tearing the bed all apart, with me dumping water on the wet spot and sponging it away. When I was done with all that, I climbed back into bed and slept on a narrow dry part on my usual side. Gretchen and all the critters had to find somewhere else to sleep.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?210817 feedback
previous | next |
