unnecessary plumbing and ambien Monday, August 23 2021
location: rural Hurley township, Ulster County, NY
It rained all last night and continued raining today so continuously that there was no opportunity to walk the dogs (Ramona would walk in a light rain, but not Neville). And then the power failed. If I wanted to do any work, I was going to have to drive to the office.
Since it would be a short day at work, I decided to bring the dogs. (Neville is perfectly happy to go out in the rain if it means getting into a car.) But when I got to the bottom of Dug Hill Road, just past that hillbilly house that used to fly the Norwegian flag (which we initially mistook for a Confederate one) there was a tree just above the road had fallen over, knocking down power lines and ending up hungup on the thick telephone cable. Evidently the soil around the tree's roots had softened up in the rain and could no longer support the tree. There had been no wind at all. The tree was at least a foot thick and there were wires everywhere, so there was no getting through that way (a realization the driver of a van coming up from below was also having). So I turned around and went out the other end of Dug Hill Road, adding about five miles to my drive to Red Hook.
Only one other guy was in the office today, and the dogs were surprisingly well-behaved, so the workday went pretty well for me. At around noon, I took the dogs for the usual walk I give them when I have them at the office. We went back behind the building, around the edge of the big new field of solar panels, and then through a patch of woods and into the field near the office building, where we scared up four or five deer and two turkeys. It being a different location, Neville didn't much mind the rain (which was still gently falling). And it had stopped by the end of our walk. I'd been wearing flip-flops and had exposed myself to poison ivy, so the first thing I did was get some squirts of liquid hand soap out of the breezeway men's room and then lathered up my feet and calves at a convenient outdoor hose (which is good to know about for next time Ramona rolls in something).
At the end of the day, I drove directly to Home Depot and returned the 150 feet of 14/2 AWG romex I'd bought a few days ago in Amsterdam. (You can return things bought at one Home Depot at another one.) Then I bought a 50 foot roll of 14/3 AWG romex and the kind of boxes that can be secured in a narrow inter-stud wall bay. While I was in the area, I got more booze for the laboratory from Miron's liquor and a burrito from Chipotle. I was very excited about that burrito, but as I was eating it in from of my laboratory workstation, I found it kind of disappointing. It certainly wasn't as good as Bubby's burrito.
Next thing I did was create a plumbing bypass around the heat-pump-based hot water heater so I can fall back on using the just-in-time electric hot water heater (in addition to the solar heating system). Had I been paying better attention, I would've seen that such a bypass already exists and that my new bypass was superfluous. Also, the process of installing it unleashed a torrent of water into my head and soaked a few things in the boiler room that would be better off dry.
This was all so I could take a bath in water that didn't stink. And it didn't, but it wasn't very hot either. This was because I'd set the valves wrong and was using luke-warm solar-heated water. It was warm enough for summer time, but had it been winter I would've been upset.
I took a rare dose of ambien to help me get to sleep tonight, and woke up some hours later with the lights and glasses still on and my laptop on the floor. Thankfully, it appeared to be completely undamaged, which is amazing considering how cheaply it was built.
Ramona licking water out of Neville's fur after our walk in the rain.
