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   failed lug nuts and maggots
Sunday, August 29 2021
After Gretchen drove off to work and Mary & Keith headed to their next adventure, I drove out to Home Depot to get a motion-activation sensor and an 18v Ryobi weed wacker, one compatible with all my One+ batteries and chargers. I then went to the Downs Street brick mansion and replaced the motion sensor on 1R's private basement stairway. That light has special importance, because a failure of an earlier incarnation of it led to a lawsuit that our landlord insurance ultimately settled out-of-court with one of our former tenants. (She'd blamed a failure of that light with her breaking and/or spraining one or both ankles after a supposed fall on that stairway.) The light had started turning on and off erratically, so I figured I'd just replace the sensor. But nothing is ever that easy. It turned out this motion-sensor fixture was the cheap kind, one whose wires were connected together with crimps instead of wire nuts, and the new sensor didn't come with any wire nuts at all. I managed to find a few wire nuts in the Subaru, which thankfully made the replacement possible. As I've been doing lately, I did all the work on the light without first deenergizing it. Sometimes it's easier just to be careful instead of figuring out what circuit breaker to turn off.
Back at the house, I tested out the new battery-powered weed wacker on the path to the front door. It worked nicely and seemed to be plenty powerful. The plan is to keep that weed wacker up at the Adirondack cabin to help with trail maintenance and other light landscaping tasks.
Meanwhile Powerful had begun his drive back to Albany in his Prius. But he didn't get very far. I got a Facebook message from him saying the car had "broken down" and he'd needed a tow. He said the "log nuts" had come loose and the "tire" had come off. That sounded pretty serious. If lug nuts had failed, it meant the wheel had come off. Hopefully this had not happened at high speed. When Powerful finally explained to me what happened, it turned out the wheel had come off at high speed. He'd been driving in the left lane at 65 mph when the car started vibrating ominously, and for some reason Powerful had just kept on driving instead of pulling over to investigate. This was probably partly because of his general inexperience with cars and partly because a rattle he'd been hearing was something I'd dismissed as inconsequential (it was a loose heat shield against the exhaust pipe). But a vibration is a very different thing from a rattle, and in this case it meant the bolts holding his right front wheel to the axle were failing. It turned out that all but one of them sheared off, which can happen quickly when there's enough looseness for vibrations to set in, and this had ulitmately made the Prius uncontrollable. Luckily there were no other cars around him at the time and the car pulled somehow knew to pull itself over onto the right shoulder and no further, though its ass was still poking out into the right lane. Before anyone could rearend him, the State Police appeared and Powerful got a $300 tow up to Albany. That could've gone really badly, but nobody was injured and the Prius can probably be repaired. ("I'm really blessed," is how Powerful put it.) Now the question is: why had the right wheel come loose? I'd replaced the front brakes on that car about six weeks ago, and I was pretty sure I'd tightened the lug nuts sufficiently. I've taken wheels off cars and put them back on many times, and I've never had anything like this happen. It's possible, I suppose, that someone tried to steal that wheel while it was parked on the street in Albany and then been discouraged by the lug nut with the funny anti-theft head. But Gretchen, when I talked to her later, seemed to think I was the most likely to blame for the modest disaster. Had Powerful been killed, this means she would suspect me of being the one responsible. That would be a heavy burden to then have to carry in our marriage. You'd think that if anyone would give her husband the benefit of doubt in a situation like this, it would be one's wife, but apparently that's not the sort of relationship I find myself in. It's not that she isn't right to think it likely that I was responsible. It's just that I would expect to be better protected in my marriage from the possibility that unlikely circumstances for which I might be blameless had caused that wheel to fail.
When Gretchen returned home, I was taking a bath. I heard her shout, "Oh no!" and I thought for sure something horrible was happening. It turned out that Neville was in the living room on a brand new dog bed chewing on a section of articulated skeleton (probably from a deer). What made this more horrible than the many other times Neville had done this was that the flesh on this skeleton was badly decomposed, and the whole first floor stank of rotten flesh. And then when Gretchen tried wrest the bones away from Neville, he ran upstairs and jumped up on our bed with it (for some reason he went to my side). When Gretchen finally got the articulated bones away from him, it hit the bedroom floor and exploded with hundreds of maggots scattered in all directions. By this point, I had to end my bath because the air stank too bad to continue. I helped Gretchen sweep up the maggots (they were all about a half inch long and a sixteenth of an inch wide) and then dragged everything from the bed down to the washing machine (after first dumping off the maggots). After I rinsed off the cover for the new dog bed, I thought I'd gotten rid of all the maggots. But when I struck the cloth with my fist in hopes of dislodging the water, many dozens of new maggots appeared; they'd been hiding down at the roots of the fake fur the cover was made with. That had to go in the washing machine too, along with the sheets, blankets, and (I belatedly discovered) one of the pillow cases.
Gretchen was disappointed I hadn't prepared dinner, so she quickly improvised an African ground nut stew with rice, beans, and big chunks of cauliflower. It was amazing, partly because it was so different from anything she'd ever made before (and partly because I'd eaten some cannabis, which was now giving me the munchies).
The cannabis was making me feel unusually social despite the slight alienation of knowing that Gretchen would've blamed me had Powerful's mishap today resulted in his death. So when Gretchen started watching a new HBO series called The White Lotus, I grabbed a Hazy Little Thing IPA and joined her. The White Lotus was exactly what I wanted to watch. It's a dark comedy/satire set at a Hawaiian resort, a place where the rich get much more worked up about their minor annoyances than the poor do about major life challenges. (One such major life challenge is a woman forced to suppress going though labor because it's her first day on the job.) The two episodes we watched reminded me a lot of the style of Fargo, where minor errors ratchet into major debacles and people are cluelessly trying to discuss things with other people at what, for those other people, are the worst possible moments. Another great thing about The White Lotus is the soundtrack, which was composed by Cristobal Van Der Veer, the man who made The Girl With All The Gifts so maximally creepy. It was all a bit too creepy for Gretchen, but she found other things to love in The White Lotus.


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