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nearly $50 per pipe
Tuesday, September 28 2021
Since Powerful is in the hospital and probably will remain there for months, he's said we could use his Prius (which used to be our Prius), since it remains where he left it in our driveway. So I drove it to work this morning. I worried that the office key wasn't on its keychain, so I also brought the keys for the Subaru.
At noon, I went (as I often do) for a Tuesday burrito from Bubbie's. It was a rainy day, so I got it to go. I then went to the nearby hardware store to make a copy of the office key for use on occasions when I drive the Prius. While there, I also bought some hardware for creating an outdoor 240 volt outlet at the cabin, which will be necessary for charging the Chevy Bolt. [REDACTED]
At the end of the workday, I stopped in at Home Depot to get yet more supplies: eleven tamper-resistant duplex outlets, a roll of Schluter-Ditra substrate, a bag of thinset, and two forty-inch by 1.5 inch galvanized pipes. The pipes had barcodes for ten-foot lengths, so when I went to pay, I drew the attention of the self-checkout staff (which included an employee in a wheelchair) to this fact, and it took them awhile to come up with a price. That price was nearly $50 per pipe, which is a lot, which makes me feel even better about a similar pipe that a frustrated cashier let me take for free several weeks ago. The guy in the wheelchair was super friendly and asked what I was using it for, and I said "a dock." So then he wanted to know about my boat, asking if it had a sail. "It's just a canoe and kayaks," I said.
Back at the house, I didn't have much planned, so I took my usual 150 mg dose of diphenhydramine and climbed into bed. When I checked my bedside laptop, there was a Facebook message from Gretchen that seemed to have just arrived, though she'd sent it in the early afternoon. She said she'd just "run into the walrus." I had no idea what this meant. So I called her. It turned out that she'd been in a lighting store in Kingston and had randomly run across David (of David & Penny), one of our many ex-friends. He'd said hello to her and then immediately turned his attention to an employee, so Gretchen then said to him that she'd never actually learned why he and Penny had broken up with us. To this, David replied that they could talk about it some time, "but not now." Mind you, that breakup happened ten years ago. Gretchen seemed flustered by the experience, but I told her not to worry about it, that it would all seem funny some day. I should note that some years ago David & Penny's upstate house, a problematic hyper-modern box in Marbletown, reportedly burned to the ground. We'd spent a lot of time there hanging out, and the main south-facing glass of my greenhouse's downstairs is made from its old sliding doors.
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