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Chris buys the house next door
Monday, July 24 2023
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
Looking for a job isn't a fun way to spend a day. It's a galling kind of work because it is unpaid and highly stochastic. I might look for a job for a week and get one. Or might look for a year and not. Also, it's not a great time for a software developer to be looking for work given that lots of tech companies have decided to lay off employees in recent months. For these reasons, it's nice to think there might be a shortcut to a job. Such shortcuts involve my social network, to the extent I have one, which usually means Gretchen's social network. My old boss Alex asked if I was interested in working on a project for a lawyer friend of his involving the automated scanning of large texts, but the pay would only be $1000, which isn't much when compared to the sort of income I've taken for granted for years now. Later today, our friend Chris (the male half of the couple I've referred to as the "photogenic vegan Buddhists") was chatting with Gretchen about some networking issues and had the idea that maybe he should just pay me to do it. I should've said no (hardware networking is among my skills, but it is not my expertise), though I felt that saying yes in this case might be part of the work of looking for a job in that it was cultivating the network that might lead to my next thing. So I packed up a Chromebook and my ethernet cable tester and drove over to Chris & Kirsti's homemade rust-colored house of Zena Road, since that was where I assumed I was needed.
But Chris has serious troubles with ADD and doesn't always provide enough context or content when communicating. When I drove past the semi-tame deer to Chris and Kirsti's house, Kirsti saw me and came out, bewildered why I was there. This is the kind of event that confirms my social anxiety and makes me never want to interact with anyone except Gretchen (who can provide a suitable buffer against miscommunications and failed obligations). Kirsti explained the thing that would've been very helpful for Chris to have said: that they'd just bought the neighbor's house and Chris was over there setting it up to be some sort of vegan retreat, and that was where he was expecting me to go. She then gave me some of the history, that when the neighbor moved out and there was an open house, the kind of people looking the place over skeeved them out. What if a hunter moved in and decided to start shooting the deer Chris and Kirsti had tamed? So they'd bought it. She said the place has a pool and other great features and that she and Chris would have to have us visit there socially.
After driving to the correct place, I found it a sprawling single-story house surrounded by an excessive amount of lawn. (Chris and Kirsti have no lawn at their rust-colored house.) Chris immediately gave me more of the story for why they'd bought the house next door. Part of the plan, he said, was to have a second house to live in while the rust-colored house gets fixed. He'd built the rust-colored house (famously using Cor-Ten steel as siding; I got some of the leftover scraps) back around 2007 and apparently gotten some things wrong. Now, Chris says, the house is "falling apart." Beyond that, he says he is thinking long-term, for when he and Kirsti get old and need nursing care. He figures he and other vegans can live in the newly-purchased single-storey house and share nursing staff there, which will make it less expensive. "That's kinda dark," I said.
My job was to get a pair of ASUS mesh ZenWiFi devices and a phone working. Initially I thought it would be easy, but some sort of auto-pairing that was supposed to happen between to the two devices kept failing, and the only feedback was the behavior of an RGB LED (good thing I had a phone to look up what the colors meant; nothing about them was mentioned in the printed documents that came with the devices). Compounding the problem was that all the new devices these days demand that you install a fucking app on your phone in order to control them. What happened to the good old days when you could navigate to 192.168.1.1 and get a configuration web page served by the device? There is nothing today's devices do that couldn't be configured with that perfectly good zero-installation technology.
After struggling for a couple hours with one of the devices, which seemed impossible to reset back to factory defaults, I was feeling hangry and decided to give up for the day. On the drive home, I stopped at the Stewarts at the corner of Route 28 and Zena Road to get a sixpack of Hazy Little Thing and a bag of old-school Fritos, the latter of which I ate greedily for most of the drive home.
I was in the bathtub when Gretchen came home, and despite still being kind of bickery after the overly-social weekend and a glitch this morning with the solar-heated hot water (requiring my intervention to get her a hot shower), Gretchen had gotten me a delicious bowl of red bean soup from the Garden Café while she was in Woodstock today.
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