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no caliper kits at the auto parts stores
Tuesday, June 11 2024
This morning Gretchen drove to New Paltz and caught a bus down into Manhattan to do a number of things, including doing organizing work for Wendy, a now very old former organizing client on the Upper East Side. Meanwhile, it was my job to take care of the animals and do a few kitchen tasks and run a few errands for Gretchen. Normally in the morning, only Charlotte goes on a walk with Gretchen. But since it was me leading the walk and Neville usually goes with me, he came along on our first walk in the late morning. We walked on a loop that included most of the Chamomile Headwaters Trail and a good bit of the Stick Trail.
In the early afternoon, I drove with the dogs out the Home Depot, where I mostly bought small wire nuts (for connecting the small wires that go to relays in my remote control system) and various sanding devices (to help with my new interest in making rustic furniture by sawing up blocks of wood salvaged in the forest). I went to the nearby AutoZone to see if they sold brake caliper rebuild kits, which they didn't (apparently that's something one has to buy online). So I asked if they had the brake caliper for the left rear of a 2015 Subaru Forester. But they were out of stock. (That brake has been dragging for weeks now and I'm pretty sure the problem is the caliper.) Next I went to the 9W Hannford mostly to get items on a shopping list that Gretchen had prepared for me. I eventually found the caliper I was looking for at Advance Auto Parts in Uptown Kingston (which also does not sell caliper rebuild kits). New calipers cost about $90, but there's a steep $50 core charge for the old calipers, suggesting a rebuild is a relatively trivial job. Finally, I went well out of my way to visit the Tibetan Center thrift store, but I only bothered to check the out buildings (where the stuff I like tends to be) and didn't find anything I wanted.
By then I was drinking my second road beer. I was probably a little tipsy when Tom the crazy carpet guy finally showed up, and I helped him load up the carpets Gretchen wanted him to clean. Then I took the dogs for their second walk of the day, this time mostly atop the escarpment west of the Farm Road.
Every now and then YouTube randomly suggests I watch some video I'd liked in the past, and today I decided to watch one of those. It was a concert appearance of the Stone Temple Pilots at the very height of their popularity in 2001. (Though when I watched it, I assumed it was in the 1990s.) The throng in attendance was a vast sea of Caucasian skin. As I was watching it, I was thinking that the only concerts that big these days would be performed by pop stars or hip hop artists, neither of which are given to performing songs with such gritty realism: vulnerability and heart-felt self-deprecation. That was the beautiful thing about grunge, whatever else you might say about it. It was a rare time in music history when dark sentiments mingled with self doubt in music that was wildy popular. There'd been nothing quite like it that was popular before, and there hasn't been much like it that has been popular since.
I'd taken a recreational 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine, which helped me crank through a few more software development tasks in my remote control system. But it also probably made me drink too much. I took some diphenhydramine to force an early end to the evening, but I ended up staying up fairly late anyway.
The gypsy moths have opened up the canopy so much that there is plenty of light on the forest floor for plants growing there. This has made parts of it look like grassland. But these aren't grasses; they're sedges. Click to enlarge.
More of the sedge "field." All these photos were taken on one of the terraces west of the Farm Road. Click to enlarge.
More sedges. Click to enlarge.
And more. Click to enlarge.
A dead gypsy moth caterpillar hanging from its own thread of gossamer. It appears to have died of the disease that typically kills off the gypsy moths at their peak. Click to enlarge.
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