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poking the bear
Friday, January 10 2025
This morning Gretchen and I were sort of doing the weekend ritual down in front of the woodstove when she started up a phone conversation with the guy from the environmental testing company that had recently failed to detect any particles in the air inside or outside of our Brewster Street rental. Apparently that result wasn't (as I'd feared it wouldn't be) good enough for the people at the Kingston Building Department. So Gretchen was trying to figure out what else we could do to make those people happy. In the end it was decided (after much discussion, some of which was with Robert, the guy who had done the air tests) that we should sample a piece of that fraying material on the one duct boot with fraying material to see if it really was asbestos. According to Robert, the sign warning about asbestos that had been put on our ducts was not the kind that would be placed in a residential setting and it was possible there was no asbestos down there at all. Those signs could've been stuck there as a prank, for all we know. And houses in poorer neighborhoods typically didn't get asbestos, as it was an expensive luxury that only rich people paid to have installed. This new testing will cost several hundred more dollars, and we're back to being pissed at the tenants, since, as a contractor, the guy who lives there should've known what the consequences for us would be of "poking the bear," that is, calling the city. But we're also not big fans of Robert, the guy who does the tests, after he said something indicating that he supported the husband who had "beaten the shit out of" his wife, a woman who had alerted the city to possibly dangerous chemicals used on playground surfaces.
Initially Gretchen had expected to go out with our friends Lynne & Greg to see Dar Williams tonight in Woodstock. But Gretchen had written the wrong day down in her calendar, and that wouldn't be happening until tomorrow night. But that was a problem, because Gretchen had planned to drive to Rochester tomorrow to give the keys of our new rental house there to its tenant. Gretchen's first idea was to have me drive to Rochester instead, but I thought that was a bad idea if she really wanted to get a sense of the new tenant, since I'm not the kind of person who is good at gathering social intelligence. (Actually, I might be great at it, but not being good at it is sort of my brand, and I didn't want to fucking drive to Rochester.) So in the end Gretchen sent some messages and arranged to drive out to Rochester herself today. She took the Subaru Forester so she didn't have to worry about weather or stopping in a place suitable for electric charging.
While Gretchen was preparing to leave, I was dealing with a new behavior being manifested by Oscar, our oldest and now-mangiest-looking cat. For the past several weeks, he's decided to poop in various places in the laboratory, particularly back behind my main workstation. His shits stink to high heaven, so it's always something of an environmental emergency to find the shit and get rid of it as soon as it is evident. Today he pooped on the wires coming out of the back of Woodchuck, my main desktop computer, and it was a real effort to clean it up. Afterwards, I laid down a sheet of plastic over the wires so that the next time he poops, it will be on that plastic. In the course of doing all this, though, I managed to disconnect both the telephone wire going to the cable modem (which is how a landline is emulated without using the telephone lines out on the poles) and the wires carrying audio to my speakers. Audio is not something I am happy going for long without, so I struggled to get it working and was extremely frustrated to find that there was no longer any sound coming from my sound card. Eventually I managed to fix this by simply rebooting my computer, something I do as little as possible.
While I was in the midst of that crisis, Gretchen came up to the laboratory with another audio technology issue for me to solve: her phone wouldn't pair with the Subaru's entertainment system. The 2015 Subaru has the most infuriating entertainment system I've ever had the displeasure of using. Its touch-screen refuses to respond to anything less than painful fingertip presses and important settings are buried deep in folder-like user interface elements. Just one indication of how bad the UI is is that its clock is always running ten minutes fast on Eastern Daylight Savings Time because changing the time is essentially impossible. (It has built-in GPS that, while absolutely horrendous, works, so I don't know why it doesn't use the very accurate time from that system to set the clock, which is what the Chevy Bolt seems to do.) At some point some years back I managed to pair my phone with its bluetooth system, but it absolutely will not pair with Gretchen's phone. Gretchen didn't want to drive all the way to Rochester without being able to listen to podcasts, so we had to find some solution. While I was rooting around in the laboratory for some computer speakers that I could run off an inverter and plug into Gretchen's phone with an audio cable, Gretchen installed her Spotify account on my phone. The Subaru bluetooth crisis on top of the catshit/no-laboratory-audio crisis had me ranting and raving in fury, particularly when I couldn't easily find a 12v adapter that fit the computer speakers I found. But once Gretchen had Spotify on my phone, that seemed like a good-enough solution to that crisis, since I barely use my phone anyway. I said she could take my phone, but that she should try very hard not to lose it. (Gretchen has a real knack for losing things like water bottles, though if it weren't for the kindness of strangers, she would've also lost her phone and wallet many times.)
Meanwhile, the weather had become a bit warmer. So I didn't have to bundle up too much before taking Charlotte for her late afternoon walk. (Neville didn't come.) For dinner, I mostly ate injera and various wats and wat-adjacent food items like those frijoles borrachos, refried beans, and an actual cabbage-based wat Gretchen had made this morning from an Ethiopian cookbook. [REDACTED]
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