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fire safety duties of a landlord
Wednesday, May 13 2015
The weather today was reminiscent of the top of Mt. Mitchell. The muggy upper-80s temperatures had been replaced with those in the low 60s, and the wind blew powerfully at times. This might have been a return of the dreaded Polar Vortex, but so long as it doesn't freeze my tomatoes, it can get as cold and windy as it wants.
This afternoon, I went over to the rental house on Wall Street and installed all the smoke detectors ordered by the Kingston fire inspector. All I had to do was take pictures and email them to her, and all my fire-related landlord duties would be complete. Neither of the tenants were there when I did this work.
On the way back home, I stopped to walk the dogs in the Esopus Valley cornfields. I wasn't there to collect dirt, so instead of going to my usual spot (with its potential for Eleanor killing herself on Route 209), I took the little southward farm road off Wynkoop and parked along the trees at the edge of the field (41.928223N, 74.072346W). The field had been plowed and then dried into a dusty wasteland, and as I drove, dust accumulated in the vortexes on the driver's side (downwind) side of the car, leaving drifts on every horizontal surface. I had to roll up the windows to keep it from filling the car. From there, I walked the dogs to the southwest and around the tip of a narrow band of trees separating this field from a smaller one about 20 feet lower in elevation (apparently the forested escarpment between them was the remains of an old river bank). Once I'd walked some distance northeastward on the lower side of that narrow strip of trees, it was possible to make shortcut back nearer the car by climbing the steep bank up to the higher field. It was bushy and Poison-Ivy-rich in there, but I found a way through that I will probably use again in the future.
Eleanor in the dusty Esopus Valley corn field. (Click to enlarge.)
Eleanor in the dusty Esopus Valley corn field. (Click to enlarge.)
Eleanor in the dusty Esopus Valley corn field. (Click to enlarge.)
Eleanor (front) and Ramona in the dusty Esopus Valley corn field. (Click to enlarge.)
Eleanor (left) and Ramona in the dusty Esopus Valley corn field. (Click to enlarge.)
Ramona in the dusty Esopus Valley corn field. (Click to enlarge.)
This evening Susan and David came over for snacks, and later we all watched a couple episodes from Season II of Strangers With Candy.
Later still, I watched an episode of Bering Sea Gold, one that seemed to really "jump the shark" as it were. Instead of focusing on the gold mining and normal tensions between the characters, we were treated to first a highly-contrived battle involving potato guns (really, they had potato guns on their boats?) followed by a stupid pissing match between the two dredges with onboard excavators, all choreographed so that there would be scenes where their buckets clanged together like the heads of mountain rams.
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