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paprika at Mother Fucking Earth
Monday, November 24 2025
This morning I again used the big 80v Kobalt chainsaw, this time powering it with the big battery from the Kobalt lawnmower. That battery is not designed for the chainsaw and protrudes out of it about two inches. But it fits and can power it. The saw worked great with that battery, proving my problem was entirely in the battery. After cutting up some of the stack of unprocessed wood I'd moved yesterday, I went down the Stick Trail to process various fallen trees near the house. I also did more to cut up that aspen that had fallen just north of (and parallel to) the Chamomile Wall.
Gretchen went to work today, so it was on me to be present at our Victorian mansion on Downs Street for its biennial inspection. I showed up a little early to replace a lightbulb that didn't actually need to be replaced (its glass wasn't frosted, so it wasn't illuminating like its peers in the chandelier) and then sat on the front porch playing Spelling Bee on my phone waiting for the guy from the Kingston Building Department. It was a sunny morning and reasonably warm, so I could've sat there for hours. But I'd drunk a lot of tea and had to keep getting up to piss back along the side of the garage. One such piss happened just before the moment that the building inspector was supposed to arrive, and Gretchen had said whoever it would be would be very punctual, so I was in a hurry and of course managed to put dark spots of piss on my brown trousers. But then I sat there and those dark spots evaporated and still the inspector hadn't come. So I called Gretchen at the bookstore, and she called the Kingston Building Department. It turned out the inspector had completely spaced the inspection and was now on his way. Then I ran into one of the tenants, and he said one of his smoke detectors wasn't working. I went up to his apartment, found the failing smoke detector, took a piss (my third on this outing!), and couldn't get it to work.
When the building inspector arrived, he was hobbling from an ankle injury he'd sustained last night at a hip hop show. He's a big guy, and his ankle is just a normal-spec human ankle, so he has to be more careful with it than I have to be with mine. Due to his injury and his familiarity with the house (he knows we're conscientious landlords who keep up our properties, which seems to make us stand out as special), he didn't give us the most rigorous hard-ass inspection possible. Let's just say it went quickly and our house passed. Then as we were going down the stairs from the front porch, the big building inspector put a little too much weight on the handrail and it broke in half, almost causing him to fall. That's not the kind of thing a landlord wants to have happen during a building inspection, but we had a good chuckle about it, with me saying "that's nothing you can't fix with a little paint." (The rail had looked great, as it recently had been repainted olive green.) Evidently the rail was main of plain untreated pine and a little rot had gotten into it (there was a little shelf fungus protruding from the bottom). But it probably could've survived the forces applied by a person of more average size.
Just as I was getting onto I-587 (the shortest interstate in the Eisenhower Interstate System), I realized I'd left my Yeti mug (the thing I'd been drinking tea from) back at the brick mansion. So I had to drive all the way to the traffic circle at the entrance to Exit 19, drive all the way around it, and drive back.
Later this afternoon, I went on a separate outing with Charlotte and Neville to get Neville's nails ground down at Pretty Pet Parlor. Afterwards, I bought a smoke detector with a ten year battery and piece of treated lumber to replace the broken handrail at the Home Depot. Then I went next door to Mother Earth (what we call "Mother Fucking Earth") to buy crushed tomatoes and paprika. There was a very chatty late-middle-age woman in the bulk spice aisle as I was getting my paprika who had been chatting with a perky looking young goth girl with bright crimson highlights in her hair whom I'd assumed was her daughter. But then that girl left and the woman started asking me about paprika as if perhaps I was her son-in-law if not her son. She was telling me about how capsaicin fights cancer, and I was saying that paprika has a lot of vitamin C but not all that much capsaicin. The woman, who seemed strangely unfamiliar with paprika, smelled the it and decided that, despite its lack of cancer-fighting capsaicin, she wanted some too.
Back home in Hurley, I took Charlotte for a short walk and then used the firewood backpack to retrieve two loads of semi-processed firewood from nearby on the Stick Trail. I then split that wood and brought some of it into the house. It was a mix of dry sugar maple and bone-dry oak.
Then I proceeded to make another of my "low-effort" chilis, this one only having one kind of bean (kidney) and perhaps a bit too much crushed tomato (from Mother Fucking Earth).
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