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cable concerns at a board meeting
Monday, May 23 2016
I woke up with a fairly brutal hangover, though it was work day, and I had to soldier on, so I didn't complain. Gretchen had arranged for us to get another look around in the brick mansion we're buying in Kingston's Midtown, and she'd invited all our friends to come over and check it out too. In addition to our realtor Karen, our friends Chrissy, Nancy, David, and Julianna all showed up. Gretchen handed them all sheets of some sort of form she'd made so they could express their opinions on the things they were seeing. Meanwhile, it was my job to take measurement. This was a surprisingly large amount of work in a house with so many rooms, several of which had large Victorian window bays (making it difficult to come up with an actual width). Meanwhile the others fussed and cooed over how awesome it all was, mostly because that is that is the automatic impression one gets from the front rooms on the first floor. Only later, once you realize that there is a bathroom standing between the livingroom/bedroom and the kitchen, does some of the awkwardness of the layout become clear. Still, perhaps even this was fixable if somehow a part of the kitchen could be made into a bathroom and the kitchen moved partially into the space occupied by the currently-interstitial bathroom. After trying to make sense of how to improve the wacky, strangely-painted/poorly-floored attic apartment, we returned to the problematic bathroom on the first floor. I soon discovered that there was a dead space that had once been occupied by another stairway to the second floor, and that the back of this space had been used to accommodate a bathtub in the other (less problematic) first floor apartment, and the front of this space was used for a stairway down to the basement. If that stairway could somehow be moved out into the hall, it would give better all-house access to the basement and make it easier to move some of the kitchen towards the middle of the apartment. But whatever is to be done, it probably won't be easy. It might be easiest to just leave things as they are and collect whatever rent can be collected.
The visit to the brick mansion ran kind of late, so I was a little late to work (my laboratory). By now it was a hot sunny day and it would've been a good one for playing hookie. But I soldiered on, trying to wrap my head around servers that it will soon be my job to administer.
At 7:00pm, I snuck out of work early and went with Gretchen to the Hurley Town Hall, where a town board meeting was being held and where an anonymous poster had urged us to go in support of a Time Warner cable run up Dug Hill Road. The cable behemoth has long resisted running such a cable, claiming there are not enough households to support it. But now that so many people rely on broadband for their work and entertainment, the situation has become untenable. Mind you, on our end of Dug Hill Road we have reliable DSL with 3.6 MB/s download speeds, but it would be nice to replace our satellite television and phone line with cable, which would probably also in an internet connection five or six times faster than DSL. Even if we didn't make the switch, just having it as a possibility would give us negotiating strength with Verizon. Still, all the people we saw at tonight's meeting were strangers; nobody from our end of Dug Hill Road was in attendance, suggesting our immediate neighbors are content with just their existing DSL. The demographic was largely late-middle-aged white people with accents suggesting they had lived in this area for a long time. They were somewhat rowdy at times, with individuals adopting an occasionally-accusatory tone towards Gary Bellows, the long-time Town Supervisor. They wondered why Hurley hadn't been collecting a franchise fee from Time Warner and if the threat of one might cause them to build out more cable. When Bellows said that this would result in higher cable rates and that, "as a conservative," he didn't believe in taxes, Gretchen let out an audible groan. Others at the meeting said they were probably going to have to sell their houses and move from Dug Hill Road unless they got cable soon, since the present regime wouldn't allow them to work or "homeschool" from home. Gretchen and I stayed long enough to sign a petition supporting the cable, though by the end I was having mixed feelings about it, particularly if it makes real estate along Dug Hill Road more suitable for development. The fact that a lack of cable was driving people away seemed like a good thing in aggregate. Fortunately, Bellows had been suggesting that it was unlikely Dug Hill Road would get supplemental funds from the state for cable build-out in "underserved areas," especially given how underserved such vast places as the Adirondacks are. As we were leaving, Gretchen said she wanted to pull a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in support of the idea of taxes, so I left the building quickly so as not to be embarrassed. But I think she chickened out.
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