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not the right detector
Sunday, May 29 2016
This morning Gretchen and I drove down to the New Paltz area (via Springtown Road along the west bank of the Wallkill) to attend the biannual New Paltz Arts & Crafts Fair, which is held at the Ulster County Fairgrounds (a little west of the village itself in the Wallkill bottomlands). Admission was $9/each. It was a brutally hot day, though the enormous tents and the single misting station (a hose constantly spraying a mist) helped. As for the crafts, it was a fairly typical mix, with numerous ceramics, woodworkers (one of whom had brought his lathe), and clothing vendors. I was most intrigued by the woman who had made lamps mostly from bits of junk. Her specialty was little retro-futuristic "robots," though she also had designs for lovers of simplicity and minimalism. Better even than her lamps were some of the bulbs she used. One looked like a conventional glass lightbulb, though inside it contained an array of white LEDs. In terms of levels of technology, this one vendor of lamps had perhaps the "highest" on display. Nobody had seen an economic opportunity in, for example, macraméing pouches or formal wear for iPhones or iPads.
There was also a single "tiny house" to check out (Gretchen had hoped there would be more). It was 200 square feet and included a composting toilet, a kitchen area, and a bed that could be formed from a built-in bench-couch. Of all the crafts for sale, the only thing we ended up buying was a couple reusable "Swedish" towels. We were bigger spendthrifts in the food vending area. There was a pickle guy who was sipping wine between the real-life Tetris of arranging pickles in plastic pickle jars. I bought a quart of his sour dills and a pint of his hot & spicies. After we'd browsed a bunch of samples in the food barn, one of the vendors managed to sell us a $10 bottle of some sort of sauce or dressing. I didn't see anyone selling blooming onions, but we didn't check out what the snackfood vendor section.
I'd been wearing my 2013 Summer Hoot teeshirt, which seemed appropriate to a local festival, and two people commented on it, which was actually kind of a low hit rate.
I might not have wanted to go to New Paltz had Gretchen not billed it as a chance to go to the Plaza Diner for spaghetti. Remember, the Plaza Diner has the best pasta marinara in the entire Hudson Valley. And again, they didn't disappoint.
Originally another big selling point of going to New Paltz was that we'd be going to Huckleberry, our favorite New Paltz bar, but by the time we finished our spaghetti, Gretchen just wanted to go home "to be with the dogs."
We ended up falling asleep with our reading materials on the living room couch. We would've been outside, but we no longer had any lawn furniture suitable for lounging.
Though it was hot and miserable outside, at least it wasn't raining and it was full daylight. So I took advantage of the conditions and replaced the Subaru's air conditioning compressor with one I'd bought on eBay. It was a easy swap; everything I needed to reach was front and center and I had room to maneuver around most of the nuts that needed to be turned (all of which were 12 mm). I then charged the AC system with refrigerant, and was delighted to find cold air blowing out of the vents.
Gretchen had the idea of perhaps going to Lowes and buying some new lawn furniture, but there was still a dryer on the Subaru's roof and washing machine in the back. So we decided to drive to our new brick mansion (which we haven't closed on yet) and store the appliances in its fancy slate-roofed garage. We thought we'd be doing the unloading by ourselves, so I brought a couple eight-foot-long boards so I could make a ramp to help get the dryer off the roof.
Soon after we arrived, a nosy neighbor over the fence (a plump woman about our age) asked if we were the new owner. Gretchen said that indeed we were. It soon came out that our intentions were to rent the house and not live in it, though Gretchen made clear that out intention was to maintain a nice property with good tenants. She also lied and said something about how my mother is getting old and we were thinking of perhaps moving her here some day (that's a good story for buying time with nosy neighbors; it worked like a champ at our Wall Street house). Gretchen has a knack for charming people instantly, and soon our neighbor had decided we were going to be great neighbors. She even had her son (a nice young man who now lives in Albany) help us get that dryer off the roof of our car. Soon she was telling us all about the neighborhood: the renters across the street, the drug addicts behind her house, and the nice man who smokes a lot of pot (and has a beautiful garden) across the street. She said she'd lived there for something like 30 years and had seen the neighborhood rise and fall. It's not so terrible now, but there had been some seriously terrible phases in the past. Generally the tenants in our house had been okay, though (being Section 8 beneficiaries) they'd always been marginal either financially or psychologically.
There'd been a weird electronic beeping the whole time we'd been there, and Gretchen couldn't find its source when she went into the mansion to look around. Eventually we determined that it was coming from one of the trashcans outside. Evidently the woman selling the house had replaced the various smoke and carbon monoxide detectors with new ones, and thrown the old ones away without first removing their batteries. It would've been a simple matter to fish the detectors out and remove their batteries, but they were under a bunch of disgusting food waste that got on our hands as we tried to find the beeping detector. Gretchen kept finding detectors, but none of them were the one making the beeping sounds. Soon our hands were covered with a revolting greasy layer that was impossible to wash away, though our new neighbor got a hose and tried to help.
On our drive out to Lowes, I noticed that the air conditioning on the Subaru was no longer working. I assumed the problem was that I hadn't charged it with enough refrigerant.
At Lowes, we managed to buy a few things we needed (both for our house and for the brick mansion), but the chaise lounge options were terrible. By the time we left, we were certain that all other places selling chaise lounges would be closed. But then it turned out that directly across the parking lot, Gander Mountain would be open until 8:00pm. Being a store catering mostly to hunters, shooters, and fisherfolk, Gretchen absolutely despises Gander Mountain, but perhaps they had chaise lounges. I told Gretchen that I've had reason to buy things from Gander Mountain in the past, but that I always paid with cash because I didn't want her seeing my purchases on the credit card statement. "You're scared of me; that's pathetic," she observed. We soon found perfect chaise lounges; their only problem was that it featured the Gander Mountain logo. "We can do something about that," I assured Gretchen, "even if we have to sew a patch over it."
Back at the house, it was after 8:00pm and still light enough to put out the new chaise lounges and hang out in the yard. There didn't seem to be any insects bothering us, although I was being bitten by something. Eventually I saw a mosquito, though there have been mercifully few of them so far this spring (perhaps due to unusual dryness).
I tried adding more refrigerant to the Subaru's air conditioning system, but it wouldn't take any more. Eventually I discovered that refrigerant wasn't the problem. Instead, the issue was that the clutch inside the compressor was failing to engage when I turned on the AC, meaning the compressor wasn't doing its job. I soon discovered that I could engage the clutch by hitting it with a hammer (or even a piece of wood). Since the clutch became magnetic whenever the AC was turned on, the implication was that the clutch was engaged magnetically. Perhaps the coil producing that magnetic field was partially-failed (though it had worked briefly after I'd recharged the system with refrigerant). Or perhaps adjustments could be made to the clutch. Unfortunately, the whole thing seemed to be riveted together and the little holes inside what looked to be fasteners were perfectly round and thus couldn't have been intended for an allen wrench. Indeed, those "fasteners" were actually made of rubber. It could be that I'll be forced to hit the compressor with a block of wood every time I want AC, which might even be a workable solution.
Later on tonight, I downloaded and watched the latest deeply-psychological episode of Game of Thrones.
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