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aligned almost perfectly with mine
Sunday, June 12 2016
While Gretchen was off at work, I had a long list of chores I needed to work on. First of all, I mowed the lawn, which I'd mowed only a week before. It's amazing how much nicer a lawn looks if it is mowed on a weekly basis instead of only when it draws attention to itself. Before I got around to hitting the edges with the weed wacker, I handled another chore: picking up an air conditioner (for the brick mansion's attic apartment) being sold by a vendor Gretchen had found on Craiglist. This involved driving to a semi-rural homestead north of acursed Rhinebeck. As I approached on its driveway, I noticed the house and its outbuildings were covered with solar panels. There was also a greenhouse. I had feeling I was going to like whoever lived here, so long as he wasn't a doomsday prepper.
The man who answered the door looked to be in his sixties and spoke with some sort of European accent (maybe German or Dutch). Right there off his porch was a pond containing a frog. "Hmm," I said, "That looks like a Bullfrog," I observed. "That's exactly what it is," he agreed. "It looks like you have a lot of sustainability projects here," I noted. He proceeded to tell me that, though he used to work for the United Nations, these days he works on designing sustainable refugee camps in the Middle East. "What do you do?" he asked. I explained that I am a web developer, news that surprised an intrigued him, since he apparently is one of many who could use a good web developer.
It soon became clear that the man's interests aligned almost perfectly with mine. But he was more plugged-in to the scene of such people than I am. My friends tend to be artists, writers, graphic designers, and, to the extent they're not any of those things, they're vegan activists. I don't know anyone (at least not in this area) with my technological interests and knowledge. The man told me about local technology meet-ups of which I was totally unaware. I should really be networking with kindred spirits at such places. At this point, the air conditioner I'd come to buy was almost an afterthought. I elected to buy the nicer-looking of the two he had for sale. It was $10 more than the one Gretchen had sent me to fetch, but whatever.
Back at the house, my lawncare was followed by a mid-grade cleaning jihad in the house. Gretchen's parents would be arriving tomorrow, and my mother-in-law tends to be a bit fussy about things not being nicely scrubbed. There was a huge Wolf Spider in the basement bedroom my inlaws would be sleeping in, so I gathered it up in a jar and put it outside. The smaller skinny-legged spiders all got vacuumed up and, if they survived that, relocated outside (where it's unlikely they could last for long, as I've only ever seen them inside buildings).
Somewhere in all of this, I also managed to do some tricky web development for one of my old clients. Fortunately, most of the code I needed for this had already been written. I just had to write a little bit of glue code to make what I needed to happen happen. That's the most satifying kind of coding there is.
This evening Gretchen called to say there was a maintenance issue in our Wall Street house. Evidently the hot water heater had failed and begun to leak (though not catastrophically). I immediately drove over to check out the situation, and indeed it looked like the damn thing (which didn't look to be very old) needed to be replaced. Evidently they eventually rust through, perhaps because they're designed to do so. (My parents had a hot water heater built in the 1950s that didn't fail until some time in the early 2000s, but that was mostly because of how little hot water our family used.)
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