|
|
|
confirming my inclination to always handle
Monday, June 13 2016
Yesterday Gretchen had tracked down a local plumber who seemed to be reputable to do the hot water tank replacement in the Wall Street house. Nancy had discovered him after he'd done some work for her rich Republican neighbor, and it turned out the same plumbing company had installed the tank that had just failed (causing our tenants to call their number even before they called us). I don't really know how it works with hot water tanks, but I suppose the installer of a tank that appears to have failed prematurely shouldn't be held responsible for its failure to last. In any case, this morning my job was to go over to the Wall Street house and let in the plumber so he could do his job. He said it would take him about an hour and that he could only accept a check as payment. So I drove all the way back home to get a checkbook. While I was there, I swapped the Subaru for the Prius so I could gather soil on the way home. It turned out that the one hour job was more like two, and unfortunately my smartphone isn't fun enough to entertain me for the hour I unexpectedly spent on the stoop. When all was said and done, the charge for installing the hot water tank (which probably cost around $500) was $999, which represents $499 for a straightforward 1.5 hour plumbing job with no complications. The only reason I hadn't done it was that it had involved gas in a house I'm not living in, though I think that the next time this happens I am handling the whole thing myself. I can't sit there on a stoop waiting for a couple guys to earn several hundred dollars for his boss when I have to skills to do the same thing in the same amount of time. It's been a long time since I've interacted with the skilled trades, and this experience did nothing but confirm my inclination to always handle everything myself.
In Old Hurley, I gathered five buckets (each five gallons) of topsoil from a new topsoil mine on the natural levee of the Esopus across Wynkoop from the Hurley Mountain Inn. Someone had used a weed wacker to cut a trail through the Jewelweed, Virginia Creeper, and Poison Ivy from the farm road down to the water, and my mine was along this trail. The soil contained a fair amount of very decomposed mulch, probably disposed of here on the levee years ago by the Town of Hurley. I ended up using most of one of the buckets to fill divots in the yard made by Eleanor back when she was alive and had developed a hankering either for insect larvæ or earthworms. Now that she's gone, the dogs are no longer interested in digging up the yard, so the repairs will probably last a long time.
My workday soon began and proceeded to follow a fairly normal trajectory, though there was a moment of delight early in the day when a couple of the young women in the Development Department (the people who organize the fundraising that keeps the whole Organization afloat) sent me an image with them posing next to a message they'd written out on Post-it Notes saying that I "rock." It's hard to know when one works remotely if one is doing a good job, but that seemed to indicate that I was, and it made me like my job that much more.
In a typical workday, I come out the laboratory at various beats in the day, usually as a reward for figuring out something or completing a task requiring anywhere from a half hour to two hours of work. This afternoon at some point when I came down to the living room, I saw a Green Frog hopping across the floor. He or she (let's say he) had either come in through the front door (which is often wide open) or a cat had brought him in. In any case, I managed to grab him with a pasta strainer and a magazine. Thinking he might be dehydrated, I put him in the kiddie pool in the yard, which seemed to make him happy. I added a small log to the pool in case he wanted a place to haul himself out. Later, when it seemed he wanted to hide under the log (even though there wasn't a frog-sized void beneath it), I added a couple leaves. Gretchen soon decided his name was Leopold II, in honor of the first Leopold (another Green Frog who had spent some time in this same pool in the late summer of last year).
Gretchen's parents arrived while I was in the middle of a conference call up in the laboratory. When it was over, I came down to say hello and talk a little about my job, which I hadn't had the last time I'd seen Gretchen's parents.
Later Susan & David showed up and we had one of Gretchen's multicourse meals, this one anchored by two different pasta dishes that included faux bacon.
It was cool enough that I started a fire in the woodstove, burning mostly paper and dimensional lumber scraps from the ongoing garage cleanout.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160613 feedback
previous | next |
