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selected by the dogs as their advocate
Saturday, July 2 2016
This morning Gretchen went off to participate in a "three sisters" planting hosted by the seed library guys, some of the farm hub guys, representatives of local Native American groups, and also some largely-Hispanic groups from the City. This was happening on a parcel of land near where Hurley Avenue crosses under the Thruway, and though it was a bit late in the season for planting of this sort, sometimes plans don't come together precisely when they should.
Meanwhile I was at the brick mansion carefully tracing and marking cables in hopes of knowing how best to proceed. After a lot of this sort of thing, I eventually just hooked up the wires they way they'd been before I'd fucked things up yesterday, at which point the stairway light that I'd broken yesterday started working, suggesting that one of the mansion-traversing cables supplied power directly to that light and the other had run to some sort of switch. Unfortunately, the motion sensor no longer seemed to work. Somehow the multiple shorts I'd made on those cables had managed to kill it. Fortunately I'd bought a replacement this morning at Home Depot (along with a non-contact line tester, which I never actually ended up using).
Gretchen showed up at noon with tempeh reubens from Outdated. She seemed dismayed when I told her how little I'd accomplished, but I did my best to sketch out how important research was to avoid being killed by this infrastructure. What I'd been doing was no different from what a competent electrician would do when dealing with such a mess.
Meanwhile the tenants had been mostly staying out of my way. The woman from 1R and the woman from 2 were hanging out in the back with their combined total of three rescue dogs. The two from 2 are fat and friendly, but the one from 1R is skittish and suspicious. It took him awhile to stop reflexively barking at me (something he often does to men, according to his adopted human mother), but eventually he started jumping up on me and even mouthing my arm in the gentle way young dogs do. At some point these two tenants compared notes and determined that their keys opened each others' doors, which wasn't exactly something Gretchen wanted to hear.
So Gretchen went on an errand to Lowes to pick up a replacement door knob and locking system as well as a dual circuit breaker for the dryer (one she'd gotten earlier hadn't been from the correct manufacturer). Meanwhile, I completed nearly all the rest of the dryer wiring. After Gretchen had installed the new door lock mechanism, I had her help me with the last of the dryer installation. First I wired up the circuit breaker and carefully installed it one-handed in the live circuit breaker box while Gretchen held a flashlight. Miraculously, it fit. But I'd forgotten to break out the tabs on the panel's front when I went to install it, so of course it didn't fit. While I was in the process of figuring this out, Gretchen made a lunge for something inside the panel she thought might be sticking out. "No!" I shouted, and happily this was enough to stop her. She'd been about to put both hands in a part of the circuit breaker box without any idea of the dangers that were there. It must've been a reflex on her part, a reflex to solve a problem, but it was the sort of thing that can easily get you killed. Everything about the inside of a circuit breaker box has to be approached with deliberation, awareness, and no more than one hand at a time.
After we got the dryer and washing machine all hooked up, Gretchen and I went up the the attic apartment to try to solve the problem of the mis-wired stairway light. After first turning off the two circuit breakers in separate circuit breaker boxes supplying wires to it, I disassembled the dual switch plate at the top of the stairs and removed the offending switch. Behind it, I found a pair of black wires connected together with a wire nut. This was promising; perhaps this was supplying the power to the offending circuit and I could just replace the offending source of power with the known non-offending power present at the other switch. This proved doable, although in this particular situation, the black wires all seemed to be acting as neutrals and the hot wires were white (the opposite of how things are supposed to be). There was also a dramatic bright white flash when I accidentally bridged a hot wire to ground with a multimeter probe, that brief electrical explosion vaporized a divot out of the probe but otherwise caused no trouble. But when I tested the revised wiring, I'd managed to correct the problem. Hooray! I also liked that Gretchen got to see the approach I take to electrical wiring, which is relatively simple but highly-logical discipline suffused with danger for the incautious.
Towards the end of our time at the mansion, I replaced the seemingly-broken motion sensor for the other stairway. And then the high-maintenance woman from the second floor complained about her two-pronged outlets (really?) and the lack of lids on the trashcans. She went on to passively-aggressively say that she and one of the other tenants would be compiling a list of things needing addressing. That's a surprisingly mean thing to tell a landlord going into a three-day weekend.
I was back home a little after 4:00pm. It was all downtime from then until 7:30pm, when Ray would be having his annual birthday bash. It would be an unseasonably cool evening, so he'd asked me to bring over some wood for his outdoor fire pit.
When it came time to actually go to that party, our dogs were still in the forest, so we had to leave without them. I tried riding my bike up the farm road and we even made a detour up to Reichel Road on the way to Ray's in case they were near there, but they couldn't be found.
At Ray's house, there were a couple tables outdoors covered with table cloths, food, and booze. I had a few drinks, talked to David (of Susan & David) about today's wiring adventures and one of his mysterious mold issues. A little after sunset Mark (the guy who likes to show up randomly and give me greenhouse advice) and I drove back to my place to retrieve the dogs. Gretchen really wanted Neville to meet Bruce the big-headed Pit Bull, who'd come up from the City with Ray's brother Kim.
I smoked some pot, which made me acutely aware of the political foundation upon which all my interactions were taking place. When, for example, Mark and Kim helped me carry the firewood from my car, something happened where Mark and I bantered in with faux-gay affections, and it suddenly made me feel terrible for Kim, who actually is gay. I later sought him out and even let him snuggle with me near the fire (he has a bit of a crush on me) just to show I wasn't a monster. I also immediately regretted something disparaging I'd said about "screens" (as in smartphones) to one of Mark's teenage nieces, and actually apologized to her for having said that. This was such an unusual thing for an adult to have done that one of her sisters was heard to ask, "What just happened?"
But the ultimate political chore came when I learned that the dogs were all freaking out about probably-illegal fireworks being launched by Mark's brother Mike (the father of the girl I'd apologized to). Some of the dogs had actually crossed Old 209 and went down to the mud flats on the banks of the Esopus to get away from the noise. When I learned this, I was determined that the fireworks be shut down. I told Nancy my feelings about this, and she was agreeable, and so too was Ray. (Though I couched it by saying that I'd been selected by the dogs as their advocate in the human world and that they were petitioning for the fireworks to end.) It soon turned out that the only constituency for continued firework launching was Mike himself. Not even his kids were particularly interested in them. So getting the fireworks shut down so the dogs could have a better party experience wasn't difficult. But at the time (being as stoned as I was), it felt a little like the sort of political intrigue one sees in Game of Thrones. When I told Gretchen this, she laughed and said I only felt this way because I'd been smoking pot and that in a normal frame of mind what I was doing was just typical social interaction.
Ray was delighted when I didn't go home with Gretchen, choosing to stay at his party instead. But I ended up catching the next plausible ride (with Susan & David) only about fifteen minutes later. But, being as stoned as I was, those fifteen minutes felt like an hour or two.
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