|
|
|
demented strangeness
Tuesday, August 2 2016
It's infuriating that a tenant would demand that their fucking kitchen sink sprayer be functional, but that's the kind of tenant we have in apartment #2 at the brick mansion. She pays a lot of rent, so perhaps such demands aren't completely unreasonable, but they feel faintly sadistic. So on my way there this morning, I stopped at the Home Depot to get a sprayer hose and a nozzle, among other things.
My first visit at the brick mansion was to the 1L, where dripping condensation was still a problem in the refrigerator. This time I took the back panel off the freezer and found an aluminum pan that might've slightly askew. More to the point, though, the refrigerator might've been leaning too far forward to both close the door effectively and for the condensation from its coils to drain into the correct hole. I didn't have any conveniently-shaped piece of wood or even a proper saw. But I did have a reciprocating power saw and some PVC, and somehow I managed to split the PVC down the middle to make two half-cylinders, one for each caster at the front of the refrigerator. The idea was to cup the casters inside the half-cylinders to raise it slightly. In practice, I could only get one of these onto one of the casters. Hopefully all of this will make a difference, though I'm doubtful. Helpfully, because the day took a turn for the cooler and drier, that might be enough to end her condensation problem for the time being.
While I was fussing with the PVC, the tenant from 2 was getting into her car to run some errand and she tried to tell me about two more problems in her apartment. That wasn't what I wanted to hear. "Email Gretchen," I said, perhaps using insufficient hostility.
Next I went up to 2 and tried to replace the fucking kitchen sink sprayer, but of course there insufficient room behind the bowls of the sink to remove the hose from the faucet mechanism. I eventually hit on a plan to cut the hose in some easily-reachable place and splice it to the new hose using a double-barbed brass junction fitting, but that would require going out for supplies. And when I went to leave, I locked the door behind me by turning the little locker mechanism from the inside. But then I wondered if I had a key for that particular lock. It turned out that I didn't. So I had to leave my tools behind and the sink in an unfinished state and head back home.
This afternoon at work, I attended a video conference tutorial about SCSS/Gulp, frontend technologies that I won't normally be using. I'd told Da I should attend just to avoid being a "remote, enigmatic" backend developer. I spent the meeting trying to pay attention to the interesting parts but finding myself becoming increasingly sleepy. Fortunately, I had other windows to entertain me and there's a lot of news these days about the ongoing post-convention Trump implosion.
Later, we had an engineer come out to look at our solar deck. The previous engineer flaked out on us after asking me to add more details to my drawings, so now Gretchen has managed to cajole a different engineer into having a look. The guy today jiggled the deck around and evidently thought it moved a bit too much (though I have my doubts it would be possible to make a deck that would move much less than it does now). He said it might need bigger fasteners in some places, or perhaps longer struts. But he's not the main engineer, who will apparently have to come out due to the complexity of the structure. Believe it or not, though interrupted occasionally, then engineering limbo of this deck has been going on for nearly eleven years now, nearly a quarter of Gretchen's life.
Meanwhile Gretchen has also been trying to sell off bits and pieces of the old heating plant at the brick mansion. Today she went over there to wait for the arrival of someone responding to a Craigslist listing for the old hot water heater. At first the guy said he was stuck in traffic and then said he was 20 minutes away. And then he called to ask if perhaps he was getting close. It turned out that at the time he was trying to drive to some neighborhood called Kingston in Queens (though he was responding to a listing in the Hudson Valley Craigslist). At that point Gretchen gave up and drove home. She called me from the road, exasperated by his unprecedented levels of "tardation." The guy had been using GPS, how could he have done something so manifestly stupid? We've largely had good luck with Craigslist, but we've found that the cheaper the item for sale, the more marginal (and, in some cases, "tarded") the people responding to the listing.
Between that fuckup, my locking myself out of an apartment in the brick mansion, the craziness of Donald Trump's campaign, and the unnervingly autumnal weather that has suddenly descended, the day had a demented strangeness about it. It made me want to go to bed early. But I took a bath first, my second in two days. (I almost never take baths on consecutive nights.)
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160802 feedback
previous | next |
