|
|
|
cleaning out the mobile toolshed
Saturday, August 6 2016
[REDACTED]
Tomorrow, Gretchen and I would be driving to the Adirondacks to spend another vacation at a cabin on Twenty Ninth Pond. As usual, this meant we'd have to be cleaning up the house in preparation for our housesitters. I'd already done the necessary lawn work, and had also cleaned out the refrigerator, and Gretchen had done some cleaning in the house, so there wasn't much to be done there aside from vacuuming. But I also had to clean out the Subaru, which had become something of a mobile toolshed and supply closet for my many brick mansion chores. Given the marginal nature of its access road, we would need that car for driving to the cabin, and we'd be carrying a lot of supplies. What with the chaotic mix of tools, parts, trash, and receipts, the Subaru took a long time to clean. I expected to be mercilessly attacked by mosquitoes the whole time, but their numbers must be thinning out because they weren't too bad.
Later this evening, I preloaded everything I'd be needing on my laptop in the Adirondacks, including webtrees for the two websites I spend most of my time on for The Organization, all my Arduino code (I might find some time to do some work on that stuff), an MP3ified copy of the Lemonheads discography, the lastest season of Orange is the New Black, Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, a horror movie recommended for me by my boss called Rubber, and a few PDFs of books.
This evening, a structural engineer from the engineering firm Gretchen contacted about legitimizing our solar deck project showed up for another examination. This was the boss of the guy who had come out the other day, and he was on his way from attending a tennis game with his young wife or girlfriend, who looked to be from southeast Asia. He mentioned something about doing a lot of work in Thailand, so perhaps she was from there. The engineer looked it over and talked a little about adding a few more diagonals, upgrades that would be easy for me to install. Usually engineers looking at my crazy structures (and we've had three of them now) are strictly no-nonsense, and this guy was no exception, though he did seem to have some interest in my solar panels. Later, his wife/girlfriend, who'd initially been frightened of the dogs, put down her smartphone, climbed out of the Mini Cooper, and admired the garden. It's looking lush and bountiful these days now that all the sunflowers have unfurled and are tracking the sun.
For most of the day while I did my various chores, Gretchen was off at Bard College attending some sort of grand classical music festival of the sort that would've made me restless and yearn to be taking better advantage of my precious weekend freetime.
Meanwhile, Neville and Ramona stayed in bed well into the afternoon, having evidently exhausted themselves during last night's Porcupine adventure. Neville eventually got up at around 4:00pm, but Ramona (who was still zonked out from the general anæsthetic she'd been put under to remove the quills) didn't stumble out of the bed until 6:00pm.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160806 feedback
previous | next |
