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another stage of Kübler-Rossian grief
Saturday, January 7 2017
After Saturday morning coffee, Gretchen and I drove into Kingston for a number of things. First we went to Carpet One to talk to Andy, the guy who's been selling or installing our floors since 2002. We needed more boxes of tile for Gretchen's library, though we hadn't thought to measure first. Andy seemed harried and overworked and asked us if we knew bookkeepers (it turns out we do!). Fortunately, the kind of tile we needed was not a discontinued product, something the tech world has trained me to expect.
Next we went to newish restaurant on Broadway called Peace Nation Café to meet up with Susan, David, Julianna, and Lee. Recently when I'd first heard of Peace Nation Café it sounded too good to be true: a vegan-friendly Latin-American restaurant on Broadway, only a couple blocks from the Brick Mansion. Even now, Broadway is familiar more for its desperate-looking pedestrians, no-nonsense working class food joints, and businesses catering to a largely Hispanic demographic. And while Peace Nation Café has a Latin-American menu, its interest in pleasing vegan and health-conscious customers is a decidedly new thing on Broadway. It's more the kind of thing you might expect in Uptown or perhaps a different city entirely. I ordered the three different tacos (one with fake chicken, the other with fake beef, and third with mixed vegetables) and a side of rice and beans. To this, I added a considerable amount of hot sauce (they had three different unfamiliar kinds, none of them all that hot). Maybe I'm now too much of a vegan for them because I didn't much like the fake meats; I would've preferred something more identifiable like seitan or tempeh. But the rice, beans, and vegetables were great, as were the soft flour tortillas.
At our table, the women were all to my left and the men to my right, and I think it was Susan who said that "only men" like the spookily-meatlike fake chicken made by Beyond Meat. Another snippet of conversation had me breastfeeding a snake from my "man-teat," and then there was the tale of how Lee's brother's neighborhood in Venice (California) came to be overrun by rats after that brother's kosher food delivery internet startup failed and he moved all its inventory into his garage. There was, of course, the inevitable conversation about Trump, much of which just rehashed earlier points from earlier conversations. But since then it's possible I'd moved on to a new stage of grief, one Kübler-Ross might've neglected: schadenfreude. "I've decided to enjoy what I can from the Trump Administration," I declared somewhat optimistically. David seemed to agree.
That group of people could have sat there talking until darkness (at least at this time of year). But I had another thing I needed to do that required daylight, so at some point I said "we're burning daylight," which gave everyone else who wanted to go (particularly David) exactly what they needed.
I left Gretchen with Susan and headed off to Home Depot on my own in our Subaru. The plan now was to buy whatever pickets I could find, cut them to length, and use them to fill-in whatever gap was left by removing the broken pickets in the fence behind the Brick Mansion. If the replacement pickets were wider than their neigbors or lacked the correct cut at the top, so be it. With this in mind, I bought six 5.5-inch-wide 72-inch-long treated pine pickets, yet more hardware, and drove out to the mansion. The day was a cold one (at least by recent standards) and working barehanded outside (you can't do such work with gloves) was an unpleasant chore. And, because I'd forgotten to bring the powerdrill's phillip bit, so I had to put in all the wood screws the old-fashioned way, the way Mommy and Daddy made you. The crossbar was broken in two places, but I mended it with two thick pieces of steel used as splints. Then I found a short piece of fencing with almost exactly the right pickets on it in the garage. But when it became clear that removing the pickets was just going to destroy them (the nails had an uncommonly-strong gripping power), I reverted to the original plan. The new pickets looked a little odd there in the context of its narrower, pointier companions, but the main thing that was different about them was their coloration, which would've been different even if I'd found exact replacements. I'd noticed, by the way, that Home Depot actually does sell the exact pickets I need, but only in the context of whole eight-foot-long panels. I suppose it works to their advantage to convince everyone that to fix a few broken pickets in such a panel the thing to do is to replace the panel itself. But I'm never going to be the sort of person who can be convinced of that, particularly when the chore of replacing the broken components is actually easier than the chore of replacing the panel.
Back at the house, Gretchen and Susan were just finished plotting what to do to make her basement library a usable space instead of a cold, musty room full of books. Part of the plan is to build out a little screened-in porch, which is a nice idea that would be fun to implement. But Susan had also introduced a really terrible idea: painting the new flooring I was about to put down. Evidently they'd both decided (or maybe it was just Susan, who had somehow convinced Gretchen) that the color of those faux wooden tiles wasn't quite right (even though Gretchen had selected it not two years before). The thing is, that material was never intended to be painted and there is a low chance that paint would stick to it and a zero chance that it would wear in a way that in any way resembled the way paint on wood wears. Eventually I got Gretchen to drop that idea, but it left me wondering what other reality-defying seeds had been planted.
While she was still there in our living room, I added some wood to the fire and then got it burning by blowing air through a thin copper pipe (a technique I'd learned from the book Norweigian Wood). Susan was so delighted by the technique that I ran upstairs and got a piece of brass pipe, which I cut to the length of my little pipe (because it seems about right). But Susan and David have two woodstoves, so I gave her both pieces.
This afternoon I finally got around to doing something I'd been procrastinating for months: I rooted my personal smartphone (the Samsung Galaxy Core Prime). This proved to be an extremely simple operation using a program called KingoRoot. All I did was install an application on my Windows machine, click a few buttons, plug in my phone, and the application did all the work. The main reason for rooting the phone was so I could use tethering applications without having to pay anything or see advertisements. Tethering is one of those things you just want to work and work reliably, and it seemed the only way to get that was to root my phone.
The tethering program that I managed to get working on my newly-rooted phone is something called Barnacle WiFi Tether. It works great, but out of the box it wants to make my phone into a hotspot with no password. I appreciate that attitude, yet that's not something I would want to do in, say, a crowded airport. But I couldn't figure out how to get to the necessary configuration screen. There was some reference in the documentation to my phone's "menu button," but a Samsung Galaxy Core Prime has no such button. In desperation, I hooked up a bluetooth keyboard, one with an actual menu button. This allowed me to find the configuration screen and make the necessary changes. Only then did I discover (by accident) that I could simulate a menu button press by letting my finger linger for a moment on the phone's "Application" button. (Oddly, there had been no mention of this technique anywhere in any of the places I'd searched.)
Of course, once my phone was rooted, I looked into all the other things I could do with it. Mostly those other things consist of uninstalling bloatware, though there are a number of power-monitoring apps that require a rooted phone. And once I ran one of those, I finally understood why my phone's battery lasts so little time on a charge. The culprit was the Facebook app, which seems to have been designed very poorly given the amount of money that certainly funded its development. (I know such apps can be written better; Slack has similar communication capabilities and has a negligible effect on power consumption.) I love Facebook and spend more time in Facebookville than I'd care to admit, but I don't love it on my phone, especially if it drains my battery at twice the normal rate. So I uninstalled it and replaced it with something called SlimSocial, which has far more modest needs.
Another important app for my newly-liberated smartphone was an SSH client so I can do technically-complicated server admin jobs. I eventually settled on an app called JuiceSSH, mostly because it stores login credentials in profiles, and I didn't want to have to type long, complicated passwords on an Android virtual keyboard. Another feature of JuiceSSH that I would have to pay for to use (it would be my first software purchase in a very long time) is a snippet collection, allowing me to store boilerplate Linux instructions for common activities. Being able to do that is probably worth the $5. (Hey kids! I still haven't really figured out how copy and paste function on a smartphone; all I know is that most of my attempts fail and the prospect of doing it fills me with dread.)
Yesterday Gretchen had had a few good gut-laughs while watching The Boss, a recent Melissa McCarthy vehicle. Tongith she watched it a second time, and I joined her for most of it. The writing was clever and good, but there were a few misplaced notes of slapstick in what didn't feel like a slapstick movie. And the laughs were a bit further apart than expected. Still, overall it was a good time.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170107 feedback
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