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not much life in a West Hurley woodchuck
Saturday, April 29 2017
At noon, I drove into Uptown Kingston to pick up a washing machine and a dryer at a house directly across the street from the family court building where Gretchen and I got married fourteen years ago. When I arrived a woman with wildly unnatural red hair was just taking a lawnmower out of her vehicle to mow the lawn. The house was, it turned out, one of her rentals. She was very helpful in getting the dryer loaded, making a number of correct suggestions when I tried to do boneheaded things. I decided to transport the equipment one unit at a time, since the drive would only be across town.
At the Brewster Street, a couple measurements indicated I needed to remove the two by four handrail down into the basement. But even with that out of the way, the dryer just barely fit in the stairway. Still, I was able to get it down those stairs all by myself. I was in front of it and eased it down each step gradually.
When I came back with the washing machine, one of the subcontractors who had been sanding the floors in the Brewster Street house helped me wrestle it down those stairs. It was heavier but physically slightly smaller, so I probably could've done it by myself. The floor guy wanted to show me a situation with the floor upstairs, so I went and looked. There were some old divots in the boards that were proving impossible to sand smooth. Might it make better sense to just stain the floor instead of sanding it all the way down and covering it with poly? I told him I'd talk to Gretchen about it. It's possible he was just trying to get out of doing a lot of work, but doing so much sanding would also produce an enormous amount of dust and leave us with thinner floors with a shorter lifespan.
I drove out to Home Depot to buy some supplies for installing the washer and dryer. This included enough treated lumber to build a low platform (just five inches above the basement's concrete floor) to set the new appliances on. I also needed hoses, a dryer vent, and everything to build out the electrical infrastructure the appliances would need to connect to. I forgot some things before going through the checkout line one time, but I remembered before leaving and circled around to make another set of purchases. Then it was time for a much-needed Chipotle burrito, which I devoured in probably less than two minutes seated by myself in Chipotle's small charmless outdoor area. It was an unseasonably warm, and the sweat from wrestling those appliances into the basement had only just finished drying.
Back at Brewster Street, I installed the platform and the appliances on top of them. I would've done the wiring, but it was too dark in the basement to work with just a flashlight. So instead I sanded and spray-painted the appliances, greatly improving their appearance but poisoning the basement atmosphere. Rich, the general contractor, tried to talk to me about what to do with the old oil tank, and I had to cut him short so we could get some fresh air.
Once I'd returned home, I ingested a recreational 25 milligram dose of amphetamine salts (the kind I have to grind up and mix with water) because it felt like something the weekend could use.
When I'd left the house to pick up the appliances today, the dogs had been off somewhere in the woods. They'd returned by the time I made it home, though it was after 4:00pm by then. With the amphetamine salts not yet kicked-in, I decided to make a completely unnecessary run to the Tibetan Center thrift store, partially just to have something to do with the dogs and make it up to them that I'd been gone all afternoon. I found an unusual amount of loot to buy at the thrift store, including a hand mirror, an illuminated mirror (with a concave mirror I can use for starting fires), and a cheap old Tasco Novice telescope that was missing some important things (but later turned out to accept the eyepiece from a Galileoscope, of which I have two).
Next, I took the dogs into West Hurley Park, since I know how much they love that place (and the attractive nuissance of that deer corpse is gone). There were already a couple people throwing a ball for a dog on a leash near our usual parking area, so I parked over near the tennis courts instead. Ramona went nuts immediately after getting out of the car, and soon was bearing down on an exceedingly slow-moving (and fat) woodchuck. The poor thing tried to amble away, but Ramona was on it and killing it before I could do anything. By the time I got to the scene, the woodchuck was nearly dead and there wasn't much I could do. Normally woodchucks have a lot more life in them than this, so perhaps it was already on the verge of death. When it seemed it had no life it, Ramona rolled it over with her nose a few times and then just lay next to it, not doing what I would've expected: eating it. I wondered if she had intentions of being here all night. If so, I was going to hatch a plan. In the meantime, I called Neville and gradually got him to give up on Ramona and climb into the car. By then, it seemed Ramona was tired of her dead woodchuck, and she climbed into the car too. I decided to leave the woodchuck for the coyotes and vultures, who certaintly had more use for it than Ramona or Neville did.
It was cloudy this evening, so the best I could do with the thrift store telescope was attempt to look at distant trees. Later tonight I went out to bring the telescope back into the house, and when I moved it, I felt a cold clammy hand grab onto my calf (which was bare; I was wearing shorts). I looked down and saw that a treefrog had briefly landed on my leg and then jumped down to the deck. That was the first time I'd ever had an arboreal amphibian leap onto me.
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