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fuck with the algorithm
Saturday, June 24 2017
After Saturday morning coffee, I drove over to the brick mansion to seal up the fireplace in 1L. The tenant had complained of birds and bird shit coming down the chimney and into her apartment. Sure enough, I found the flu wide open with no hardware to close it. Looking up the chimney with a flashlight, I saw it veer off at an angle such that no daylight was visible from above. I used an oscillating tool as a saw to cut pieces of scrapwood I'd bought into 6.5 inch wide boards, which I placed horizontally on their own on a little ledge where the flu might've been. Using spray foam, I sealed them all in place. This will probably make the apartment considerably less drafty in the winter, making it more comfortable and saving us enormously on heating (which we pay for in all the apartments). As the tenant noted, it was probably a good thing that birds had decided to come down that chimney to alert us to the problem.
Unfortunately, I managed to get spray foam on yet another of my teeshirts, this one a message shirt from the Physisicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine. The accident didn't even happen when I was spraying the foam; it came as I fumbled with my keys at the Subaru's hatched backdoor.
This afternoon I drank kratom tea and did things at and around my computer workstation. Among the projects I've been working on is the installation of OpenWRT (another kind of open source firmware) on a DGN3500 WiFi router with DSL. It would be nice to replace the last non-open-source router in the house (a Verizon-branded box with non-gigabit ethernet ports) with one I can modify endlessly. It turns out that OpenWRT installs on many devices that DD-WRT (my preferred open source firmware) does not. The OpenWRT interface isn't as nice, but it seems more flexible.
Late this afternoon, Gretchen and I drove into Midtown Kingston to a attend a house party on Pine Grove Avenue (a mysteriously wide street to nowhere that for some reason includes a median strip, see 41.925936N, 74.002036W). The party was being hosted by new friends we'd met at Chris & Kisti's vegan-hot-dog-cum-mentalist party. One was named Jenni and the other had an odd name I cannot remember. Let's call her Aix. When we arrived, Aix announced us to the others at the party with great fanfare, which was wonderful and odd at the same time, which seems to be a perfect description for Aix. Chris (of Chris & Kirsti) showed up soon after I did, and the three of us talked at some length about her primitive furniture, which she screws together from pieces of dimensional lumber bought at Home Depot. Later some guy named Kevin told Gretchen and me about a web series shot in Kingston for which he is an actor (he plays the nosy neighbor).
As the party wound down, Aix told the delightful story of how she met Jenni on Match.com. Aix said that, on a lark, she'd decided to fuck with the algorithm by demanding potential mates with all the features of conventional attractiveness. Doing this, she ended up with Jenni, who looks like she might be an actress in the leading female role in a romantic comedy. She's thin, blond, has blue eyes, perfect skin, the works. It was such an absurd result that Aix initially found the match suspect. Was Jenni really even a lesbian? But the whole thing worked out. They'd waited for New York to allow gay marriage before tying the knot.
For most of the party, I was being unusually honest about whether I actually did know the people I was talking to. Supposedly I'd met a bunch of them before (including the sister of a famous actress), though it was a long time ago and just meeting someone at a party whom I don't talk to is never enough to record anything in my long term memory. After a number of awkward experiences, I think I'll go back to smiling vacantly and acting like I know everyone.
Meanwhile, we'd gotten a text from Andrea back at the house saying Ramona had chewed off the tape and glue keeping her bear-injury wound together, and now it was gaping once more. She'd been wearing a cone of shame, which we'd recently replaced with an Elizabethan collar, and evidently that had afforded her too much flexibility.
Back at the house, I looked at the once-more open wound and said that she probably should get stitches after all, even though this would require a trip to the super-expensive emergency vet. $450 dollars later, Gretchen returned from that vet with a Ramona, whose wound had been professionally (and very neatly) stitched. The emergency vet had also given Ramona an injection of penicillin, which was prudent. Fortunately, he hadn't demanded to take x-rays.
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