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inherently-rectangular
Sunday, November 25 2018
Rain had been expected yesterday, though it didn't come until some time during our watching of Bohemian Rhapsody in Saugerties. It had mostly ended by this morning, allowing me to salvage another backpack of that delicious dry oak from below where the Chamomile crosses the Stick Trail.
With that out of the way, I set out with Ramona on a landlording chore at the Brewster Street property. There was a checklist of three items, and it looked like I might need to be building custom braces or machining out a custom piece of wood. So our first stop was out on 9W. I needed staples such as beans, corn chips, breakfast cereal, and fruit juice, which took me into the ShopRite. It being in season, the fruit juice I bought was two liters of apple cider. Evidently the Sunday after Thanksgiving is one of the bigger grocery shopping days of the year; perhaps that is the typical day on which the leftovers run out. I hoped I could maybe (for once in my life) make it through the self-checkout without it bitching at me, but of course this didn't happen. In the process of trying to add another can to the already awkwardly-stacked cans in one of my reusable cloth bags (which these systems really weren't designed for), the cans toppled and the weight sensor returned data suggesting I was trying to pull a fast one. Had I been, my white privilege would've had my back; the harried woman administering the robots came over with her barcode badge and swiped me instantly back into the realm of the innocuous.
At the Home Depot next door, I bought a treated two by four, a treated two by six, a replacement metric nuts for my chainsaw (they keep falling off, and the replacements are not the kind of things one has many of in a jar full of assorted nuts and bolts), a lockable doorknob set, some bungee cords (one recently broke on my firewood-hauling backpack), and a Ryobi circular handsaw compatible with my lithium-ion batteries ($80). I had been resisting the purchase of that handsaw for months, but today's project was going to require either that or a 120 volt handsaw (and, at Brewster Street, one never knows how easy it will be to get to electricity). When I went through checkout, the woman asked if I wanted a protection plan for my saw. I did not. If I was into such plans, not only would I have to have terrible financial sense, but I'd also have to have much better organization skills than I do just to keep track of what plans I had paid for and whether or not they are still valid.
At the Brewster Street house, my first chore was another repair of the railing alongside the front steps. The tenant had suggested that the problem was the ground shifting around, but that definitely didn't appear to be the problem. The rail had simply come off, probably because someone had been unnecessarily rough with it. It was a simple matter to reattach it. I then used super-long lag bolts to secure it (and similar rails) in multiple places.
Then I went around back to deal with the second task: making the backdoor latchable. The door was to a porch that had sagged in unfortunate ways over time, meaning the inherently-rectangular door was now trying to plug a hole shaped like a parallelogram. This had been compensated for somewhat, but the place where the latch was supposed to go wasn't finding a sure enough hole to push into. So the door could be pulled open even when locked. I quickly decided that the best solution was to machine out a replacement for the improvised solution apparently made by a hillbilly carpenter as well as the semi-destroyed frame above and below it. It was good I'd brought my chisel, as there was other tool that could have so precisely allowed me to removed the bad old material or finish the new material that would replace it. I machined that material out of the treated two by four using the brand new saw, which cut surprisingly powerfully given that it was battery-powered. At some point, I went and got Ramona so she could join me in the backyard, though she ended up hanging out on the back porch as I worked. Meanwhile the neighbor to the south was stringing up Christmas lights. I happened to notice at some point that our tenant had installed a massive above-ground pool in their backyard. Filling that thing had man-made lake probably accounted for the $1000 unpaid water bill Gretchen learned about a month or so ago. Things are definitely happening at this house that Gretchen never would've wanted had she known they would be happening. Whenever I am there, there's always a mix of people coming or going or ducking out onto the porch to make sketchy phone calls (one I overheard today involved a young white man defending himself against accusations of having sex with some woman at a funeral party). And it's not just mysterious adults making appearances. As I worked on the back door, I kept hearing the sounds of little children inside, none of whom belonged to any of the people living there. Sometimes they'd raise a shade enough to peek on me.
The third task involved an antique interior doorknob that had apparently fallen off and vanished. I decided to table dealing with that until all the parts were either found or declared lost.
Back home, we still had a couple hours of precious daylight. So I rolled a handtruck a short distance down the Farm Road thinking I might fell a smallish (though substantial) skeletonized oak hung up in the trees (it was just below where the Farm Road runs along the edge of the escarpment above the Stick Trail). But when I looked at the snagged tree up close, I judged it too dangerous to deal with using only a saw. So I let it be and felled two easier trees nearby, one a dead white pine and the other a dead white ash. Both were small enough that their core wood would be dry, though the remnants of lichen-covered bark on both were still soggy from recent rains. The load I assembled ended up being bigger than anything I could've carried on a backpack, so I wheeled out to Dug Hill Road and then back into our driveway and up to the front door of the house, where I gradually started bringing pieces inside.
I then got a pot of water boiling and began making chunky pasta with red sauce, one of the two things I cook, so Gretchen would have something to eat when she got off work.
As I did my firewood salvaging and cooking today, I listened to episodes from a recently-ended Slate podcast series entitled The Secret History of the Future. In these, we're shown examples from history of technological innovations (or paths to innovations) that we think of as thoroughly modern. Most of these were familiar to me; 20 years ago I remember reading a fascinating article pointing out the many similarities between the 19th Century electrical telegraph network and the internet of today. And I was also somewhat familiar with the tale of how the chromometer came to be invented, though I didn't know all the details. The Secret History of the Future is deeper and smarter than I'd expected, and I'm disappointed at how few episodes of it exist.
My Sundays are probably my biggest work days, since the work I do on them tends to be more relentless than the sort of work I do on any other day. Even in the evening I was doing chores such as washing and folding laundry. At some point in amongst all that, I took a bath. In a way, though, that too is a chore. I have to be clean before beginning my work week, especially after two sweaty days of firewood salvaging and landlording.
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