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Boxing Day, 2018
Wednesday, December 26 2018
Last night, both of our dogs had spent considerable time out in the cold barking monotonously at something, It was the kind of bark they do in response to things heard in the distance (as opposed to critters they've treed nearby). Perhaps they'd heard coyotes howling at the moon (now three-quarters full and waning). Whatever the dogs had been up to had left Neville with some sort of problem with one of his hind legs, making it so he didn't want to put weight on it.
Not all that many people were in the office workplace today, so when the fire alarm interrupted my work by going off a second time, I decided to head home to maybe finish the workday off there. There were also some things I needed to see for myself in the ongoing kitchen renovation. As I approached Dug Hill Road on Hurley Mountain Road, I saw no fewer than four red-tailed hawks perched atop separate telephone poles. That has to be a record, at least for the short mile-long section of road.
I got back to the house a little before 3:00pm and immediately went out to the garage to unbox the oven to have a clearer idea of what its requirements were. I'd assumed it was a gas-powered oven, since it was replacing the oven part of a gas-powered range. But today it had turned out it was all-electric. This meant that we no longer needed to run a gas line to it, which was the good news. But the bad news was that now we needed to find the box where the 240 volt outlet for the old electric range (immediately ripped out by Gretchen the day we moved here, way back in 2002) was in the wall. It had already been buried behind new cabinets. Fortunately, I'd been careful to photographically document the locations of all the electrical boxes in the kitchen before any of the new cabinets were added. I talked to Colin about this, and he said this meant it would be easy for us to open up a hole in the back of the cabinet for a 240 outlet. From there we could run cable along the back of the cabinet (behind the drawers) to the new oven.
When I looked at the oven itself, I saw that its own wires only appeared to be 10 gauge copper, which meant that I already had the wire necessary to hook it up. Indeed, I'd have to be lowering the value of the circuit breaker in the basement from 50 amps to 30 amps so as to prevent a fire should there ever be a short inside the oven itself.
This evening I drove to Woodstock to meet Gretchen at the end of her bookstore shift. From there we drove directly to a Boxing Day party in Bearsville at the home of our friends Peter & Alison. (We hadn't wanted to bring any of our dogs to that party, so Gretchen had left Neville home today, and I'd also left Ramona home so they would have each other.)
It was an older, less-familiar crowd at Peter & Alison's place tonight. (There was one unfortunate youth there, a teenager of indeterminate gender. He/she did, however, have a smartphone with which to interact.) Gretchen and I didn't really know any of the people there except for our good friend Chrissy, who'd just returned from Spain with a certificate in trapeze-yoga instruction (?!). She and Gretchen spent considerable time discussing her future in the aftermath of the worst year of Chrissy's life, a year during which her husband impulsively left her and a family of tame crows she's known for four years failed to return. She has pretty much decided to sell her gorgeous Victorian house in Kingston, which she (and her estranged husband) had been using as an AirBnB cash cow. Chrissy has hopes of buying some land in an inexpensive township nearby and perhaps setting up an AirBnB campground. I wasn't much of a participant in this conversation, though there was a brief tangent to discuss the new slightly flamboyant outfit I'd selected, finally transcending my usual pallette of olive green, black, grey, and brown. I was mostly eating chips with guacamole and drinking red wine, though I'd started with a shot of single malt scotch.
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