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carwash 2019
Saturday, April 6 2019
After Saturday morning coffee, I decided to begin working on the upstairs bathroom cabinet replacment project. Gretchen had ordered a replacement from Etsy or some such place, and it's a beautiful piece of furniture that looks to be made of walnut. I'd wanted one that could actually fit inside the wall, if possible, and this particular one was only for in-wall installation. So I got a four inch hole saw and used it to cut a hole centered above the center of the upstairs' bathroom sink. I'd been thinking about what I would find in there and hoped there wouldn't be a vent pipe, but sure enough there was one. It wasn't a small one either; it was three inches thick and black (meaning it was made of ABS plastic, not the usual PVC). How was I going to move that monstrosity? Maybe I could cut it out and replace it with a smaller pipe pushed to the back of the stud bay. But there wasn't much room for connecting things at the top of the stud bay (which was only 70 inches above the floor, the necessary headroom being provided by a cathedral ceiling). Perhaps I could just mount the cabinet part-way into the wall and then trim it with strips of wood to match its existing materials. A third option was to mail the cabinet back and try to get something else. I really thought the partially-into-the-wall-with-strips option would be the best, but Gretchen was concerned it would end up looking like shit. I even proposed getting a second identical cabinet and mounting them side-by-side in the wall, with the gap between them (where the pipe ran) centered above the sink, but Gretchen didn't want to do that either. In hopes of finding a solution, I did a large number of internet searches. In Google, for example, I found out the minimum necessary diameter of a vent stack. It turns out there really is none. On Ebay and elsewhere, I learned about eccentric pipe fittings, which would allow a narrow pipe to connect to the end of a bigger pipe flush against the bigger pipe's side (instead of centered in the middle of the bigger pipe). This sort of thing would be necessary if I had any hope of making enough space in the wall for the cabinet (which was 3.5 inches deep).
It ended up being a glorious sunny spring day, with highs in the low 60s, which quickly burned away yesterday's snow. Just because of all the firewood available in the house, though, we also kept a fire burning all day in the stove, which made things embarrassingly pleasant. I haven't gathered firewood in nearly a week, and we have over three tranches of firewood in the woodshed and about a fifth of a tranche piled up in the living room. That's how things happen as heating season goes out with its usual whimper.
For date night tonight, Gretchen made a reservation at Black Eyed Suzie's in Saugerties so we'd be sure to have a table there at 6:30pm. At first when I looked at the menu, I wasn't sure I'd be able to find something suitable for my culinary preferences. There were, for example, sweet potatoes in all that places one would normally see regular potatoes, and I have great difficulty eating sweet potatoes. Their cloying sweetness and gummy texture conflicts with what I want across multiple dimensions. But then it turned out that the black bean soup had no identifiable sweet potatoes in it, and the large orange lumps in my chick pea stew were actually some sort of squash (and I've come to like squash over the last 12 years or so). My beer was a Farmer's Daugher Rye IPA, which wasn't great (I've never had a rye IPA that was), but it was plenty drinkable. Overall, the food was better than expected given the healthy vibe the restaurant is going with.
On the way home, Gretchen went a bit out of our way to patronize a carwash at the place where Albany Avenue becomes 9W. I didn't remember having ever been to a carwash before (my parents had no use for such places, with my father insisting they were bad for automotive paint), but as we went through I flashed back on some other time in a carwash, perhaps with Gretchen or Bathtubgirl. It kind of reminded me of going through a haunted house, and made me wonder if haunted carwashes are a thing.
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