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taking out their trash Tuesday, August 10 2021
At around noon I drove down to Rhinebeck to get falafel at Cathy's lunch-only falafel restaurant. Gretchen had said she wanted falafel if I was going there, so I got her one too (but, because Gretchen doesn't actually like falafel or cucumber, it contained more of everything else (except the pita). Cathy was doing a brisk business, and the queue I joined streteched nearly 20 feet out the door. Everyone waiting in line was looking at their phone reading stuff on their phones. Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, had just said he would be resigning his office in 14 days due to a long-running groping scandal. (I always hated Cuomo; he's been a terrible Democrat and done more in his career to advance conservative causes than any Republican could've ever managed to do. One of the few good things Cuomo did was sign a bill legalizing cannabis, though that was just to throw the hounds off his groping scandal.) Unlike Republicans, Democrats are good about taking out their trash. (Republicans, by contrast, take their worst trash and deify it.)
After work, I got a two by six and a two by twelve of treated lumber, two 60 lb bags of gravel, and a large pull handle, some short carriage bolts, and some long self-tapping screws at the Home Depot. I then drove out to the Brewster Street house and immediately began the work of rebuilding the bottom step up to the front porch. Eric had already applied primer to those steps, including the old bottom step, which I'd awkwardly put atop the concrete blocks I'd installed yesterday. The new bottom step would be a full two-by-twelve. Before I could put that in position, I first had to make the top surfaces of the concrete blocks all fit into the same plane, which I achieved by digging down to a very hard rock layer and then backfilling with gravel. As for the actual step, I was able to fix it firmly in place with a series of short pieces of the same board serving as a punctuated riser. I was in the Bolt, unfortunately, and so didn't have any deck screws. I could recycle a few old rusty ones, which was just enough to keep the boards of the punctuated riser from wiggling out of place. But when I tried to use a long self-tapping screw to secure the longest of the riser pieces, my torx bit proved a bit too small and, after achieving something modest, started turning uselessly inside of the screw's head, and I was forced to leave it that way, sticking up about an inch. Good thing it was on the edge of the steps.
I also installed a large handle on the side door. This would've normally required drilling two holes, one for each end of the bow-shaped handle. But there was already one suitable hole; it looked like maybe it was a bullet hole from a .32 pistol, the kind of damage that doesn't surprise me from the last tenant. (It turns out it's very easy to drill a hole even through a steel door.)
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