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skeletonized varmint in the yard Tuesday, September 17 2024
location: room 305, Klassik Hotel, Berlin Germany
Gretchen had set her alarm for something like 7:15am this morning so we'd have plenty of time to make it to the airport. But I was up early, still tinkering with the code I'd been working on yesterday. It took us only a few minutes to put on our clothes, grab our bags, and leave the hotel, and it was a short walk to the train station. Again we rode unticketed, this time to a big central station having a train running directly to the big international airport (a public transportation no-brainer that is unusual in American cities). Somehow we randomly managed to run into Robin from the boat (and her semi-autistic husband) yet again while we were checking in for our flight (for some reason the software hadn't allowed Gretchen to check in online). They would be on our flight, but of course they would be in business class, where, as we mutter as we walk past, "it must be nice."
Getting through security wasn't difficult, even though we were carrying a container of that fairly soupy noodle dish from Dervish, that Uzbek restaurant. The severe blond woman working security had seemed like a hard ass with other people as we waited in line, but when she saw that, she gave it a second look, shrugged, and said it was fine. That said, Gretchen was pulled aside twice, once at initial security and a second time at the gate, for additional security procedures. But it was more annoying than anything else.
Our plane was on time and, since we would be near the back, we were among the very last people to board. We waited so long that there was hardly anyone in our way as we went to our seats. On this flight, the plane was extra wide and had the two aisles, and our seats were two between the aisle and window on the port side in row 43. I immediately tried to watch a movie in the Planet of the Apes franchise called Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (which is maybe one too many "of the"s in a title). I was intrigued by the special effects needed to produce acting apes, and I had fond memories of reading the original Planet of the Apes novel as a teenager. But whatever was happening in it was just not compelling enough for me to keep watching. So I eventually switched to watching Civil War, a dystopian movie that imagines American polarization being exacerbated to the point where factional fighting breaks out. It was a little formulaic for my tastes, but my movie standards are lower on airplanes, especially once the ambien starts to kick in. (I popped my ambien after the drink cart came around and I got my glass of red wine.)
I slept for over half of the eight hour flight. When I finally woke up and checked the map, our plane was approaching Newfoundland. I continued checking our position using Google Maps on my phone and was surprised to see that the location would sit for a long time in some town and then instantly jump to the next. The plane had free WiFi, so it's possible the location was somehow coming via that system, since it's hard to imagine that satellite-based positioning would behave that way. By this point I'd gone back to watching episodes of Tracker.
But then I nodded off again, waking up with a start when the airline attendant gave me my second meal of the flight, a savory curry-flavored pastry. It was much better than a sweet potato curry I'd eaten before the ambien knocked me out. (I'd also eaten the leftover chanterelle linguine with big slabs of Gretchen's schnitzel from Försters.)
Upon landing, Gretchen and I did what we always do when arriving on international flights: we ran as quickly as we could past as many of the others on our plane as we could, occasionally mumbling the Wicked Witch of the West theme as we did. We really outdid ourselves this time, and when we got to immigration, we only had to wait a few minutes before we were processed and free to walk about America. The wait for the shuttle to take us to where our car was parked was also amazingly brief.
Unfortunately, things didn't go so well after that. Traffic at that time (it was early afternoon) was terrible near the airport, and it continued to be bad all the way to the Tappan Zee Bridge (I know, it's not called that any more). Poor Gretchen was driving, and she ended up driving the whole way back to Hurley. Aside from the terrible traffic, little of note happened on the drive except that I saw my first ever Cybertruck somewhere in Queens.
When we got to the house, things were a little amiss. There was a fairly large dead rodent (probably a woodchuck, though it was so skeletonized and covered with maggots, it was hard to say) in the yard. Neville had apparently killed it at around the time that dog sitting duties were handed off from that weird gay couple to True, the daughter of the woman who runs the Garden Café. True had done a great job, but for some reason she'd just left that dead animal in the yard right in front of the house, stinking everything up. And Neville's face was still covered with scabs from the battle he'd evidently had with that poor varmint. Another issue was that the whole house now stunk of urine, and it wasn't even clear where the smell was coming from.
I didn't really have time to settle in once I was home, as there was an ongoing emergency at the Brewster Street rental. The tenant had complained about there not being hot water at two different faucets, and from her description, it sounded like maybe the water heater had failed. We'd had the tenant flip circuit breakers and even begun the process of finding a plumber to send there. But the tenant had been so slow in responding that it eventually became clear that my fixing it when we got back would be the fastest solution.
The first thing I did at Brewster was flip the circuit breaker off and on. And then I went to the water heater to see what was going on. To my surprise, it was full of hot water. What, was the water somehow not making it out of the tank? I went up to the kitchen and ran the hot water. It was a little slow, but not hot. Wow, there was hot water, but maybe the pipes were a little clogged? Upstairs, the shower was plenty hot. You would think the tenant might've told us that, especially when we had her flipping circuit breakers on a water heater that was clearly working well enough to produce hot showers. But this wasn't the first time she'd astounded me with her ignorance of how houses work.
The only real problem that I could find was with the hot water in the bathroom sink. The pipe was so clogged that it only came out at a trickle. I tried removing the flexible hose and cleaning its nozzle, which was jammed with lime scale. But this didn't fix the problem. So I tried sucking on it. That didn't improve things much either. What finally fixed it was to put unconnected end of the hot water hose into a container to catch any water coming from it and then run cold water from the tap. As I then switched the cold to hot, something in the mechanism directed some of that cold water backwards through the hot water pipe, and this flushed out the obstruction. For a few minutes there I'd feared I'd have to replace the faucet, but now it was working as good as new.
I shared news of my triumph with the next door neighbor Howard, who was working on his porch. I also mentioned that I'd woken up this morning in Berlin. Then I went into the back with a chainsaw to remove some of the woody debris back there, which was another thing the tenant had been complaining about.
On the way home, I stopped for some provisions at Hannaford: lettuce, tofu, tempeh, and beer. (The store is being completely remodeled and I couldn't find mushrooms or the generic diphenhydramine I like.) I drank one of those beers on the drive home to celebrate another landlording success.
It was about 7:00pm when I went to bed, which, according the schedule my body was still on, was 1:00am.
A bit of New England or Long Island coastline as we approached JFK early this afternoon.
Click to enlarge.
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