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improvised landlording
Tuesday, May 20 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
On the drive home from work on Milldam Road at about 3:40pm (4:20 nowhere!), a presumably-stoned fisherman began unexpectedly stepping away from his car on a trajectory to go fishing in Milldam Pond across the road. This trajectory took him right in front of my oncoming car, though he never looked for cars before starting his walk. I slammed on my brakes and narrowly missed hitting him. It's possibly that the Chevy Bolt was partly to blame because of how silently its electric motor runs. But I was going at a speed where tire noise is typically louder than any engine, so that probably wasn't the case.
After I got back home, I loaded up a screen door and a somewhat transportable air conditioner into the Subaru Forester and drove out to the brick mansion on Downs Street in Kingston to install them in the big attic apartment. The people living in there right now are actually subletters (an arrangement Gretchen had okayed), and they helped with getting the bulky things I'd brought up the stairs, particularly the heavy air conditioner.
I immediately turned my attention to the screen door replacement. The old screen door has been badly bent for years yet could be used, but it didn't move smoothly and constantly threatened to collapse. To remove it, I had to first remove two outer glass doors. When I did this, it struck me that they were completely unnecessary, as there were two other glass doors, both double-glazed, that could completely seal the doorway and lock in place. Then it turned out that the new screen door I'd bought to replace the old one was about 3/4 of an inch too short! Supposedly there was an adapter kit one could buy to make it taller, but that hadn't been included. I'd already flung the old screen door to the ground, so it was probably too busted to put back in place. So I was going to have to improvise a solution. By perching the rollers at the bottom of the screen door on top of one of the dividers between the tracks, I was able to raise it up high enough for its upper rollers to engage a similar divider between tracks at the top. And then I could change the tension of the rollers to secure it pretty solidly. There was still a quarter inch gap at the top and bottom, but it was a good enough improvisation for now. As for the extra sliding glass doors, I'd decided to store them in the basement.
After that, I installed the air conditioning unit. It was the kind with two ducts on it, and those ducts both need to reach the outdoors. (There are also one-duct air conditioners, but they create a vacuum in the space they are cooling, which encourages hot outdoor air to encroach through every crack.) The air conditioner had come with a plastic panel to place in a window to be sealed in place by sliding down a window pane to press down against it. This panel included two holes to be attached to ducts leading to the air conditioner. But the panel was just a little too wide for the window I wanted to use. Fortunately, though, all I had to do was snip off a small amount of plastic from the panel (another improvisation!) to make it narrow enough to slot into the tracks on either side of the window opening, and then all I had to do was install the ducts.
Meanwhile Gretchen, who had been at pilates, returned and made herself a meal based around a very dense head of iceberg lettuce she'd just bought. (Both of us have recently gotten into iceberg lettuce, the trashiest of white trash vegetables.) Gretchen also cooked up some asparagus, and, since I'd been snacking fairly heavily, all I had for dinner was that asparagus and a strong imperial IPA.
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