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a brief babysitting gig
Thursday, October 23 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
I awoke a little before 5:00am because the dogs were crowding my side of the bed and, because they were both on top of the blankets, I'd been sort of squeezed out from under them and couldn't get warm. So I did what I often do in such cases: I went to the laboratory to sleep the last hour or so of the night on the bean bag. But when I lay down on that bean bag I felt an unpleasant cold dampness accompanied by the distinctive smell of dog urine. Clearly Neville had pissed in bed again, something he hadn't done for a couple months (and something he hadn't done in the bean bag for over a year). So I then had to spend the next twenty minutes gathering up the pissed-on blanket, washing out what I could of its urine, putting it (with other clothes) in the washing machine, and then do what I could to spot-clean where the urine had soaked into the bean bag itself. After all that, I lay down for the next forty or so minutes on the couch in the living room.
Gretchen drove down to the City today to spend the night and most of Friday. My plan was to drive to the Adirondacks, but our neighbor A needed a babysitter for a half hour or so this evening, so I stayed home for a few hours, taking Charlotte for a brief walk and finally securing the new plank I installed out on the east deck with some screws. Once I found out the dropoff time was 5:45pm, I was a little irritated to realize that now I'd have to drive to the cabin entirely in the dark, but being helpful has its inconveniences.
At about 5:50, A arrived to drop off her daughter. It was to be my first solo babysitting gig since I was a teenager. The daughter arrived with what was left of her "supper" (A is Canadian) and sat at our dining room table eating it while watching an episode of The Simpsons on her iPad. (She's like nine years old, so I hadn't expected her to be consuming media I could so easily comprehend.) I didn't want to be any sort of bother, so I left her alone and went off to do chores like the folding and putting away of the laundry forced by Neville's pissing on the bean bag early this morning. A's kid didn't end up interacting with me at all. I felt like I should "be around," so I hung out in the living room trying to pry apart an obscure LoRa device I'd never been able to get to work in hopes I might be able to make it into a Meshtastic node. A returned sooner than I expected (the thing she'd been to was a parent-teacher conference) and once she was there, her daughter was much friendlier, even excitedly showing me some world she'd just been building in Minecraft. She hadn't interacted with the dogs when it was just me with her, but once her mother was there, she got all up in their business. This is not to complain; babysitting her was the most effortless mitzvah I'd ever performed. I'd rather have A's daughter for the weekend than, say, Jack the dog. Unlike Jack, A's daughter knows how to keep herself amused.
Once A and her daughter were gone, I loaded up the dogs and began my drive to the Adirondack cabin, which happened entirely in the dark. Fortunately, we ran into no deer.
Temperatures inside the cabin were in the low 50s, so I started a fire and also ran the boiler to benefit from its hydronic heat. I ran into boiler errors about the exhaust duct being clogged, but it turned out this was just because I was running the boiler with its front enclosure removed.
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