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vacation from the necessary
Saturday, June 25 2016
I'd stayed up late last night drinking and smoking pot, so I awoke today with a rather bad hangover, something Saturday morning coffee didn't do much alleviate. At around noon, I took a 120 milligram dose of pseudoephedrine in hopes it would power me through an afternoon of chores at the brick mansion, but during the first of those chores I felt like I might have to excuse myself to vomit. That chore was at Herzog's tool desk, where I had a young employee cut me nearly twenty keys for the brick mansion's many locks. I had a padlock for which key copies could not be made, but that was solved by replacing it with a padlock for which unlimited keys could be made.
Gretchen had made me a rather long punch list for the brick mansion. The first of these I addressed was the five small steel mailboxes out in front. They were covered with tape, rust, and grime, and Gretchen wanted me to spray paint them all black. I don't think she was aware that this would require me to remove them all, but that's what I did. While I waited for the first coat of paint to dry, I did other chores. There was a sewage pipe that leaked in the basement whenever the toilet in 1L was flushed, and I soon determined that the toilet probably needed a new wax gasket. I also installed the last of the new carbon monoxide/smoke detectors the seller had given us for all the apartments. Maddeningly, though these new detectors were the same brand (Kidde) as the old ones, they didn't fit inside the old detectors' attachment rings. There had been no change in the detectors' overall shape that required such a change; it had simply been done because Kidde didn't think the effort of installing new rings (the vast bulk of the effort in installing or replacing a smoke detector) was an issue they needed to concern themselves with. The more I deal with products and brands, especially in cases like this where I'm in a multi-unit building doing things repetitively, the more little things like standardization of size and fit matter in terms of my potential brand loyalty. So far Kidde has provided me to reason to have any loyalty to their brand at all; the next time I have to replace a smoke detector, I'll have to replace its attachment ring whether the brand is Kidde or something else.
While I was in the midst of this work, Eva and Sandor unexpectedly appeared. I was in serious work-mode at the time, but I took a break to give them a tour. They offered to help, but all I could think to have them do was to have Sandor help me carry out a microwave oven that one of our tenants didn't want. I love Eva and Sandor to death, but I didn't have socializing with anyone on my schedule for this afternoon. Fortunately, they soon headed off to do their own errands, even offering to pick up stuff for me from Home Depot and get me a sandwich from Mother Earth's Storehouse. Unfortunately, though, I soon ran out of provisions necessary to keep doing my chores. I needed more black spray paint, electrical and ducting supplies for installing a dryer, and non-incandescent bulbs for the public areas and Apartment 1L (where we pay for electricity). I kept waiting for Eva and Sandor to return, but they didn't and I didn't have their cellphone numbers. So eventually I left them a note (just finding a pen to do that was a huge frustration) and drove out to Home Depot. I wasn't there long before I got a Facebook message on my phone from Sandor. He and Eva were waiting for me back at the brick mansion with that sandwich. So now I was in a hurry to get everything I needed, which is always a bad way to shop. In so doing I forgot to get a Siemens 30 amp dual circuit breaker, black spray paint, an a number of other things. Fortunately, though, I was able to get the spray paint from Advance Auto on Albany Avenue on the way back to the brick mansion. Eva and Sandor didn't stay long after giving me that sandwich, which I devoured like a homeless man with inexplicably good teeth (though of course I still can't bite with the left side of my mouth due to my punk rock tooth, which has been loose in my skull and increasingly marginal since late March). That tooth was acting up bacteriologically today, and combined with some Victorian basement grit that mixed with sweat and got in my eye, the lingering hangover, and regretful thoughts about the unpleasant political mess I'd gotten into yesterday at work, I was feeling plenty miserable.
I returned home a little after 6:00pm and Gretchen and I sat in the lawn and went through and organized all the keys for the brick mansion. I was saddened to find the dead remains of what looked to be a Phoebe in the grass near the dog house. It was almost certainly one of the four that had recently fledged above the garage door, and seeing its corpse was a little like experiencing the death of yet another Direwolf on Game of Thrones.
Gretchen and I had both been invited to a summer bash at Peter & Alison's place near Bearsville, but Gretchen was beat from a week of intensive real estate bullshit. I was beat too, but for some reason I needed a little vacation from the necessary and wanted to go, so I headed over there on my own. With the exception of a 2.37 miles on Route 28, the drive there and back is all via little back roads, so it's a good drunk driving destination. It's also a beautiful drive; I was delighted, for example, to see a huge beaver lodge in Yanketown Pond as I drove past.
The party was a fairly big one, and the only people I knew there was Jeff the reality teevee cameraman, his girlfriend Alana, and the hosts Peter and Alison.
I was fairly good about mingling and finding strangers to talk to, including a woman with a European accent who talked at length about Mayan codicies and an absurdly tall woman who claimed to be an actress. She was pretty, but her seven-foot stature seemed to be working against her in the dating world. There were a lot of chips and salads and such, and at some point someone cooked a huge kielbasa in a barbecue (I suspect I was the only vegan present). Later, about ten pizzas arrived from Catskill Mountain Pizza. Supposedly one of these was vegan, though I had my doubts as I ate it; the cheese seemed pretty authentic to me.
I drank mostly wine, and there a period when some pot I'd smoked had me in a cartoonish variant of my usual mental state. But I started drinking water and was reasonably sober for the drive back home (though I probably would've flunked a breathalyzer).
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