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the myster of Stripey's globular nature
Saturday, March 4 2017
The fuck french press beaker had developed a tiny leak since I'd last used it, and now the Saturday morning coffee I was trying to make was leaking all over the kitchen's central island. A eventualy determined that the leak was coming from a tiny divot of glass that had been chipped way, leaving a tiny hole. Meanwhile, Gretchen had was stuffing praziquantel tablets down the throat of our cat Julius the Cat (aka "Stripey"). In the couple months or so, Stripey's abdomen had swollen into a large round globe in a way that suggested something other than normal weight gain. Seeing his distended guts after we returned from Mexico, I'd decided there probably was something wrong with him. But what? He seemed otherwise normal, with a normal appetite and normal behavior. One possible explanation was tapeworms, an affliction he (and none of the other cats) has had in the past. Thus the tablets of praziquantel. But if they'd had any affect, it would've happened within hours, and there would've been tapeworms all over the laboratory. Unfortunately, that didn't happen, and Stripey's globular nature remained a mystery.
Last night at Momiji, I'd mentioned something I'd read somewhere that Donald Trump's craziest tweets tend to come on Saturday mornings, during Shabbat, when his orthodox-observant son-in-law and daughter are unplugged and not around to reign him in. (It still feels like I must be in a dream that such a racist and deeply-ignorant narcissist is actually President of the United States.) This morning's news was yet more confirmation of that peak-crazy-of-the-week theory. Donald Trump had unleashed a paranoid just-shy-of-coherent tweetstorm accusing Barack Obama of personally tapping his phones in Trump Tower. As always, Trump had dispensed with any supporting evidence and just went straight to the accusation and the one-word analysis (in this case, "Bad").
I had some things I needed to do in town today, so first I drove out to Home Depot to get a bunch of little things:
- a really good pair of needle-nosed pliers with an insulated handle, built-in wire strippers, and the ability to cut through a thick piece of 12-2 Romex in a single chomp.
- 50 feet of 12-2 Romex
- a small number of red, winged wire nuts
- a moderate number of Romex staples
- an electrical box suitable for installing a light
- a wide door sweep
- a 15 foot extension cord
- various half-inch galvanized and black-iron bits with which to build a new arm-lamp mount.
- a bluetooth-capable programmable "smart bulb" (a $12 impulse-purchase)
- an LED bulb for above the bathtub in the bathroom where I like to take baths to replace a twitchy CF bulb
- a $5 pair of 1.5 power reading glasses, something I only just discovered that Home Depot sells
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Gretchen wanted me to swing by our newly-purchased wreck of a house on Brewster Street to meet Rich, the general contractor supervising the fixing up of that place. When I arrived, nobody else was there, but already a lot of good progress had been made. A big dumpster was parked in front of the house on the street and it was already 30% full. The old terrible cabinets and countertops had been ripped out of the kitchen and the the room gutted all the way back to the lath boards. The ugly tile had been removed from the ceiling in the dining room, revealing drywall that just needed to be repaired in a few places. I'd been asked to pass judgment on the gas-powered kitchen stove, which was supposedly "all rusted out." But it only looked rusted on one side, and not even that badly. With a little paint thinner and elbow grease, it would probably look at least as good as the gas stove in our own kitchen.
My next stop was the Brick Mansion over on Downs Street. As I headed north up Broadway, I saw a bunch of police cars with flashing lights in the southbound lanes. As I drew closer, I saw a policeman (heavily bundled against the unseasonable chill) directing traffic. Then I saw a few people walk past with handmade protest signs that was unable to read. Further north, near the railway overpass, I saw what it was all about. There was a fairly substantial protest march underway. It featured between 100 and 200 people (a lot considering how windy and cold it was), most of whose signs said things like "Support Public Education!" and "No Charter Schools!" Perhaps Betsy DeVos had come to town to tell our citizens that it wasn't in the public's interest to have an educated population.
At the Brick Mansion, my first priority was installing various safety devices that somehow been overlooked. I made quick work of installing a smoke detector in the front room of 1L (the tenant was there, but mostly all she did was tell her little Chihuahua Jack to quit barking at me. Next I installed a carbon monoxide/smoke detector in the basement. That second device had an obnoxious voice feature, and when I went to test it, it started shouting "fire!" and didn't seem to want to stop.
With a clear afternoon and time to think, I returned to the task of installing a motion sensor light above the stairway down from 1R. I soon determined that 120 volts was always available in an overhead light, and it was electricity coming from the common circuit breaker box (which also electrifies 1L), which was what I was supposed to be be using for electrical features in common space. This time I knew what circuit breaker to turn off, so I was actually able without much risk of electrocution.
Inevitably, I went well out of my way on the drive home so I could swing by the Tibetan Center Thrift Store, this time mostly with a view to seeing what other partial cans of paint were available. The pint of dark blue I found was perfect for my needs (I had no use for the brown, at least for now, though that could come in handy the next time I need to camouflage something). But the main thing there that attracted my interest was a massive (and very ugly) Yamahah PSR-280 music keyboard. It would be hard to justify taking such a big piece of junk home (especially on the chance it didn't work), but I looked it up on my smartphone and found that it actually has touch-sensitive keys. Still, I somehow restrained myself and didn't buy it (or the fun little Casio SK-1 keyboard that was also there; supposedly it was one of the first sampling keyboards).
[REDACTED]
Down in Gretchen's library, she hooked up the new extension cord I'd bought so she could electrify a pair of small lamps on her writing desk. That desk is out in the middle of the floor, so to get power to it I'd thought it best to run an extension cord under an area rug. I'd bought the door sweep to close some of the massive gap under Gretchen's primary hallway door. The bottom had been cut off that door to accommodate the tall shag carpet in her room back when that was there. But now with just the thin faux wood tiles cover the foor, the gap was over an inch in height. Unfortunately, due to the way the hallway wall leans, the door swings much closer to the floor when it is open than when it s closed.
Our friends Kate and Nancy came over this evening to take Gretchen to some movie. While they were here, we showed off the basement library. For some reason Neville the Dog was extra-excited by Nancy (perhaps because of the fresh smells of Jack the Dog) and he was being so frisky and mouthy with her that we had to physically separate him from her.
Later this evening, I finally fixed the arm-lamp that forms a surprisingly important component of my laboratory workstation. All I needed for a base was a half-inch flange screwed to the vertical solar deck support pillar and a 90 degree fitting screwed into that. To keep that fitting from moving whatsoever, I spot-welded the two pieces together (galvanized fumes be damned!). To get the void inside the half-inch fitting narrow enough for the 0.25 inch-wide cylindrical tail of the lamp, I used a simple half-inch-to-3/8-inch brass fitting. There's a little slack in that connection, though not enough to affect its operation.
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