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Plattekill washing machine errand
Sunday, April 16 2017
I was listening to a Planet Money podcast (now sponsored by Koch Industries!) and painting the floor in the southeast corner of the laboratory when I heard the first tree frog of 2017. Temperatures had already risen into the 80s, and the little guy had something to say. He sounded like he was out on the laboratory deck, which was entirely possible. I've seen them crawling on the windowglass and railings out there.
Neville didn't get to be a bookstore dog today because Gretchen wanted to keep the bookstore door open on a such a glorious day. So back here at home, Neville managed to find yet another large articulated piece of the troublesome deer skeleton that had caused so much trouble yesterday, and he began another grim period of hoarding it and threatening anyone who approaches. I thought if I could snip it into smaller pieces with a pair of bolt cutters (the ones I found in Beverly Hills back when I lived in Los Angeles), maybe it would weaken his attachment to it. But as I tried to snip through a joint in an articulated leg, Neville attacked the bolt cutters. That was it; I grabbed the whole skeletal unit while Neville was distracted by the bolt cutters and took it out to the garage. There I used the bandsaw to cut it into segments ranging from about six to ten inches long. I then tossed most of them randomly into the yard and gave Neville a fairly nice piece (one that still contained ligaments) to gnaw on. It was a small enough piece that his aggressive hoarding behavior seemed to dissipate, at least initially. Later, though, he'd assembled a hoard of these smaller pieces on a different dog bed and was making aggressive moves at anyone who ventured that way. On one occasion he threatened poor Celeste the Cat (aka "the Baby") outside the house when it seemed she was just walking towards the front door. And one time Neville even charged up to me and applied an open mouth to my ankle (though he didn't bite). The bones had completely undermined his usual stunning personality.
Ever since learning the washing machine in our Wall Street house had failed, Gretchen and I had been looking on Craigslist for a replacement. Initially the options weren't great, with the best option being a smallish washing machine having a Turkish-only user interface. Anything else had a price of at least $300. But this morning I found an old dented Kenmore for $80 down in Plattekill (south of New Paltz, 21 miles to the south as a crow might fly). Over the course of the day, I arranged with the seller to meet him at his place and then eventually drove there. It was a gorgeous day for driving down small Upstate lanes such as Ohioville Road. People were out in their yards in their summer clothes throwing frisbees or on their porches waiting for Easter picnic guests to arrive. The only fly in the ointment was the constant drone from a hole in the Subaru's exhaust pipe. Several days ago I'd tried to patch it with some aluminum flashing, pipe clamps, fiberglass mesh, and furnace cement, but the fix hadn't worked at all.
Google maps sent me up a terrible pot-holed dirt road called Krystal Lane for some reason, but other than that it managed to get me close to the seller's house. His name was Jeremiah and he sounded on the phone like an old man. But it turned out he was a vaguely aspergery millennial with an interest in appliance repair. He helped me wrestle the Kenmore into my Subaru and then we chatted about appliances and trying to make money as a landlord. Regarding the former, he told me that the best washing machines were all made before 2000, when the motors were still big and the logic was non-computerized (electromechanical). Regarding landlording, he said it only really worked if one was "handy." Otherwise, you get a few bad repairs and a tenant or two not paying their rent and then the whole thing falls apart. We probably could've nerded-out on these things into the evening, but eventually I got on the road and headed back north. I stopped in New Paltz at the plaza where the best spaghetti in the Hudson Valley can be had to get some white spray paint from Advance Auto Parts so I could make the washing machine look a little less nasty.
As I neared home, dark clouds had gathered in the northwest. Eventually a storm would blow threw, though it wasn't as extreme as the clouds had implied. There was little rain and no electrical activity, though there might've been some wind.
Later, at around dusk, I went outside and completed a project I'd begun on Saturday. Gretchen had wanted to replace the three numbers of our street address at the road with beautiful new ones she'd bought on Etsy. Originally she'd wanted me to grout them onto the flat piece of bluestone the old numbers had been on (before eventually delaminating from). But I'd found a boxier piece of stone along the Farm Road and attached the new numbers to it with Goop. This evening, I built a tall, solid cairn from irregular piece of bluestone found nearby and placed the numbered stone at the top. The result was better than expected. I know from experience that a well-built cairn will provide many years of service, though it's possible it will eventually be toppled by a passing snowplow or a teenager willing to get out of his car for the modest sociopathic hell of it.
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