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forest as Schrödingers's Box
Monday, June 5 2017
This morning I was back at the Wall Street rental house to address a new leak, this one coming from the washing machine whenever it was in use. That's the machine I installed a couple months ago to replace one that didn't have a spin cycle. I took some screw-tightened hose clamps, a big screwdriver, and a pair of channel-locking pliers. I was hoping the drainage hose wasn't connected properly. In the basement at the house I soon realized that, no, that wasn't the problem. I poured some water down the drain hose so it would pool in the low part and come out wherever the leak was. Unfortunately, the leak was somewhere under the washing machine. That wasn't good.
I turned the machine on its side and had a look underneath. Fortunately it was open under there, with not much going on except for hoses strung between various parts. One of these hoses connected between a plastic box (a stop valve?) at the back of the machine where the drain hose attached and another plastic box housing what was probably a pump designed to push the water out of the machine. The hose was corrugated and made of plastic and appeared to have developed a crack in parallel with one of the corrugations. It was of an unfortunate thickness, so it didn't look like it would be easy to replace.
I drove over to Herzog's and the young Hispanic guy who works there asked if I needed help. I described the problem, saying I hoped to fix the hose with something like glue and tape. He pointed me at a self-adhesive silicone tape designed for just this sort of thing. At first that seemed like the perfect thing, but then I wondered how well it would work in the context of all those sharp corrugations, which were probably arranged in a spiral. At the ends of wherever I taped it, there would be leaks where the spiral corrugation ridges emerged. I wondered if I could instead use a piece of old washing machine drainage hose to simply replace the leaking corrugated one. I had the old hose from the old machine that had been removed. So I bought a cheap break-away-blade knife and more hose clamps.
Back at the Wall Street house, the main problem with this plan was that the nipples to which a rubber hose might attach were too wide on both ends. But I had a wide piece of rubber I could salvage from the end of the old corrugated hose; that would work for one end. For the other, I was going to have to stretch the thick rubber of the drainage hose to fit up over that too-large plastic nipple. The only way to do this was to heat the hose in hot water and then pre-stretch it using a screwdriver and the handle of the pliers. Even so, I couldn't quite get it. I had to reach under part of it with a screwdriver and pry it over the nipple. But then I had it; that fucker was on! Making an adapter for the nipple on the other end was easy. Best of all, my contraption was solid enough to last for the life of everything else and didn't leak. Mission accomplished.
I celebrated, as you might imagine, with a detour out to the Tibetan Center thrift store. But after all the loot I got yesterday from Dan, the few shabby things I saw there were disappointing. I think I've been there a record number of times now without buying anything at all.
Back home, Gretchen related a harrowing experience she'd just had in the forest with the dogs. Not far from home on the Farm Road, they'd encountered a huge black bear (it was big, so Gretchen assumed it was male, though I don't know if things work that way with this species of bear) and the dogs had immediately given chase. The bear went up a tree, and the dogs totally lost their minds with excitement. Gretchen reported seeing Neville leaping four feet into the air, though there was no way this was going to place him within range of the treed bear.
Somehow Gretchen managed to get Ramona away from the bear, though of course the bear came down the tree while Neville was still there underneath. But Neville is slow and the bear managed to get away. But then Ramona escaped and gave chase, and Gretchen ran after them to find the bear treed again, this time thousands of feet to the south. With some effort, Gretchen managed to fashion a dual leash from her sweatshirt, and used it to restrain both dogs for something like a half hour while the bear ran away. Inevitably Ramona escaped again, but at least Gretchen managed to get Neville home.
I was worried about Ramona, for whom the forest around us served as something of a Schrödingers's Box. A bear could easily kill Ramona, and she doesn't have the sense to know that. Mercifully, though, while Gretchen and Andrea were off in Woodstock running errands, Ramona finally appeared. She was wet from the rainy woods but not muddy at all, suggesting she'd somehow spent nearly four hours alone in the forest without starting up a single chipmunk mine.
Fighting to restrain the dogs had fucked up Gretchen's back something awful. She took a prescription-strength pill of some sort before heading to Woodstock and then later had so much ibuprofen she was worried it would give her an ulcer, as it supposedly had to a co-worked at the Woodstock bookstore.
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