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peewees not phoebes
Sunday, June 11 2017
This morning Gretchen and I saw what looked like a dead Sylvia the Cat in the marshy margin of the driveway. She was still breathing, though she didn't look like she had much life left in her. I relocated her closer to the house and tried to interest her in some wet food, though she had no interest. It seemed like she wouldn't be around much longer.
Early this afternoon, I loaded up some tools and Ramona the Dog (Neville was with Gretchen at the bookstore) and drove out to the Brewster Street house. I had a job that Gretchen thought might be simple: to make the handrail on the steps up to the porch less floppy. It turned out that a couple long deck screws were all it needed to form a better connection at the bottom (which featured areas that had rotted away. As I worked, I kept Ramona in the idling Subaru so she could enjoy the air conditioning. Temperatures at this point were in the low 90s.
I'd originally planned to go to Home Depot next, perhaps to get supplies and then come back. But I didn't need supplies for this project any more, so I drove to Home Depot with the idea of getting supplies for other projects. One such supply was a tool to help me produce a nice square deck east of Gretchen's library. It was a dual-laser level manufactured by Bosch designed to produce precisely-level 90 degree angles. I also bought some silicone tape and furnace cement, having forgotten that I'd recently bought a small container of furnace cement at Herzog's. I wanted to do more work to silence the Subaru's exhaust system, which was still leaky in a couple places.
Back at the house, I drove the Subaru up on the plastic ramps and got in there with layers of fiber glass insulation, fiber mesh, and fresh, new, easy-to-spread furnace cement. By the end there, I had nearly all of the aluminum flashing hidden beneath an exotic cement-colored cocoon, secured in a few places by pipe clamps. When I started up the car, it sounded like I'd fixed all the leaks.
This afternoon Gretchen told me at some point that Eva and Sandor wanted us (including Andrea) to come over for a barbecue. Neville would also be going, and we could even bring Ramona. So at around 6:00pm, we headed out. I stopped on the way at Hurley Ridge Market for beer, buying a sixpack of Red Stripe lager and a sixpack of Ithaca Flower Power IPA (the best IPA option in their refrigerated beer section).
Initially I hung out with Sandor as he slowly barbecued the various things. The charcoal wasn't burning very hot, so it took a surprisingly long time for the food the be read after we'd arrived. Nevertheless, I kept myself to one beer before dinner. Meanwhile Ramona and Neville were having a grand time exploring the yard, chasing squirrels, and (at one point) threatening the gas line from the household propane tank. I feared one of them my rip it out like an annoying root, the way they do when one blocks access to a chipmunk tunnel. In this case, it seemed Neville was convinced there was some critter up the PVC pipe into which the gas line ran. But when I dragged him away and later, when he returned, I told him "No!" amazingly he obeyed me.
After learning all that Sandor had to tell me about his life, the Maverick Street house (now being renovated) and his parents in the basement apartment (his father has a mysteriously-cracked vertebra), I joined the ladies. Eva pointed out some birds that looked exactly like phoebes, but she insisted they were peewees. And it was true, their call was a little different, more of a "peewee" than a "phoebe." Otherwise, they were identical, doing all the same small flycatcher things and nesting under the eaves on the side of the house. There are also supposedly a family of bats living in a void somewhere beneath the eaves, and they like to come out clown-car style at dusk, though we didn't see them come out tonight.
We were famished by the time the food was ready, but it took awhile for Eva and Sandor to join us. So Gretchen, Eva, and I began eating without them. Two of the condiments were weird sauerkrauts with strange Indian flavors that I didn't think really worked.
After dinner, as Eva and Andrea ate some leftover Trump penis cake dating to election night, November 2016 (it had been frozen over the months since), Eva told us a story of how a subtle language translation issue had caused her company (an international cosmetics concern for which Eva is a project meta-manager) to pull a website after only a few hours of being live. It was targeted at a French audience and had been translated into French by someone fluent in the French spoken in Quebec. But it turned out that the translation of the word "gift," though innocuous in Canadian French, has connotations of "blow job" in European French.
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