Friday, January 31, 2020

I Resisted Getting Sticky





Happy New Year.  Pissing rain today.  There goes all this snow.  So much for my cross-country ski package I’d rented.  This morning was an early morning odyssey.  Up at four and out on the road to get my daughter down to the 7:30AM flight back to college from JFK.  Groggy, foggy but it was a whole lot better than doing it at almost any other time.  Zero traffic on the New York State Throughway and none on Route Seventeen, through Paramus.  I don’t think I’ve ever sailed over the G-W so quickly, though oddly only half the tower lights were on and the bridge felt more majestic than it looked.  Not much of anyone on the Whitestone Bridge nor the Van Wyck.  And after we dropped her off and turned around to head home, we repeated the same route and though there is always some amount of traffic in NYC, it was merciful.  The only thing that wasn’t an upgrade was the glare of the oncoming headlights which were starting to tire my eyes and I was grateful to finally welcome the sun, which made its appearance about thirty minutes before our arrival back home.  And with that, I dove right into bed.



I’ve been sitting on hard kitchen chairs and soft, deep-seat recliners to do my work these past few months.  There isn’t a a posture perfect chair there, anywhere in the house to do work in.  Later this morning I took my little one over to the campus so she should join the New Year’s celebration there and on the way back I stopped at Staples and bought a desk chair.  I was talked into buying the care package for an extra twenty bucks that allows me to return this chair at any time in the next three years, and they’ll fully refund it.  Indeed, I don’t even have to bring the physical chair in, which seemed hard to believe.  I imagined the process whereby I could return tomorrow and say I didn’t like it because it was "broken" and wanted my money back and just get a second such desk chair. 

My good friend called.  His younger son is back in Shenzhen with the grandparents and he is worried about the Corona virus.  Should he bring him home?  Should he wait it out?  I defaulted to suggested it was no big deal and then caught myself.  What the hell do I know?  We chatted about this with he and his wife while I bounced around in Lowes, buying bird seed.  I got a new feeder that was supposed to be absolutely squirrel proof.  We’ll see.

My wife called and wondered where I was in the rain.  I had one more place I wanted to go:  Agway.  Apparently, they were going to be the only ones around that had “Tanglefoot.” I’d resisted getting sticky goop to retard the squirrels but at this point short of a bee-bee gun or an electric buzzer I’m running out of ways to keep them off my feeder.  They’ve out baffled the baffle and made short work of the earlier squirrel proof” feeder I’d optimistically set up.



Back home I replenished the seed and applied the goop and set this new feeder up just around the time the rainfall had broke, and a nice sunset was materializing.  Tonight, over to The Samuel Morse Estate for a high school service auction.  I guess I don’t really know what to expect, whether there at Locus Grove or here with the new feeder. 



Saturday, 01/25/20

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