The heading isn't particularly 2020-
- as we lost Walter Becker in 2017 and the remaining group's 2020 tour, which I thought about seeing them on, was canceled. But the two subjects for today kinda go together, which is why they’re here on the same day, duh.
To put things in perspective, we ended 2019 on a fairly bad repair note, having a very expensive emissions idiot light on my just-out-of-warranty car show up a few weeks before its inspection was due, and our not-very-old water heater deciding it didn’t want to heat water anymore. We’d just socked some simoleans into an emergency fund, which promptly cried out for an emergency or two to fund. (We only just managed to replenish some of it at the end of this year, and mightily resisted using any of it for the veterinary disaster of the past month.) The good news is, both the car and the water heater made it through 2020 (give or take a couple of days) without those problems arising again, but we had our share of improvements, setbacks, inventions and discoveries in these areas as this Year to End All Shitty Years moved along.
At home, the farewells were mostly to smaller things that had given us long and faithful service, from an electric can opener dating to when you needed to open cat food cans with one, to a smashed coffee carafe that was once part of an actual Mr. Coffee maker. Unfortunately, things like microwaves are turning into fungible pieces of junk, as we had to replace one dating only to the 2015 kitchen reno where the repair place said, meh, just buy a new one. Since we haven’t even HAD anything to play audio tapes on for years while still having a ton of them downstairs (some of things never reissued on CD or digitally), we acquired a new Bluetooth-enabled boom box with an actual cassette player in it, which will also be great for outdoor dining….
On the soon-to-be-finished patio away from the Neighbors from Hell.
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They moved here about this time three winters ago, buying and slowly remodeling the home next door that our dear neighbor Betty had lived in since it was built around 1960. Until this summer, we got along with them fine, despite the husband being a bit loud (he’s deafer than me) and a cigar smoker. But with the stress of the pandemic, things escalated, mainly on account of a regular guest of theirs, who we first simply knew as “Foghorn Leghorn” (for being even louder than the husband) but later came to learn was his wife's brother. He was not only worse in volume but in content, and after one summer night of particularly bad behavior over there- with their firepit threatening to set his new wooden fence on our lot line on fire and a torrent of racist language coming from their guests- we asked them over the next morning and asked them to tone it down. The missus listened but finally said she wasn't going to be told “what to do on MY property"- after her spouse bailed after a few minutes, telling us we were being "ridiculous."
He is now forever known as Aristophanes, from this old Odd Couple bit.
Foghorn, meanwhile, never shut up on any later visit, and we had reason to believe he was coking up out in his (uninspected) Beemer. One night, first our neighbor’s truck peeled out into our street, followed a few minutes later by his BIL in his car.
Had Foghorn's bad behavior been reported to the authorities? Was his brother in law checking for po-po's before Foghorn left? Did he turn out to have a criminal record and a trail of unpaid child support judgments for the (somehow sweet) kid he had been bringing over to play with his (also very sweet) cousin?
Don’t look at me ::adjusts halo::
All’s I know is in the months since, we haven’t seen foghide nor leghair of him. The wife, meanwhile, has lost her fulltime job and made one of the three local quotes in a recent New York Times article about the horrible effects of COVID on Buffalo; her husband is rarely seen out (other than one late October night I saw him slapping a TRUMP 2020 flag on the back of his pickup, gone the next day), only to have him surface on a neighborhood message board earlier this month, complaining about a suspicious car in our neighborhood at 3 a.m. who was “not a good person.” He had reason to be suspicious, he said, because "Nothing is open at 3 AM."
( I had questions. )
So anyway, the result of all that was Eleanor deciding to move our summer outdoor patio from their side of our yard to more in the middle. It was a multimonth project that never finished, but it should need just some minor grading and filling to get it going next year so we can have company out there. If anyone can.
Fortunately, these neighbors aren’t our only ones. We met an 89-year-old from around the corner who always greets Pepper with a “cookie” if he’s out. He saw our BLM sign and told us how much he liked it- because, as an early Italian immigrant to this part of the Buffalo suburbs, he suffered the epithets and setbacks of prejudice as a boy. We became friends with a retired woman around the corner with three beautiful dogs and a gardener in her spirit for Eleanor to commune with. Closer still is a couple whose husband helped us with some roof repairs last year, gave plenty of advice on the patio design, and wisely begged out of our most recent needed repair- of the house-original oven that died over the summer, the only remaining appliance from before the 2015 renovation.
Eleanor had found and installed a replacement heating element for it; we knew the problem was element-ary because the broiler still worked- but when the weather got colder, the connection again failed, and both she and Glenn from down the street agreed it would now need a licensed professional. We had initial trouble finding one, as appliance guys wanted electricians to do it and the electrician around the corner didn’t do appliances, but in the end a reliable Rochester client of mine in the electrical business sent a guy over who fixed it in 20 minutes and it’s been good ever since.
Ending with things I've posted about recently: the only repair we didn’t need, winding up among the most annoying, was to our gas meter. THAT cost us 100 bucks on our bill (since removed), three days of waiting around between scheduling and appearing/not appearing, and 30 whole seconds of me watching the guy doing a “safety inspection” that took less time than a flush of a toilet. The only remaining one is of my front tires, which brought us to a sad end with a longtime mechanic that we hope we can, eventually, repair.
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What a difference in technology a year makes. Last December, "Zoom" was an old PBS kid show with a funny language, "Teams" played with balls and pucks in places you could pay and watch them in person, and "Streams" were to be fished in, not watched in your living room. We've come to know all of these new terms, as everything from court appearances to poetry readings to concerts have turned into bits and bytes kept at a total distance.
Other activities have adjusted, including my passion for knowing trivial things. Geeks Who Drink are and still do, but do it from spacebars rather than actual bars. This piece chronicles some of the others which have changed their ways in the pandemic; one which really hasn't, but which I've continued to enjoy, is another mentioned in there. Learned League rolls on in its almost entirely text-only format. I missed a deadline and sat out one round in the spring, but returned, along with adding a referred friend who's now in the same "rundle" of players and with whom I competed neck-and-neck with through earlier this month; her son is now heading to a level above us, and anyone reading this who wants an invitation should ask now, since they will likely be going to waitlists in the future.
The hardware we use for all this is unchanged, although the occasional updates to them can be timeconsuming and annoying. Most recently, I brought in one of my two laptops to see if its keyboard could be repaired- several keys stopped working, and of course they were oft-used ones like the left-shift, tab and most recently the T. I had a similar problem, a few years ago, with this one, now kept at and only used for work. Cat hair gets under the keys and gums up the works. It was still under warranty, but had to be sent out for the repair with a two-week turnaround, and Ensurion does not provide loaners. So, Laptop the Second, which has been fine until it suffered the same end. They just quoted $300-plus to fix it; only about 30-50 of that is the keyboard itself, but just look at what you have to do to replace it yourself and you'll realize that you are, literally, screwed:
The more likely scenario is to replace it, but for now I'm going to make do with what I've got.