Since Tuesday morning—that is, yesterday morning, when I was looking forward to the nruns 5k in Prospect Park—there had been a high-pitched squeal out the living room window. So high, like tea-kettle high, Moki wouldn’t have been able to catch it. Do you suppose it’s all over the building and the old folks just don’t hear it? I figured it was due to the workmen doing their endless makework out in Sixth Avenue. It never ends. They come here at 1am sometimes, weekends. I served them notice, so to speak, and called in the cops, in the wee hours about 8 years ago. They left. No one stands up to them.
And now here on a second morning the whine continues. I figure I’ll give it another day, then complain to building staff, who will have a lot on their plate where I am concerned.
In the evening, after a busy day otherwise, I traced the sound to the radiator. With the help of working gloves and a hex wrench (we have so many) I removed the front panel of the lv rm radiator. I found the sound was coming from a little yellow plastic box with a hole on the top like that of a pencil sharpener. A 12v battery inside. I’d seen one of these things before. One of the exterminators took one of them out of the radiator in the bd rm and left it on the windowsill. A useless doodad, I decided. Tossed it out. This one I left on the liv rm windowsill because it’s clearly some sort of alarm, warning about condensation, or battery running down, or Lord knows what. 
Anyway, no more dog-whistle whine.
Early morning, there is a Frenchman in Portland, Oregon who wants to buy my Mayflys. The Scots Tartan ones. Not just the new-in-box ones without bag, but the other, slightly used ones. (What’s his game? A collector? A museum curator at Nike?) Through the day we negotiated on my basic 89.99 for the NIB ones, plus about $45 for the others. And I added the used ones to eBay so we’d be doing it within the rules. Didn’t take long. He’d bought them by evening, and they are now packaged up, waiting by the door for me to hike them down to Rockefeller Center PO. One single parcel, two packages, $9.10 postage for me. A good deal for him. He’s paying $135, free shipping. I would have loved to be on his end in the olden days.
These are the first shoes I’ve sold since early April.
This $135, minus postage, plus the $140 or so I will have made yesterday in Prospect Park for nruns will go quite a way to making up for the $270 I spent getting my Mac Air 13″ trashed and data-recovered by the odd Mediterranean or Near Easterner at 501 Fifth Avenue. He’s very friendly, very personable. Would go back in a heartbeat. Am backing up the data-recovery hard disk right now, on Moki’s less-than-reliable G Drive.
Thought of going to Pershing Square for refreshment afterwards, but decided against it. Up Madison Avenue in the scorching sun. Stopped at the old Natureworks for two tostadas. I’ve decided the tostadas are better than the soft tacos I always bought before.
Some revelations as I scrolled through the drive contents at home. A major transfer to the Mac Air, June 6th perhaps, was copying the Playhouse 90 Mike Todd party DVD. That may have been what did my poor laptop in, eventually, though it died slightly later. I was using Moki’s LaCie DVD drive. I burnt out, or something burnt out, the CPU of the Mac Air. So Apple Repair Club man says he can fix it with a new logic board AND recover my data for $279 + $189. I say no thanks (this is in txt) but do recover my data. This I say on Monday night (two nights ago).
The major impetus for getting the drive data back, I am sorry to say, is that I couldn’t find the Julie Haugh photo she sent me 25 years ago. Well it wasn’t on any of my laptop drives at all, as it turns out. It’s in the blarg.net scaffolding. JFH-BOY she called it. JFH circa 1994. And she scarcely looks like a boy.
We have to ask: why did she send it to me? Or us?
I doubted the Ratty connection until yesterday morning, because the current edition is skin-ravaged and of course much older. But there’s enough there now for positive identification. Austin TX, Milwaukee WI. She had a girlfriend, or rather a civil-union spouse, from a ceremony in Vermont. Alas, the spouse died a few years ago. And then JF took a job with J****on Controls in Milwaukee. I picked up CV data via Ancestry and LinkedIn. An Austin ID photo from maybe 15 years ago, with good skin:
So JF is definitely Ratty. I was very fond of her in days of yore. I bought her a swimsuit and she traded me some surplus gear. That too was in Wisconsin, March 1999. She has seemed very unhinged on Twixer, going through various identities (a short-lived one called Carol Bratslover got smoked out quickly because she was acting abusive to the same people she’d fought with before). Insulting poor Fiona, going after Gami, reiterating a hundred times that she has a female ‘Q angle’ and is some kind of intersex (sounds plausible). Then claiming to be Jewish, ferociously anti-Christian (endorses a crazy theory that the Church was a vast conspiracy by the tyrants of Ancient Rome), and telling impossible stories about how her mother married at 16.
I have to look past that, as she’s taken far too much abuse herself online and in real life, and her mind has been easily poisoned by all sorts of people, not the least of them The Egregious Nicki a quarter-century ago.
I thought Julie was blue-eyed. Apparently not. Anyway it was hard to square this present edition with the Geena Davis clone we knew and loved in the late 70s.
So the hunt for Julie was just a blessed maguffin forcing me to recover data. And there was plenty of precious stuff. Raw video files, for Ashley and for me. The various rewrites of Teentime from years ago. The Capt. P. C. Martin files. Etc. Etc.
I was very beat today, after yesterday’s festivities.My exercise consisted of going to 501 Fifth and back. I will get my paltry check in over two weeks. Then another $100-200 two weeks after that. August through October seem to be shaping up into intense months.
Before and after the repairman, I struggled to move Moki’s glass shelving. It also needed to be balanced. Hex wrench, screwdriver, level. Tall, wide etagere into the bedroom corner. That’s a success. I had to vacuum there, both vacuums. Lots of rat turds.
People will laugh, but it’s a day’s work and a great improvement.
Where does the smaller, narrower one go? I do not know. Has to be lv rm.
Drank a 12 oz Resin, then went to drug store for aspirin and a 20 oz Resin. After 10pm I went out to the fabulous liquor store at the corner of 58th St., which I’d never been to before. Tourist prices. $7.60 for a half-pint of Svedka. Guy there let me have it for seven dollars.
Watched a doco on Tubi about the making of GoodFellas. I’ve had that book by the colleague of Matt Zoller Seitz, the guy with the Irish name, and never really read it thoroughly. Glenn Kenny. Made Men. I shall take another look at it.
