March 2025 Island Trip – Day 11

I waited today. Waited for the mower doctor to come, and they didn’t 🙄. The first call I made let me know they’d be out but no sooner than an hour. The next call let me know it might be tomorrow. Two different people, of course. I am less than pleased, but kept my cool, and did not address the second person as “Little Missy” tho I was sorely tempted as she tried to explain that making an appointment to have your just serviced mower picked up is actually meaningless.

While waiting I thought to address the gasket on the stove in the lower barn. After cementing it in place, the stove door wouldn’t close. So, remove and toss the gasket, clean up the water based (thank God) cement, test a scrap of a smaller gasket (also too big), and then get a tape measure to see what the clearance is. It’s about 1/16th to 1/32nd of an inch. It remains to be seen if there’s a stove gasket small enough to fit in there.

The apple trees have been fed 🍎. I worked on Stella’s slope, and while I love my foxes, I do not want them digging their dens on this slope 🦊, and spent time filling the two dens in. They don’t look active. If all the frass I put in the dens gets kicked out, then we’ll know that they are.

I got a call back from the appliance fixer’s better half today. Turns out my tenant has lied to me not just the one time I knew, but an additional two times. He did not tell the tenant:

• That the oven was the cheapest unit that can be bought.
• That he needed to talk to GE about the washer. One is unable to talk to GE about anything, ever.
• What the washing machine was ‘doing.’ Did not diagnose it. He told her to run a cycle and try to figure out if the washer was trying to agitate while it was spinning.

All of these things are either her grossly misunderstanding him, trying to get out of doing any self-help, or trying to get her way, What that way is, I am still not clear on, but having even newer appliances comes to mind. She is too smart to grossly misunderstand him.

After discovering all the above, I went for a walk up the road. Just as I headed back, I ran into a neighbor who was friends with my folks. We chatted for a few minutes and then went to his house for tea, It was good to catch up. He’s a local attorney. Also a unique individual. He walked me through 6-books, one about his family, he’d just read. I know about the four cats now, things he really valued about my mom, particularly her expertise of the English language, which he leaned on at times. English is not his first language. This was also my first time riding in a cybertruck. He bought it before the election… He delivered me home commenting how long it’d been since he’d driven onto the property. It was good to see him, and relate like a peer rather than a kid 😅.