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I think it’s the 31-year old fridge that’s calling it quits 🧊
I think that’s what the occasional clicking noise I am hearing downstairs, especially now that I’m noticing it with what sounds like the slowing of the refrigerator compressor. I noticed things weren’t as frozen solid this morning in the freezer.
Out for the morning walk in the cold ❄️. Still very much winter outside. But I really like the morning walk 🚶 and today wasn’t quite as bitterly cold. First day of the legislative session, traffic is backed up going through the Plaza. 🏫
Last night I walked around the plaza until 6:15 PM, as I participated in the Save the Pine Bush Zoom meeting. 📹 Came home and had dinner, investigated the clicking noise, started to clean out around the refrigerator. After listening 👂 a while to the refrigerator, noting the compressor slowed after that occasional click, I am sure that is what it is. The refrigerator was manufactured in April 1994, so it’s 31 years old and it’s a no name Roper brand, so I’m sure it’s tired and old. Back in 1994 was I was in fifth or sixth grade and that was a long time ago.
Going to email the landlord and request refrigerator service on Monday. 🔧 I don’t like the fact that the new landlord isn’t reachable by phone in emergency, but the flip side is I can submit service requests in writing, which means no uncomfortable conversations and protects my rights. ✍️ This weekend I’ll use it to scrub down the kitchen and clean out the refrigerator. I don’t have that much stuff in the refrigerator right now, and if it’s not keeping it’s cool, it’s certainly cold out enough this time of year, I can load up a cooler and stick the frozen goods in my truck, and use the freezer with ice blocks. I’ve been needing to do some good cleaning, 🧼 as that did not get done while I was so sick 🤒 over the Christmas holiday. I turned the temperature lower on the fridge before work and put some of the freezer stuff in the cooler but I’m not hopeful about the refrigerator.
One advantage to renting is that I won’t be immediately out of $1,000 plus bucks for the refrigerator, though I’m sure rent will probably be going up in June when I get notice next month. As much as don’t like how my rent went up to $800 last June, I’m paying well below market rate at this point for the Albany area, but that’s in part because I’ve lived here so long and things are diapolated. 💰 Of course this means the landlord will discover how dumpy this apartment is and how I haven’t always taken perfectly good care of it or kept it clean, but the worse that can happen is I have to move to some place less dumpy after 17 1/2 years. That said, I doubt they’ll kick me out, as I’ve always paid my rent on time. And the last service call to the landlord 📞 was four years ago.
That said, I was much too upset about the refrigerator calling it quits after 31 years, 🍏 as I never like the landlord over to see how much I’ve trashed the building over the years but the truth is it’s not all my fault that I should have been more proactive about the mold issue and the leaky sink traps a decade and a half ago. Things would be a lot rusty and dirty but regardless the unit is due for renovation as everything in there is probably three decades old and it’s not like I ask for every little thing to be perfect 👌. Plus I make good money and have been saving and investing for a decade now and my net worth is fairly good for my age, and I could go out and buy a house with cash tomorrow if I sold some stock and that’s what I really wanted. 🏡
I just suffer from a sort of imposter syndrome at times. 😯 While I don’t watch the news 📰 every day, I’m well aware of all the risks out there from scammers, criminals, tax men and the cops. 👮 There are a lot of people out there who want to tear you down and whack you over in the head. 🥊 It’s tough taking over an agency, supervising employees many of whom have decades more experience. Plus everybody is lobbying you for their pet projects and I have my own. 🐶 Most of my supervisors and colleagues work five miles away downtown. 🏢I try to protect myself however I can but there is so much scary things out there in the world. 👻 And the spector of homelessness always crosses my mind.
I was excited that one of the big commercial vendor contracts came through at work, 💾 and we got a big data dump to upload into our database and link to the content. I am envisioning making our agency a big data powerhouse that empowers the Assemblymembers to do relevant, targeted communications in all forms, based on a wide variety of information on the constituencies that they represent. So much data to link together and tag. 🔖I actually really like that part of the job as it’s interesting linking 🔗 data together, cleaning and processing it. Far more interesting than address corrections and running district wide lists. 📃
Yesterday, I was actually processing Plattsburgh State Students data 🎓 and noticing how many of the current year students were born in 2005 and 2006 the years when I attended Plattsburgh State. It’s hard to think it was that long ago. Yesterday was mom’s 76th birthday and dad is turning 78 this year. 👴 I was thinking that 31 year old fridge represents a time period between now and my 73rd birthday 🎂. My god time goes by quickly. 18 years ago today, I was an intern with than Assemblymember Joe Morelle, that Rochester polymath and power broker. Doesn’t seem that long ago these days. That short guy with his Italian 🇮🇹 mouth scared the shit out of my little intern eyes. Come the 29th I’ll be only 13 years from my 55th birthday and if I want to hang my hat 🎩 up from the state at that point I certainly can. But first I really want to expand the targeting capacity of my agency.
US Median Household Income by Census Tract
Cold and blustery Tuesday ☃️
I was on the fence but I decided to do my morning walk and it was worth it. Crisp but with the face mask it’s refreshing.
Good morning, Happy Tuesday. ☀️ I almost thought about riding in this morning but I think with the wind 🍃 and the issue with the brakes I’m going to bus 🚍 it in this morning. It is still early January after all. Plus I have a Save the Pine Bush 🌲 Zoom.
It’s actually not that cold out, the wind is a bit misleading 🌬️ though the full face mask helped as did planning my route so most of the walk I wasn’t directly in the wind. 🚶 Time to shower 🚿 and get ready to catch the bus. Keep hearing an occasional loud clicking noise downstairs though it’s near the fridge but I don’t think it’s the fridge. I’m thinking it’s a mouse 🐁 but I can’t find it.
Been continuing to study slots and signals in Qt6. 🔁Truth is I’m not totally unfamiliar with the concept – I’ve written Qt for nearly a decade on and off in python for QGIS plug-ins but I’ve never really understood the concept fully especially as it applies to the C++ library. 🖥️ I think becoming good at Qt can teach me a lot. Now is the time to learn in the cold and dark of winter. 🌨️
I got to admit that I really like that big brass lamp I got for my office 🛋️
It’s such a warm color though it doesn’t throw all that much light even with a 200 watt equivalent LED bulb as the shade is probably old and the plastic less translucent. But with the other lamp in my office it’s actually brighter than it was with just the other lamp. The small lamp now has a hundred watt equivalent bulb. I really like it.
Walking laps in the Plaza this evening. Catching a later bus home as I want to get more exercise as I’m trying to rebuild my body and feel better after COVID. Then it’s going to be cold and dark out so I’ll reheat that bread I cooked this morning and warm the soup, have a good dinner and retire to bed to read.
Insurrection! Uprising! Or Just COVID bad behavior.
You know, it’s hard to think that January 6th uprising was four years ago now. Honestly, I didn’t pay all that close attention to it, I just remember it being a particularly cold and gray January day and I was working from home, doing a Zoom Meeting from my desk where I write these words. Seems like a world ago, even though it was just last week when I — as a fully up-to-date vaccinated individual got COVID — and incredibly sick from it.
COVID did a lot of harm to the American psyche. It was a virus in many ways, not only a virus that attacked the body but also a virus that attacked the human brain and society as a whole by the mass-lock-downs that lead people to stay home, and those who had to venture out for work or necessary supplies, in pure fear. People forget how deadly COVID was before we all were vaccinated. Even with vaccination, COVID wasn’t pleasant to catch but it’s nothing like our fear of then very deadly disease before the vaccine.
People were isolated for weeks and months on end. People were bored by that summer, even if the lockdowns started to ease and we went on with out business, a bit wearing masks and knowing there was still a very real risk of death or serious disease from the virus. People were angry and frustrated, often without jobs or pay, and were in many cases literally struggling to hang on with deferred rent and credit card bills growing month after month. Things were fertile ground for public wildfires in the form of protests, disorder and even riots as people’s feelings of injustice were stirred up.
Albany like many cities was not immune from disorder during the summer of 2020. I remember walking back from a beautiful spring evening at Five Rivers and seeing the Humvees and tanks heading into the City of Albany from the Sheriff’s barracks in Clarksville to battle the disorder that had been flaring up in Albany, leading to smashed windows, spray painting, some looting and rioting, and a whole lot of mischief. Always blamed on outsiders stirring things up, but a lot of it was the good people in Albany deeply troubled by the way things were in this deeply alarming time.
The January 6th Protests, lead by then President Trump were no more of a continuation of the bad behavior. Trump had to know he was playing with fire, using his rally to whip up anger over what he called a rigged election after his 2020 loss. He had some legitimate points — elections are often unfair with rules created by the states to benefit incumbents and the party in power — but his claims of absolute fraud were asinine and not backed by a shred of evidence. He had a right to have his views heard, but also he along with Congressional leaders had a duty to protect the Capitol and the public protesting on the same day. Some disorder is inevitable with an angry crowd. You have to allow some disorder as part of ensuring people’s right to be heard and give and take a bit to keep people from feeling like their too corralled in. Too aggressive enforcement can actually spark more disorder.
I think we read too much into what happened on that cold January day what is now many years ago. Breaking glass and vandalism isn’t nice, but sometimes it’s a necessary part of change. The guady old Capitol building took some abuse, but it’s not like it ever was in that much of a danger. The protestors would have inevitably gotten chased out, the glass swept up and ordinary business resumed either later that day or the next day. Ideally, police would have deflected the protests away from the Capitol and kept the protestors, the workers in the building, and the building itself safer, but sometimes public buildings must burn in face of angry mob – to be rebuilt another day. They can certainly haul the broken glass and plaster off to local landfill, and order up new to repair it. It’s not like they weren’t going to renovate the building in a few years in the future, regardless.
I have very little love for government in general. Much less love for government office buildings, with their fake veneers of marble and glass. Behind the look is still just concrete, steel and coal, like every other big industrial building. People who work for the government, while often venerated by the politicians, are just ordinary people doing for a paycheck, no matter how valiant they make their causes seem. It would be good if he held Washington DC in less of high regard and focused more on our own lives, our families, our community needs, and stop saying that government workers and the buildings they work within are somehow any more special then corner liquor store with the smashed in glass in the ghetto.
I didn’t realize how truly massive that lamp was until I brought it into the office.
And the 200 watt bulb seems under-powered in it. Maybe I need to get a 250 or 300 watt bulb. It was so heavy bringing it in on the bus this morning! I kind of got that look from the bus driver when I brought it on the bus this morning, thing has to weight 200 lbs. Honestly, I think it is meater then brass lamps that a lot of legislators have in their office.
Taken on Monday January 6, 2025 at Work.