THE ROAD TO RHODE ISLAND

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (09-12-19)

      Right up Route 84 and over to the east is nice little spot called Newport, Rhode Island. You may have been there but I haven't, and I'd certainly like to know why. It's not too far, maybe about three hours by car if there's no traffic. We encountered traffic however, which slowed us to a standstill. I expected there to be a good reason for this, such as a 20-car pile-up or an accident where somebody hits a Brinks truck and everybody stops to pick up the money so that they can say that they were planning to give it back the whole time and were just waiting for their plans to firm up. But then when we got to the place where a pile-up should be piled up, there was nothing there and the cars just started moving again. As far as I'm concerned those people should be arrested for not sticking to the speed limit, which was 65.

     I've never been to a bed and breakfast because it seems so much like staying at somebody's house, and I've always been afraid that I'll break something or somebody's mom will come down the hall and tell me I'm making too much noise and can't I break things more quietly. But we checked into a charming place right on Newport Harbor across from Goat Island. We were with our trusted companion Gidget, The Prettiest Dog in the World, who seemed disappointed that her breakfast was not included and her bed was the floor.

     The place to see and be seen is Thames Street, which is where all the action is. Eateries, drinkeries and shopperies line the bustling avenue which was named after the river in England but the locals pronounce phonetically. It was one of the original two streets two streets laid in Newport in 1654. Here you can find all the goods and services you need during the day, and all the trouble you might need at night. When we showed up after dinner for some evening cocktails there was an ambulance already waiting at the side of the street, and I should have gone over there and given them my name for later, in case it was first come, first served.

     On Saturday we bicycled over to the Cliff Walk, which is a beautiful paved trail overlooking Easton Bay and curving south around Boathouse Gully. The 3.5 mile walk begins up the road from Easton Beach and ends in an oxygen tent at the hospital. There are great views of the shore, and you can see across to the Sachuest Point National Wildlife Refuge from here. That's also where the Sakonnet River Shellfish Management Area is. I've been thinking of getting into shellfish management, since they are too shellfish to manage things on their own. Along the way opportunities for selfies abound, but don't be one of those idiots who gets too close to the cliff and tumbles down the rocks into a cormorant nest or something. How many times do you hear about somebody taking a selfie on a safari in the middle of a herd of rhinoceros, and they get the shot of a lifetime but the lifetime is suddenly shorter than expected?

      Newport is a great place to visit if you enjoy the sport of tennis. Once they took our money at the front desk, we were officially inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. The place is a working club, and we signed up to play a match of lawn tennis, since I'm a bit of a tennis enthusiast myself, which is a nice way of saying I suck at it. Playing tennis is not the dumbest thing I've ever done while on grass, but it ranks right up there. They say it's the fastest surface, but I was a able to slow it down to a moderate crawl. My serve was actually quite dangerous on the turf because I think I killed a bee, but that's the way the ball bounces.

     We walked down Bowen's Wharf and there was a HUGE yacht parked there. The guy at the marina gate wouldn't tell me who it belonged to. I threatened to torture the information out of him, which seemed to cheer him up. "Is it a hedge fund guy?" I asked. "I can't tell you that, but no," he said. "That means it's a celebrity. Is it Tom Cruise? The name certainly fits." "I can't tell you if it is or isn't. It isn't." "Tell me one thing and I won't ask anymore questions- is it who I think it is?" "I'm not allowed to say anything about who owns the yacht, but it's someone with untold wealth." "Well not anymore, you just told it. HA!" The owner charters it out sometimes, he told me, along with its 18 crew members. I'd like to hire it out for a pirate mission, do some looting and pillaging, and show off my big booty when I return.

     The next day we went to Easton Beach, and there was so much traffic on Memorial Boulevard that it was like a parking lot, so when you do finally park your car you'll hardly notice the difference. There was a lot of pressure to be gorgeous, since now we were part of the gorgeous view from up on the Cliff Walk, and I didn't want them looking down on us. There is plenty to do at the beach the locals call "First Beach." There's a snack bar, an aquarium and even a carousel. The sand itself is expansive even at high tide, with gorgeous views of the poor suckers up on the Cliff Walk. There are sometimes reports of red algae, so check before you go.

      The end of the three day weekend came much too soon, but it was fine with me because by that time I was ready to go home. I was sick of all the nice weather, the beautiful views and the endless things to do. I was tired of seeing good-looking blonde girls wherever I turned. I couldn't wait to get out of there and feast my eyes on somebody homely.

APPLIANCE NON-COMPLIANCE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (09-05-19)

     They say that bad things happen in groups of three, and if I ever find out who they are, I'm going to tell them that they are absolutely correct. First, our air conditioning unit went down, then our cable TV went out, then our clothes dryer went on the fritz. Oh, and then the parking brake on my car died, but that's probably the first bad thing in the next group of three and the other two will be along shortly, so I don't see any reason to change the rule.

     I was complaining about how hot it was without air conditioning to my wife, who was still at work. She said, "everyone here says it's probably the capacitor- look it up on YouTube." Luckily, there was a video on how to fix your air conditioning capacitor on YouTube. First, you take your volt-ohmmeter and set it to 75 microfarads. That's as far as I got, because at that point I ran around testing everything in the house. Our flashlight batteries need to be replaced, but I guess I could have determined that slightly faster by turning the flashlight on. Also, did you know that my cat has 122 ohms of resistance between his front paw and his back paw? I could have also figured out his exact resistance by the scratch on my arm.

     It was so hot that I purchased a stand-alone air conditioning unit for our basement from Amazon. It gets awfully hot in the Amazon so I figured they must know what they're doing. It attaches to this big hose that vents out the window, and it's very quiet, like a DC-10 taxiing in a library. My wife didn't care for it as much as I did. "I don't want to see a bunch of hose running out the window," she said. I have to tell you, that sentence sounds a lot different when you hear it as opposed to reading it. "Neither do I!" I said. "What's the hurry?" She said a few more things which I couldn't hear because the DC-10 was revving up for take-off, but the bottom line was I had to get rid of it.

     The air conditioning unit must have weighed 70 pounds, and I was thinking that Amazon is never going to come by and pick this thing up so I can return it, but that's exactly what they did. First I had to figure out how to get it back into the box it came in, where it did not want to go. Those packages are designed for a one-way trip, and there were pieces of styrofoam all over the place that didn't fit where they did before. I finally had to shoot it with a tranquilizer dart and tie it up with nylon rope.

     It was hot AND boring with no TV, but if you have email, you can schedule the cable guy to come during a window between 2:00PM and 4:00PM two weeks later. Unfortunately for us our internet provider IS the television cable, so he was going to have to show up on a whim. If you've ever tried to live without TV AND internet, you know that it can test your survival skills. History has shown that most major innovations in the world were invented by people who didn't have any internet or cable TV. Fire itself was invented by a person who was so bored that they just wanted to burn the house down and start again somewhere else.

     I scheduled the cable guy in a tight window that he barely fit through. "Look at this," he said, and showed me a scope that had a green screen which registered a whole lot of noise and looked like the EKG of a patient that tried to survive without TV and internet. I also thought I saw an enemy submarine wandering into the picture. "What are you going to do about this?" I asked. "We have to trace the source of the noise." I was talking about the enemy sub, but he didn't mention it so I pretended I didn't see it. Then he led me on a wild goose chase that started where the cable comes into the house and ended in the refrigerator where we keep the beer.

     He tightened every connection that led to a TV set, and a few that didn't. When he showed me the scope, it was flat-lining and the cable was back on. On the way out he passed the air conditioning repairman and gave him a look as if he found it quite believable that I could break three appliances at the same time.

     The air conditioning guy came right away, because apparently Somers had some kind of power surge that fried everybody's central air conditioning. He said, "Hmmmmm," about three times, and I know from experience that whenever a repairman says the word, "Hmmmmm," it will cost you $200 dollars. Some will even itemize it on the bill. "It's your capacitor," he said. "It's incapacitated." That's a little repairman humor, but thankfully he didn't charge me for it. I said, "Do you have one in your truck? It's 87 degrees in there." "Look at it this way," he said. "Your body temperature is 98.6, so you're still ahead of the game." That only made me feel hotter.

     By the time the guy came to service our dryer I had my volt-ohmmeter out and I was looking for the fuse. "Did you test the fuse?" He asked. "Actually I'm looking for the fuse on the volt-ohmmeter, it's not working anymore," I replied. Probably the batteries were dead, but I was going to have to put them into the flashlight to find out for sure.