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hot day at Fording Place
Wednesday, June 20 2012
I could tell just from the way that the morning felt that today was going to be an oppressively hot and humid one. Temperatures ended up reaching nearly to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, though the house itself still had enough residual coolness to make things somewhat more comfortable indoors. We have no air conditioning, which is generally unnecessary in this climate. Still, when weather is like this I have to chuckle when I see people posting "WANTED: air conditioner" on Freecycle. They might as well be asking for "gold jewelry, no fakes please."
Yesterday I'd gotten started on building the door for the new greenhouse upstairs. Since it would be shorter and narrower than any stock door and would contain windows and a pet door, it made sense for me to build it from scratch. As with the custom door I'd made for the greenhouse downstairs, I built a frame of two by twos (that is, ripped two by fours). Unlike with the downstairs, I felt safe to use standard lumber (as opposed to the pressure treated kind).
Today I focused on provisioning a window for that door. Ideally I would have selected a pane of insulated glass, but I had none available of the right size that didn't have blown seals (and I only want to use unclouded glass for the upstairs).
Hoping to somehow reuse the glass, I decided to see how difficult it is to cleave the individual panes from one of my smaller blown-sealed double-pane units. It turned out to be a rather simple procedure to work a knife in along the inside of a pane, past the aluminum spacer, and into the void that should normally be filled with either argon or super-dry air. From there I could work the knife around and free the pane. Cleaning it proved unexpectedly difficult; the cloudiness on the inside seemed almost like a mineral and required vinegar to remove. And there was also some sort of coating on the outside of the pane that had been discolored and was difficult to scrub away. But when I was done, I had a couple of nice pieces of glass measuring 14.5 by 24 inches. I took one of those panes and installed it within a mitre-cut wooden frame. By this point I'd decided to solve the problem of glazing my custom door by making the window modular. It would be a rectangular socket willing to accept framed window units containing glass, double glazing, or even screen, and I could swap units in and out as needed. The single-paned window I was making today would be suitable for holding out drafts and rain, but might be insufficient for keeping back cold on a brutal winter's day.
At some point this afternoon I drove down into Old Hurley mostly to get some more cheap beer, which is essential in hot weather like today's. (My cheap beer of choice remains Mountain Brew Beer Ice, the Stewart's in-house beer with laughably-amateurish packaging design.) I also got two five gallon buckets of top soil, and while I was there, I carried Sally down to the Esopus and plunked her in the water. She's too feeble to walk down there herself, but she looked like she needed to cool off. Unfortunately, none of the other dogs joined us.
So then I drove us all out to Fording Place (four miles to the southwest). It being a hot day, there were a number of people already there: what looked to be a grandmother, a son, and a young girl, a group of shirtless teenage boys, and, across the Esopus on the 209 side, a woman sitting on a towel. As I was carrying Sally to the creek, the young girl asked her living ancestors, "Why is he carrying that dog?" I replied, "because she's really old. She 17!" I'd been a little concerned that maybe Ramona (who is sometimes overwhelmingly friendly) would start licking that little girl in the face and chewing on her ear, but she left her completely alone. I was able to get both Ramona and Eleanor to wade into the water, but they quickly tired of the limited canine recreational options available there.
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