Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   perfect weather in the Adirondacks
Saturday, April 10 2021
Today Gretchen and I would be meeting with our builder at the Woodworth Lake property to work out the details of where our house would sit in an existing clearing. So we didn't do our usual Saturday things. Instead we loaded up the dogs into the Prius (the best car with the necessary range) and started driving up the Thruway. The plan was to pick up lunch from the deli in the back of Parivar, an Indian grocery store on Central Avenue in Albany. But when we got to Parivar, we found their deli was closed, perhaps due to the ongoing pandemic. So I bagged up eight tablespoon-sized samosas and grabbed a bag of Tikh Mitha mix instead. We ended up buying to-go lunch from the deli area of Whole Foods. This included a tempeh sandwich and a slice of cheeseless pizza featuring sundried tomatoes and arugula. We didn't find a place to actually eat this lunch until we arrived at the Patterson Travel Plaza (west-bound on I-90 not too far from Schenectady). In the back, near the parking lot at the end of the travel plaza's access road, was a small pond that looked to be either a runoff collector or a sewage lagoon, and we sat there and ate our lunch while the dogs sniffed around. It turned out the tempeh sandwich contained avocado, so Gretchen didn't want any. Fortunately, she found the pizza delicious.
As always when driving in the southwestern Adirondacks, Google sent us to our destination on a seemingly unfamiliar route. There are no direct routes but many indirect ones, and, depending on the data at the time, Google can seemingly come up with a different one every time. We met Joe the builder at the Woodworth Lake gate, and followed him in our car to the buildign site. Neither of us seemed too worried about coronavirus; he'd had his second shot a couple weeks ago and we'd had ours on Thursday. So there was no mask wearing nor much social distance when doing things like looking at the map. It turned out that our building site was on a mild north-facing slope, meaning trees to the south were rooted to ground that was higher than where our house would be. The clearing was kind of small for the house we'd be placing it in, and this meant we had a little trouble finding room for the septic field and parking area. But if we could rotate the house so the roof ridge didn't exactly run east-west, we'd open up a nice triangle in the northwest corner for parking and a septic field. I thought 20 degrees off of perfect north-south orientation would be okay, so we oriented the picnic table to represent this. But we'll have to talk to solar energy experts to confirm whether this is acceptable.
As Joe was leaving, Gretchen and I hiked down to the lake, though we got a little lost on the way down and had to go off-trail part of the way down. And then Gretchen and I somehow got separated when she went off to look for some sort of "bench" she remembered. Meanwhile I was exploring a jumble of granite on the lakeshore that seemed to include a few voids big enough to be considered caves. When I wanted to find Gretchen again, I shouted a few times (loud enough to hear an echo from the other side of the lake). But there was no response. I did this multiple times, gradually starting to worry whether Gretchen wasn't responding because She'd fallen into an unseen chasm. But I had no other choice but to head back to the building site and hope she'd gone there too. It turned out that she was there, sunning herself on one of the two benches on the picnic table. The weather was sunny and in the seventies and there were no attacking insects, meaning this was probably as good as it ever gets. There were even a few flowering daisies on the building site.
Gretchen had communicated with the head of the lake's housing association to ask about rules regarding solar and wind, and in the process had learned that Piotr, one of the other members of the board would be up this weekend at his property on the north shore of the lake. So our next destination was the other side of the lake, which we reached via Woodworth Lake Road. Road conditions were perfect for driving the Prius, though there were still ridges of dirty snow on either side in places. We came across Piotr organizing some rocks along the roadside, so we stopped and chatted with him for awhile. We asked about things like the rules for building a dock on the lake and whether there are loons. It turns out we can build any sort of dock we want, so long as it doesn't cover more than 100 square feet above the shoreline. And the lake usually gets a pair of loons every year (probably nesting on the lake's one island), though he's seen migratory flocks as large as 30 on the surface of the lake. He told us all about all the other landowners in the association and what their history was. As for him, he has about fifty acres but no real cabin yet. Instead, he has a series of leantos in various places. Piotr said he liked to have big loud multi-generational gatherings on his parcel, though today he was just there with his wife. He hadn't even brought his two rescued dobermans, which he usually lets roam off-leash. That was what our dogs were doing at the time, and Neville even found something to bark at. It turned out Piotr is only 43 years old and yet has daughter is 23. "You were a young father!" Gretchen exclaimed, which didn't cause Piotr to elaborate. His other place is in New York City, where he owns a construction business. He seems like a nice guy, though I braced Gretchen for the inevitable news that he is not a vegan.

On the drive back to Albany, Gretchen and I decided to pick up lupper at Little Anthony's, the pizza place with calzones and lots of vegan options. We ended up getting three calzones (one each for us and one to bring home for Powerful). Little Anthony's dining room is still closed and there's no outdoor place to eat there, so we stopped at Our Ladies of Angels Cemetery, which we came upon as we headed back north up Central Avenue. It was a Catholic cemetery, but nearly all the gravestones we saw there had German names on them, suggesting it hadn't been open to Italians and the Irish. Our calzones were delicious and the cheese so convincingly cheese-like that Gretchen called Little Anthony's to make sure we hadn't gotten real cheese by mistake. The woman on the phone insisted it was the latest version of Daiya, which, she said, keeps changing their recipe.
Before heading back to Hurley, we went into the Wolf Road Trader Joe's to get the kind of provisions that can only be bought there, such as naan crackers, corn & wheat tortillas, and cheap sunflower seeds. We only bought one grocery cart full of items, but it still came to over $300. Our cashier insisted on doing all the ringing-up and bagging herself, probably for social distancing reasons.

I should mention that our Prius stank the whole time of some sort of fake floral air freshner, which Powerful had put in the car (and Gretchen had removed the moment she became aware of it, though its olfactory ghost remained). Gretchen and I find such fake floral smells revolting, and would much rather smell whatever such fragrances the air freshner was installed to conceal. In the case of this car, it was probably cigarette smoke, since Powerful is a smoker (he occasionally "quits," but never for long). He probably sneaks an occasional cigarette in the Prius (if he's anything like most smokers, who, with respect to their addiction, are always sociopaths). But even if he doesn't, that smell is on his clothes, and he sits in the Prius for hours every week. But the solution, at least for us, is not air freshners. Our differences regarding such fragrances are likely part of a bigger culture clash we keep running into between us (upper-middle-class coastal lefties with a preference for natural products) and Powerful (who comes from a working-class urban African-American family).


Ramona and Gretchen in the cemetery today with our calzones. Click to enlarge.


Neville in the cemetery.


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