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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   Stony Creek
Saturday, May 8 2021
The panagram for the Saturday Spelling Bee in the New York Times was "normally" with "y" in the middle, and by the end of the day we would manage to get all but two of the words: "mononym" and "lorry." After I'd had enough coffee and cinnamon rolls, I started cutting up the pieces for the new top drawer in the steps up to the laboratory deck. The space could support a drawer with an area of nine by nineteen inches with a height of 5.5 inches. As usual for such drawers, the corners would all be on a mitre cut strengthened with screws and glue. (I don't need fancier joints than that.)
My work was interrupted by Gretchen wanting to take me on the day's dog walk, where she wanted to show me some things she'd discovered by walking outside her normal territory. So we drove a short way down Lorenz Road and then we walked on the road's northwest fork, where there was an old camper trailer. (I'd never been on this part of Lorenz Road before and never seen the trailer.) Some distance down a trail further northwest, we came upon a shack in the forest flanked by two outhouses (one of which looked to have been last shat in about nine months ago). Someone had twisted the lock on the door of the shack, rendering it permanently unlocked, so we were able to peak in. The shack was actually a trailer to which additions had been made. Inside, it was grimy and gross, the kind of place only straight men would be comfortable in. There was a five gallon bucket full of bullet and shotgun casings, enough to make a large brass bell if we were to take it to Mercedes in College Park, Maryland. Despite the grim nature of the accommodations, this wouldn't've been a bad site for a pleasant little cabin in the forest, because a little way further north was a body of water with plenty of artifacts of recent beaver activity. "Who needs a cabin in the Adirondacks?" I asked, semi-jokingly. Someone had even put propped a boat against a tree on the other side of the pond.
It turned out that the body of water was dammed up by a causeway that had been further raised by beavers. The causeway crossed what turned out to be Stony Creek and was on a named avenue called O'Keefe Lane, which came off Stone Road, which is the next north-south road connecting 28A to Hurley Mountain Road west of Dug Hill Road. We actually walked south some distance on Stone Road without ever knowing it was anything more than a mountain logging road. Along the way, we saw a sawmill (41.935541N, 74.133646W) and a bluestone stone yard (41.933655N, 74.132971W), as well as a trailer with a surprisingly big photovoltaic array (41.934244N, 74.132928W), but there were no actual human being in evidence anywhere; the only vehicles were large trucks of the sort used to haul bluestone or unprocessed trees. We went down the driveway from the trailer with all the solar panels and found an amazing year-round canvas tent on the banks of Stony Creek with a little trailer parked nearby that seemed to provide a shower and a composting toilet. It looked like someone's ideal honeymoon get-away, but perhaps it was an AirBnB glamping site. Gretchen had been off her feed since seeing the hunter's camp, but whoever had made this glamp was, she thought, one of her people. They'd even laid out bluestone paths.
Near there, Stony Creek opened up into huge pools, ones I thought Gretchen should note so she could come back in swim in them when the weather gets hot.
Loose bluestone from nearby mines was everywhere, and after climbing a steep slope topped by a manmade bluestone wall, we found ourselves at the Lorenz mancamp, something Gretchen was familiar with but which I'd never seen. It featured some trailers, a single permanent building, and a large mowed meadow (41.932246N, 74.127624W, perhaps intended to attract deer to shoot at. In the past there had been a no-trespassing sign saying not to worry about dogs but to instead worry about men with guns. That sign was gone, along with a lot of the trash and clutter Gretchen remembered. Perhaps it had been bought by some nice gay couple from Brooklyn.
My feet were soggy from having waded through Stony Creek in Crocs, so the first thing I did when we got back to the Leaf was take off my shoes and socks. The dogs were a little slow, so we drove a little ways down Lorenz to pick up first Ramona and then Neville.
Back at the hous, I finished building my laboratory steps drawer. It proved a little deeper than initially planned, so I had to rip out yet another two-by-four beneath the top of the steps to the laboratory deck. This one was fairly easy to extract, since it was held in place by six screws, all of which I could reach. (At this point I'm marveling at how overengineered the steps to the laboratory deck were; what was I thinking back in 2004?) The new drawer seemed small, but it can (I determined) hold nearly three gallons, which is not bad considering a plastic antifreeze container (my basic unit of storage) only holds one gallon.


On the O'Keefe Lane causeway beneath the beaver pond.


The tent of the people Gretchen thought she might like on Stony Creek.


Another view of that same tent.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?210508

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