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almost done doing cabin electrical work
Sunday, August 22 2021
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I had a bit of a red wine hangover when I finally got out of bed this morning. The solution was easy: I drank a beer, and the hangover vanished. It's that easy, and that's why alcoholics drink in the morning. It's not something I want to be in the habit of doing, but I wanted today to be productive, and beer was something I had. (If I'd been smarter, I would've bought some sort of shelf-stable caffeine product while I was driving around yesterday.)
The dogs were looking pretty comfortable on the futon, so I let them be and continued with my electrical work, eventually installing the rest of the outlet boxes in the unfinished bedroom.
At that point, it was time for a break. So I got the dogs out of bed and started walking on the trail down to the lake. The dogs didn't seem to be too excited to go in that direction and lagged well behind. But, unbeknownst to them, my plans weren't to go kayaking. Instead, I took the fork in the path taking me to Woodworth Lake's outflow. There's a beaver dam there, and below that the stone causeway. Since it all belongs to Gretchen and me now, I decided to add to the causeway, building it slightly higher and damming up a bit more water in the pool below the beaver dam. We're forbidden from creating structures in any area except for the place around our cabin and for the place for our dock, but if I make things (such as boat launches) from granite boulders, it would be hard to know whether the structures were natural or not. Such projects are perfect diversions after all the big critical tasks are finished.
Yesterday Joel had told me about some spectacular "100 foot cliffs" that supposedly exist somewhere on or near the boundary between our two properties some distance north of the lake, and my goal was to find them. By now, the dogs had joined me and seemed excited to be venturing into unexplored terrain. We went some distance and never found any cliffs, but eventually we came upon a well-maintained logging road full of little babbling temporary streams. The road started curving around back in the direction of the lake, so I decided to follow it wherever it led. Eventually it reached the extended part of Woodworth Lake Road somewhere between Piotr's and Joel's parcels (Joel's parcel is what separates our parcel from Piotr's).
From there, it was a long walk back to the cabin, though at least I wasn't finding my way through trackless wilderness. The dogs were back to following me at a great distance, taking detours to check out various nearby campsites of association members who haven't yet built cabins, where they were likely finding the sorts of delicious things that dogs living in vegan families don't have access to very often.
Back at the cabin, I continued my wiring. By now I was doing trickier, nastier work such as pulling wire through bats of ceiling insulation. Soon I was drenched in sweat as I had been yesterday.
At around this time, one of the other association couples whom I'd met last night at Claudia's party stopped by on their way out of town to have a look at the cabin, which had just been a poured foundation when they'd last gotten nosy and had a look. This time I could give a tour of the actual house, and they made all the appropriate noises. The best thing about their visit was that it indicated I hadn't made a complete embarrassment of myself last night.
I worked like a crazy person after that, taking occasional sips of a warm Brew Free or Die IPA as I finished off the last things I could do. I didn't have supplies to complete the job, since there was a narrow inter-stud wall bay my boxes couldn't be nailed in and I wanted to run three-conductor wire to the light in the bathroom and bedroom. (I'd figured out that the "light box" directly inside the door in that bedroom was actually for a networked smoke detector.) By the end there, I was down to the fussy work of stapling wires and sweeping up all the debris resulting from drilling holes through studs and plates. The builders for the cabin keep a clean worksite, and I didn't want to junk it up.
Then it was time to pack up the car, lock up the cabin, and start the two hour drive back to Hurley. A light drizzle was falling initially, but when I got out onto I-90 eastbound the showers became steadily heavier, causing a worrying decrease in visibility. Even in such conditions, there were occasional assholes weaving in between the cars in a hurry to go do something douchey. There was a hurricane named Henri lashing New England at the time.
Back home in Hurley, I opened the door to find the cats sitting around in the dining room as if they'd just had a dismal conversation about what to do if the humans never came back. I'd been gone about 48 hours and in that time they'd eaten ever kibble from their dishes, which I'd overfilled. I felt so bad for them that I gave them all extra wet food.
I was still filthy from all the sweaty work and lack of soap in the Adirondacks, so I took a nice hot bath, though our hot water is back to stinking of sulfur again from some sort of bad reaction between the electrode in the heat-pump-based hot water heater and the water in our well.
A white amanita mushroom northwest of Lake Woodworth today.
Ramona with a large granite boulder at northwest of Woodworth Lake today.
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