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handcrafted medicine cabinet
Sunday, October 31 2021
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
[REDACTED]
We wanted coffee as if it were a Saturday morning but wanted to defer starting up the generator. Fortunately, the 120 volt inverter for Ryobi batteries provided enough power to run the coffee grinder. And the gas stove could be ignited with a lighter. I wrote the day's New York Times Spelling Bee letters (N A C I O R Z) on a piece of cardboard and we shouted out the words we saw. (The panagram was "zirconia.")
Gretchen found that it was no longer raining, so she took the dogs for a short walk over to Shane's building envelope to look at the devastation. When she returned, she said maybe I should take advantage of the continuing lack of rain to canoe my two-by-sixes from the public dock over to our dock area. I tried to get the dogs to go with me for that, but when I headed down the hill, they stayed at the edge of the backyard and watched me skeptically. I managed to retrieve all eight boards in a single canoe trip. Though it was chilly and a little windy, it was still somehow pleasant to be out paddling on a canoe on the lake. There wasn't much in the way of wildlife to see, though; all I saw was a fat robin and a couple of blue jays.
Back at the cabin, I finished building the hardwood workbench I'd started yesterday. The directions were terrible and there were lots of parts I didn't end up needing. It also included a fair number of pegs (both steel and wood) for securing workpieces to be chiseled, though the bench itself seemed a bit flimsy to absorb much in the way of hammer blows. But it will be nice to have some place to put my tools and jars of fasteners, if nothing else.
Next I turned my attention to building the downstairs medicine cabinet using the one by sixes I'd brought atop the roof of the Subaru alongside the two by sixes. I'd also brought my chop saw, which made making straight cuts a simple operation. I worked in the basement, where I could listen to the radio and make loud construction noises without disturbing Gretchen, who had just started reading a new book in the great room. It was a fairly easy job to make the framework of the cabinet with two shelves using screws and Gorilla Glue. Then, I made something of a picture frame for the front of the cabinet using maple boards with mitre joints and attached it with finishing nails. This would work to hide the gap between the cabinet and the drywall and provide an attachment surface for the mirrored door, which I'd salvaged from a medicine cabinet we would not otherwise be deploying. As I worked, I noticed that WFNY ("Glove City Radio") had switched to a heavily Halloween-themed broadcast, with nothing but spooky music (if "Black Magic Woman" and "Devil With a Blue Dress On" qualify) and voiceovers digitally processed to sound monstrous.
Gretchen seemed surprised by how great my medicine cabinet turned out. She suggested I paint it with a layer of polyurethane to protect it from bathroom moisture, so I did that out on the screened-in porch using the worst paintbrush in the entire multiverse. (Note to self: never ever buy another paint brush with rubber foam instead of bristles.)
I've neglected to mention that when she hasn't been reading, helping me with the tile, preparing food, or walking the dogs, Gretchen has been recoloring the grout in the first floor bathroom. I was deeply skeptical of this project, and thought the results were a little rough around the edges, but Gretchen liked the way it looked, and that's really all that matters.
At some point I managed to get the Cricket-powered WiFi hotspot to work, and it seemed to provide reasonably-fast internet when working from the loft (where the cell signal is strongest). Before we left, I attached the hotspot to a car battery to see if it would still be up and running when we return next weekend (a test that would've probably made more sense back in Hurley where I could better monitor it).
After cleaning up the cabin and packing up what we needed to take home, we started our drive back to Hurley at around dusk, We were low on gas, so we stopped at the Gulf station near the corner of Perry and Maple. Despite that station's urban feel, it nevertheless seemed to be named "Country Farms." Country Farms has no public restrooms, but I was bursting at the seams so I went around back and found a not-especially-private place to piss there.
As always, I did nearly all the driving while Gretchen talked on the phone. On the way up, she'd talked to Powerful and found him in agony as a result of his pain medications being cut in half. (This might be part of the unconsciously racist "suck it up, buttercup" attitude toward black patients, an assumption that they can't experience pain like white people.) By our drive home this evening, his pain was being better managed (partly as a result of actions Gretchen had taken), though there were still issues to contend with. Gretchen has been finding that being the point person for a transplant patient is something of a part-time job.
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