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grout exhausted and a frozen hose
Saturday, November 13 2021
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
Gretchen (and really everybody who was anybody) would be attending a Patty Smyth concert this weekend, so she wouldn't be going to the Adirondacks. I, however, would be (no offence, Patty), though I would be leaving today (instead of last night) so I could be in Albany during the hours when the Tile Shop would be open. I would also be driving the Subaru despite its failed power steering and muffler issues, since I would be carrying a bunch of lumber (which I'd wrapped in a tarp to protect it from yesterday's rains). I would also be carrying four large pieces of bluestone, one of which I'd carried from an old bluestone mine in the forest a couple hundred feet east of the south end of the Farm Road. To accommodate the bluestone, I had to lay down the back seats and cover the stones with a four by two foot piece of plywood that I was also transporting. On top of that, I put a dog bed for Ramona; Neville would be riding (as he prefers) in the front passenger seat.
Our first stop was the Tile Shop, where I was only picking up two boxes of tile so I could finish the bathroom tiling at the cabin. From there, I drove straight to the cabin. This time I paid more attention to the mileage. It's about 82 miles from the Kingston exit to the Amsterdam exit, and about 23 miles from the Amsterdam exit to the cabin, making the whole trip about 110 miles in one direction. At the gate to Woodworth Lake, I found a guy in a pickup truck wearing hunters' camoflage. I didn't know his name, but he looked familiar. He might've been part of that local group of "rednecks" who move a trailer onto their parcel in the warm weather. He was friendly but a little suspicious, since I'm not yet a known quantity in the homeowners association. He mentioned that packages kept being left at the gate for someone instead of being driven the last mile to their actual destination, and I asked if they were from Gretchen Pr!mack. He said they were, and indicated that he'd put them in a plastic bag to keep them from getting rained on (a light rain was falling at the time). I'm not great at smalltalk but offered, "this isn't bad weather for the Adirondacks this time of year." The guy said that some years it would've already been snowing. But, as I pointed out, that's also true of the Catskills. Before we parted ways, he asked what parcel I belong to, and I told him, which reminded him of our neighbor Shane, the guy who just bulldozed his building envelope.
It was 45 degrees in the cabin when the dogs and I arrived. The dogs immediately plunked down in their dog bed, and I covered them with a blanket. The starter battery was dead on the generator, and jumping that (using the Subaru) was my first major chore.
I then hooked up the mercury-tilt thermostat to automatically control the generator and got a sense of about where I would want to place it when leaving the cabin unattended, a place I marked with a Sharpie. I built up a good fire in the woodstove, and when temperatures reached the 60s, I mixed up some thinset and installed the remainder of the tiles (about 35 or so, three of which I needed to cut on the wetsaw so they wouldn't reach past the ceiling). After letting that set for an hour or two, I mixed up mortar with the hope of doing all of it. Unfortunately, I only had enough mortar for about a third of the job, and to get more of the right color would've required driving to Amsterdam (and also unloading the roof rack in what was now snow). When I went to clean my trowel and bucket, I saw crystals of ice glinting on the front stoop. And when I went to run water from the hose, nothing came, indicating the water in it had changed to ice. Mind you, I was working with just a teeshirt on and no pants, which keeps mortar and grout from ending up in my clothes.
The bathtub was a mess after all the tiling and grouting, but I managed to get enough of its plumbing working (replacing the test plugs with an actual faucet cartridge) to both run the water and to drain it. I could've also taken a bath had I wanted to.
Before going to sleep, I ate some cannabis and cracked open a Founders KBS stout (12% alcohol) and was enjoying myself so much I almost forgot to clean the grout lines.
I've been trying to preserve the bandwidth of our 20 GB/month WiFi hotspot, but this evening I tested it out to see how good it actually was. I found I was able to watch both porn and YouTube videos without any problem, suggesting that cellular internet is a usable there, perhaps even for remote work.
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