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Adirondack dog steps
Sunday, November 14 2021
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I'd set the generator's mercury-tilt thermometer to turn on when the temperature dropped to about 62 degrees, which happened at some point in the night, causing the generator to cough itself itself awake. That seemed unnecessarily warm, so I lowered it to somewhere near 58 degrees, causing it to wake up this morning about fifteen minutes before 8:00am. That seemed like a good time to me, and I let it run until it (and the woodstove) had heated the house enough for the tilt switch to switch it off, which took about an hour. During that time, I used the toaster to make myself some toast. Heating with resistive-coil heaters is very inefficient, particularly when electricity has been made by burning fossil fuel and venting the waste heat. But toasters make better use of the heat they produce because their heating coils lie very close to the thing they are heating.
I only got around to unloading the Subaru's roof rack today, once it was no longer raining or snowing and there was daylight to help me. It was still unpleasant work, what with the snow sliding off and tramping through all the sandy mud of the building site. To help with that, I'd brought those four pieces of bluestone so I could get started making some sort of path to walk on. But it's going to take a lot more bluestone to make much of a difference.
One of
A dusting of snow had fallen last night, and I went outside to take some pictures, as I think this was the cabin's first experience with snow.
I was puttering around the cabin and the outdoors for awhile before taking the dogs on a brief walk out to Woodworth Lake Road and back. Along the way, I went into Shane's (our neighbor's) new clearing, which is very near the peak of the hill our cabin is on the northeast side of. He'd laid down a thick bed of gravel and removed most of the stumps and some of the soil in a smallish clearing. Much of the soil was in a ragged mound that probably won't remain, but which would help block some of our view from our cabin if it were to.
Off in the distance to the west, I heard the call of a loon down on Lake Edward. This made me wonder where loons go in the winter, as I hadn't seen a loon in Woodworth Lake in over a month. So I did a little online research and learned that loons actually spend the winter out in the ocean, where their color changes to drab grey. At some point they moult all their wing feathers at once, and in the three weeks before new ones grow in, they're entirely flightless. Another interesting thing about loons is that, while the adult loons leave for the ocean in late September or October, their young don't leave until November (or, at the latest, when the lake they're in is in danger of freezing, after which it's too late, since loons can't get into the air without first taxiing for a quarter mile across a liquid lake surface). Nobody knows how the young know where the ocean is or whether they meet up with their parents out there. But if they don't, loons return to their birth lakes (or at least nearby) every spring the moment the lakes thaw, and family reunions could theoretically happen then (though the probably don't).
The view from our cabin of Lake Edward continues to grow clearer and clearer as more trees shed their leaves. I have cleared a straight path through the woods to the top of the first line of granite cliffs. I stood at the edge of those cliffs admiring the view. The clouds had mostly cleared away and the distant lake was now a band of blue. By this point the snow around the cabin had melted away, but the mountains just northeast of Lake Edward were still white above a certain elevation. As I looked at the mountains, I saw single cabin up high in a place that I'd thought was either state land or hopelessly inaccessible by road. I gathered a little firewood and then returned to the cabin.
Early this afternoon, I undertook a small task of installing a handle on the downstairs bathroom's medicine cabinet. I used a decorative ceramic handle we'd bought in Guatemala back in 2006, which had spent some time as handle on a cabinet in our kitchen before we renovated it back in 2018. I wanted there to be a magnet on the other side of the cabinet door where the handle's through-bolt was secured with a nut. I'd brought a number of perforated rare-earth magnets that can be secured with a screw. But even in the largest one, the hole was too small for the bolt. So I got out a drill and drilled out the hole to make it bigger. The magnet did not like this one bit, and was soon glowing at the place where the drillbit was being applied. And the glowing continued after I stopped drilling, not in a way that suggested retained heat but in a way that suggested burning. I was, however, able to enlarge the hole, though this created a fair amount of highly-magnetic dust (which was less of a problem than expected) and the silvery finish of the magnet was mostly destroyed. But it was still a magnet, and it allowed the cabinet door to lock in place when closed (against a little steel nubbin leftover from some Overstock.com assemblage).
After firing up the generator, I overcame my procrastination and went down to the basement and methodically built a set of steps to allow the dogs to get up to the king-size bed we'll soon be using (though this weekend the dogs and I were still sleeping on the futon). The steps I built were modeled on a set of steps I'd built back in 2010, when Sally our then-dog was starting to have trouble getting up on the bed. As with those steps, I divided the height of the bed by three and made the steps be the first two of those three steps. So in this case, the bed is 24 inches above the floor, so the unit I made had a bottom step eight inches above the floor and the other step of sixteen inches above the floor. I hadn't looked carefully at the steps I'd built back in 2010, which has relatively simple dado joints. So on the steps I built today, I made extensive use of fancier cross lap joints, which require a fair amount of accurate (but shallow) chiseling to produce, especially when the saw-cut fillets are thick. (I had to chisel out eight separate voids.) But I kept to it, cranking MP3s of Arch Enemy, whose creepy riffs and blasts of machine gun drumming are perfect for this sort of work. (Amusing, for all Arch Enemy's sonic brutality, one can hear the strong influence of Scorpions, the dinosaurs of Central European hard rock, who are as famous for their love ballads as anything else.)
Before leaving the cabin for the work week, I brought all the long pieces of one by six lumber up to the upstairs bedroom and proceeded to paint their edges and one of their sides with polyurethane, the idea being that this would be easiest while they aren't yet nailed to the wall (where they will serve as simple cabin-style baseboard).
It took a single road beer to drive the 23 miles out to the Thruway, but from there I just drank cold tea I'd fixed myself yesterday morning and had never gotten around to drinking. Somehow that aging Subaru got me to the Adirondacks and back without incident.
[REDACTED]
The Subaru (still with its roof rack unpacked) near the corner of the cabin nearest the generator so I could jumpstart it last night.
Click to enlarge.
A view of the cabin from a large boulder just to its south.
Click to enlarge.
Some of the chiseled-out pieces for the dog steps.
Two mostly-assembled halves of the steps.
The finished steps. The rear supports angle ten degrees out from plumb; the one I'd made in 2010 had rear supports that angle fifteen degrees from plumb.
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