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pizza Thanksgiving at the cabin
Thursday, November 25 2021
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
Gretchen and I would be going to the cabin for the long Thanksgiving weekend, so this morning Natalie came over to learn about our house. She'd be "babysitting" Powerful while we were gone, and would even be sleeping over in our bed, which meant we'd be putting clean new sheets on it for the first time in weeks. Among the wholesome things Natalie brought over as activities to be done with Powerful was a jigsaw puzzle of a Boston terrier swimming under water in pursuit of a tennis ball.
Gretchen had a number of large items she wanted to take to the cabin, and initially this suggested we would need a larger vehicle than the Chevy Bolt. But once I nixed the idea of bringing an antique chest of drawers, the remaining large objects managed to fit. These consisted of a table made from an old pedal-powered cast iron sewing machine drive mechanism and a tall-but-narrow set of shelves for the cabin's entryway closet. I managed to wrangle these into the back and side of the Bolt on top of the large pieces of bluestone and still leave enough room for Ramona and Neville.
We had nothing to get for the cabin, so we drove directly there. Along the way, I noticed a number of digital (grainy yellow dot-matrix) signs along the way warning drivers not to "drive high." A typical sign read "WHEN YOU DRIVE HIGH YOU'RE OUT OF YOUR MIND." It read like something someone's grumpy hippie-hating uncle might come up with. Evidently it's become more of a concern (at least for Thanskgiving) that drunk driving.
We arrived at the cabin with a couple hours of daylight left in the day. There was no snow on the ground when we arrived and the weather was fairly mild, with temperatures in the 40s. Neville immediately went to his carcass in the woods east of the cabin, the place from which he'd dragged a leg last week.
After Gretchen and I unloaded the car and I'd started a fire in the woodstove, Neville still hadn't returned. So Ramona and I went out to find him. He was in the woods only about 150 feet east of the cabin gnawing on a single bone, with no other traces of the carcass in evidence. A little down the hill from that, I found where the carcass must've been: a well-trodden patch of ground strewn with deer hair that had evidently been ripped out of the skin. The skin itself was nowhere in evidence, and neither were any bones. Evidently the coyotes in the Adirondacks are much more efficient than the ones back home, eating everything but the undigestible hair.
Gretchen is somewhat resistant to wearing orange and putting orange collars on the dogs even though it is hunting season, at least up at the cabin. She had apparently been living under the delusion that hunting is not permitted at Woodworth Lake, having accepted as true something our realtor had told us in an effort to sell us the property. But that didn't make any sense to me. Hunting is not the sort of thing that would be restricted on large forested parcels, especially at a place that clearly allows fishing and that attracts the kind of person who likes to hunt. She eventually sent an email to someone in the homeowners' association to find out for sure and learned that indeed hunting is very much permitted. And the carcass Neville has been visiting was probably a deer that survived long enough to get away from the hunter who shot it but died anyway.
John Jr., the "stoner plumber," had been working on adding a third zone to our cabin to heat our basement. His battery had died and he'd been forced to abandon his utility van at our place. This afternoon he and his wife drove out to pick up the van, and this also gave him a chance to clean up the mess he'd made in the basement. He'd installed two kickspace heaters on either side of the stairway to heat, respectively, the basement's east and west halves, and that seemed like a good space-efficient solution. [REDACTED]
My main task today was just to install the faucet on the bathtub. This involved a small amount of soldering to get the male half-inch fitting to end exactly three and seven-eighths inches from the wall. Once that was in place, I used caulk to seal it against the wall. I then continued with the caulk, adding a proper margin the the wall tiles and providing a good final seal between the tub and the floor tile. Meanwhile, Gretchen baked a couple frozen pizzas in the stove, and that ended up being our Thanksgiving feast. This might've been the first Thanksgiving in decades at which I drank no alcohol at all (unless you include the slightly-fermented Naked-brand Blue Machine smoothie; the fermentation of an unreliably-powered refrigerator had significantly improved its flavor, replacing some of the cloying sweetness with a trace of sour).
At some point I went out to gather firewood, this time using the wood-hauling backpack I've used so much in the forest near our house in Hurley. This makes it much easier to carry substantial firewood loads. Ultimately, I suspect I will have wood-hauling backpacks at both locations. (The one I've been using is quite tattered and has been rebuilt multiple times.)
Well after dark, Gretchen and I went for a walk. Initially a light rain was falling, though this eventually stopped. Our walk took us out to Woodworth Lake Road and then up to a radio tower owned by the City of Gloversville. (It has antennas for emergency services, not for cellular phones.) I looked through the chain-link barbed-wire-topped fence at what was inside and saw a propane tank, probably for a backup generator, and a number of fat neatly-organized cables connecting the tower to a windowless shed. While we were up there, Ramona was the first of our dogs to catch up to us, and she seemed a little unhappy to be walking in the rain and the cold. So we turned around and returned to the cabin.
Tonight for the first time ever, we slept in the southwest bedroom on the king-sized bed that had been set up there for weeks. The dogs were initially perplexed about how to join us, but then I showed them the steps I'd made. The mattress (which had come rolled up tight from Overstock.com) was very comfortable, topped as it was with a thin layer of memory foam.
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