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one hell of a trucker bomb
Sunday, January 16 2022
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
It wasn't much (if any) warmer today, though it was sunny again, which put some solar power back in our battery and flooded our great room with sunlight. Relflection from the sun made it brighter than it can ever get in the summer, and it surely had positive effects on our pineal glands.
I spent the late morning carefully sawing a roughly-square hole in the drywall of the wall to the right of the second floor toilet. This is the wall between the toilet and the tub, and I wanted a permanent removable hatch to give me access to all the plumbing valves as well as the tub drain. Again, I used a box cutter for this task, since it is very precise, has a limited penetration depth (thus being less threatening to plumbing pipes) and generates very little gypsum dust. It takes longer, but the other attributes more than make up for that.
Next I did some research to see if a steel tub should be attached with any fasteners to anything. Apparently not; gravity and the wall material pretty much hold it in place, though a little adhesive caulk along the floor at the bottom of the outside panel is probably a good idea. One does have to install a stringer on the outside of the studs against which the tub is set in order to support the rim. So I built and installed that with a little help from Gretchen. I also checked for how the drain worked in the tub before installing it, catching a leak I might not've detected until after the installation.
Then I had Gretchen put down her James Baldwin book and come help me wrestle the tub into its alcove. In the process it kept getting hung on various things and the damn drain was just a little too far from where it really needed to be to hook up with the plumbing underneath. But with patience and persistence I managed to at least get the down pipe into the correct hole (even if I wasn't sure if the securing nut was doing anything. And then when I partially-filled the tub and did a test drain, there were no leaks evident. Overall it was a success, though thoughts of the marginal nature of the drain attachment will probably haunt me for awhile.
For her fast-approaching birthday, Gretchen had requested some modifications to a shelving unit in the closet in the entranceway of our house back in Hurley. The shelf was kind of shallow, and things (mostly gloves and hats) tended to fall off the shelves. So she wanted some sort of lip to better contain those items. Since my mitre saw is currently at the cabin, I decided to cut all the pieces for my solution to this problem: a set of four hopper-like fronts for each of the shelves. While blasting retard rock (WPYX) in the basement, I cut all eight right-triangles and four rectangular pieces.
Then I happened to notice a thick fur of frost had formed on the concrete walls at the insides of the basement's four corners. Evidently cold could most-rapidly be conducted inside at those places. Ultimately I'd like to insulate the top of the foundation wall on the outside, but for now it seemed prudent to use styrofoam sheets (all of which I'd saved from the packaging of furniture shipped to the cabin) to cover the coldest parts of the foundation wall from the inside.
Then I cracked open a beer and hung all the various drawer-and-tray-based storage solutions on the plywood basement wall I'd installed a month or so ago. While I was doing this, WPYX played "Nothing Else Matters" by Metallica. I'd thought Metallica might be a little too abrasive for a station that features Medicare-related advertising, but that is one of Metallica's least-abrasive songs. And it's a whole lot better than "I Can't Drive 55," a song WPYX loves to play but which seals the deal on its format being "retard rock."
There was a big snow storm coming, and originally the plan had been to leave the cabin in the mid-afternoon. But the storm was arriving more slowly than usual, so we left at our usual time, which was maybe 7:00pm.
Back in Hurley, Powerful was stuck down in his basement bedroom, unable to even walk to the bathroom on that same floor. Gretchen made him a salad that included cucumbers and a stir fry that included vegan bacon. In exchange, Powerful gave her a half gallon of urine that he'd pissed into a plastic jug. That would be one hell of a trucker bomb! As for the other major use for a toilet, well, pain has forced Powerful to start taking percocet again, which pretty much shuts that whole system down.
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