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the needs of my big new saw
Sunday, April 10 2022
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Today play out initially like a repeat of yesterday, though it was a good deal colder outside. Eventually we had periods of light sleet and even a few snow flurries. But later the sun came out and we occasionally collected a good amount of electricity in the big battery in the basement.
When Ramona eventually went outside, she did that thing where she shat over by the well instead of where she usually shits, which is behind the propane tank. She then proceeded to eat all that she'd shat out again, exactly as she'd done the last time she'd shat near the well. There's no way of knowing why she did this, but it's good I'd observed it or we wouldn't've known to avoid her lips for the rest of the day.
At some point I began work on a carpentry project: the building, from scratch, of a medicine cabinet for the upstairs bathroom. There was an especially large two-by-four-deep rectangular hole above that bathroom's sink. The hole measured 28.5 inches wide and 22 inches tall. I wanted to take advantage of the entire void, though it was too large for a medicine cabinet. So I decided to frame out a set of narrow shelves on either side of the medicine cabinet. These would be integrated into the medicine cabinet's structure, but a hinged mirror would only cover the middle part, the actual medicine cabinet.
After taking a number of measurements, I went down to the basement, turned on the local retard rock station, and began cutting up one by four planks using the big mitre saw Gretchen's parents bought me for my birthday. It was my first real use of it, and I quickly got the hang of the laser cut guidance and other features. The saw is extremely powerful, which is good for some reasons and bad for another. It turns out that it uses so much power when making a cut that it can easily overload the SolArk inverter. And even when powering the house with the generator (which I more or less had to do to use the saw), if I was trying to charge the Bolt as I was using the saw, I found myself exceeding the Generac generator's 14 kilowatt limit. That's a lot of power. But it's okay; it's not really a problem to have to run the generator if I want to use such a beefy tool. And it's not a problem to not be charging the Bolt if I'm using the saw.
I had the perfect dimensional lumber for the medicine cabinet. But it turned out that I didn't have a big enough piece of quarter inch plywood to form the cabinet's back. I was forced to use four different rectangular pieces, which I carefully measured so their edges would fall on either uprights between shelves or on shelves.
Meanwhile Gretchen had cooked up a frozen pizza, which I ate along with leftover curry from last night.
At some point I started drinking a beer. And then I drank another one. By then I was pretty much ready to head back to Hurley. But Gretchen was on the couch, reading. So I lay on the other couch and eventually fell asleep. And then Gilley called from Portland, which meant we wouldn't be leaving the cabin any time soon.
When we did finally leave the cabin, it was a little after 6:00pm. I drove us home, driving about a third of the route on an otherwise nearly-empty Thruway behind a tractor-trailer going about 65 miles per hour. This was to conserve power, as we'd only started the drive with about 140 miles' worth of range in the battery. Driving this way, we made it back to Hurley (about 110 miles away) with 31 miles still left.
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