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hot water heater takes the low route Friday, May 20 2022
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
I get up so early that I have hours available to work on things before my workday begins. My pattern of late has been to actually do workplace work during that time to compensate for the slacking I tend to do during the workday. But this morning I used my time to begin the process of moving the heat-pump-powered hot water heater out of the house and then through the rough country east of the house to Dug Hill Road. Things went well initially, and I had no trouble getting the bulky thing down off the slab outside the basement guest room. But then I hit a few bumps, maybe the roots of the big tree of heaven that grows there, and eventually the heater caused the handtruck I was using to fall over on its side. None of this was too rough, but it was enough to scuff up the outside of the heater and even (in one place) to install a few shallow dents. I should mention that the wooden disk I'd attempted to glue to the bottom of the heater quickly detached; it turns out that E6000 glue needs 24 hours to cure, and I'd only given it about twelve.
By mid-morning, I'd managed to haul the hot water heater all the way to Dug Hill Road, where I had it leaning again the outside of the guard that blocked my path. At that point it seemed prudent to have help from someone else; getting a 200 pound object over a guard rail is a tricky and dangerous operation. Initially I thought I'd get Powerful to help me, but he hadn't come up from the basement yet. Then I found Gretchen was getting ready to go to the doctor to treat a urinary tract infection (these are always the result of sex, and it seems they make it as expensive as relying on the services of a prostitute). She said she could help, so, in the Subaru Forester, I drove us down to the place along Dug Hill Road where I'd placed the heater. (I chose that vehicle since that's the only one with sufficient cargo space to haul the heater.) Gretchen was helpful in securing the heater as it balanced precariously atop the guard rail. And then, once the heater was over the guard rail, it was a simple matter to lean it into the back of the Forester and then slide it in atop the bluestone I'd collected Wednesday (with, of course, a carpet fragment between them to keep the stone from tearing up the heater).
I did a few small things in the remote workplace, but most of my mental energy was focused on figuring out how to maximize the payload of the Forester. At some point I dug an old unused vehicular bike rack out of the garage and managed to attach it to the back of the Forester. It was missing some straps and the few it had were sketchy, so I augmented the straps with ropes and one of the ratcheting straps I use to tie things down to the roof rack. Even with all this, the rack failed to press fully against the back of the Forester, leaving me to wonder if my two-bike payload would eventually sink down to the point of abrading against the highway on the drive I intended to do to the cabin.
One other item of payload was a rocking chair we'd brought back from Gretchen's parents' apartment in the Watergate back in April. I strapped it to the roof rack, with a focus on compressing it from the top to avoid the possibility of it jiggling apart (something that once happened to a tinker-toy-style bookrack I hauled from Brooklyn to Hurley).
At 5:00pm, I said goodbye to Gretchen (she had something she needed to do from Hurley this weekend), loaded up the dogs, and drove up to the cabin in the Subaru Forester. Along the way, I stopped at the Pattersonville rest area so the dogs could poop and piss and then got some groceries at the Johnstown Price Chopper. I then got an Impossible Whopper and two large fries from the Gloversville Burger King. I got so many fries because I intended to feed half of them to the dogs.
As I headed uphill on Route 309 out of Gloversville, I noticed a pair of mallard ducks flying above me and keeping pace with my speed. Neville, who is in the front seat, also looked up to watch them. But there's a downside to spending any more time beneath a bird than you absolutely have to. At one point of of them defecated, and this placed a hand-sized smear of chunky brown on my windshield.
At the cabin, I quickly figured out why the internet had failed early in the week: one of the wires that allow my Moxee restarter to restart the Moxee hotspot wasn't attached to the correct terminal. Once I had that fixed and the internet working, I could begin feeding the dogs their fries.
Before dark, I walked with the dogs to Ibrahim's building site to get a close look at his foundation. It really looks to be at the bottom of a hole. I couldn't figure out what was happening with several corrugated flexible drainage pipes, which seemed to be sproinging out of the gravel outside the foundation in several places. Perhaps these were to catch gutter runoff.
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