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shrinking food desert
Sunday, July 9 2023
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
After the usual rituals of Sunday morning, the day didn't repeat the pattern of the last several days. The sun stubbornly remained behind clouds and threatening rain, making Gretchen reluctant to take a book down to the dock to read. Instead she went on something of a cleaning jihad in the cabin, a jihad that included doing a load of laundry. Meanwhile, the weather was perfectly good for continuing my excavation project under the decks along the east foundation wall. I made rapid progress removing the sand along the sixteen-foot-long shallow trench I'd excavated northward from the cabin's southeast corner to the end of where I'd applied styrofoam along that wall (coming from the north). In so doing, I was forced to remove all of the woodchuck tunnel I've been mentioning. It was about five feet long, a little more than two feet deep, and its end was lined with leaves of bits of torn plastic from a sheet I'd been using to shore up the excavation wall for a sheet of styrofoam I'd installed two weeks ago.
Once I'd made it down to within two feet of the footing, the excitement of being so close caused me to work like a madman, and I soon had a spot prepared for the installation of another four by eight foot sheet of two inch styrofoam. But then, in a part of the excavation front that formed a shallow cape where the width of my south-going and north-going trenches met, the excavation face suddenly gave way, spilling a big pile of sand into my pristine trench. I then had to spend another half hour removing all of that and hoping there would be no more wall collapses. Fortunately, the sand here is under an unroofed deck, meaning it is exposed to rain, and all that moisture helps bind it together better than the drier sand under the part of the deck that is a screened-in porch (fortunately, the foundation wall there is already insulated).
With a place prepared for a second time for the east walls' fourth styrofoam sheet, I quickly measured and cut the sheet, breaking it into two pieces like I had the one I'd installed two weeks before to make installation easier (or, actually, possible). For this piece, though, I made the dividing line be three inches from the dividing line of the earlier one so I would be minimizing the length of any pre-made tunnels for insects to move around in. (Since I spray foam into all such cracks and boundaries, any such tunnels would be short.) Before spraying in that foam, I remembered to put on latex gloves so I wouldn't be spending the rest of the day picking stuff from my fingers.
In celebration of the installation of the fourth styrofoam sheet on the east wall, I made myself another gin & pomegranate-blueberry-juice cocktail in the Yeti travel mug and headed down to the dock, where Gretchen had gone after her cleaning jihad. It was still overcast, but I was sweaty and dirty and the thought of being in the lake appealed to me enormously.
When I arrived, Gretchen wasn't the only one at the lake. A quarter mile away, Pyotr and his family were a near the boat house (though they rarely make any use of the actual lake) and some "rednecks" (as we call anyone we see there) were at the public dock. One of the rednecks was in a kayak fishing at the soutwest corner of the lake, but he seemed to be staying in one place.
I launched into the water using the big River Run inner tube and a paddle I had Gretchen fetch for me. But the paddle didn't work very well, as it mostly wanted to cause the inner tube to spin. Eventually I just let the currents carry me all the way to the beaver dam at the lake's outflow. As I was getting out of the lake, I saw the fisherman was now fishing near the rocky islands that separate the ouflow bay from the rest of the lake.
Back at the cabin, Gretchen eventually decided to watch another 45 minute British detective show and have me pay attention to the use of bandwidth so we would know how much this consumed. Afterwards, I determined that that one show had consumed 1.3 gigabytes, which would be a substantial part of our usual 20 gigabyte monthly allottment (which, for this month, was inflated by 100 gigabytes for the shockingly-low price of $14).
We left the cabin and began driving homeward at about 4:00pm, quickly encountering torrential rains in Gloversville. Normally we don't drive through Gloversville on the way home, but this evening we wanted to check out that new Indian restaurant in Amsterdam. It's called Zoobear, and it's out in the motor mile along Route 30 near a Harbor Freight. No other customers were there when we arrived, and (as always) Gretchen had called in an order for much more food than we could possibly eat. It was all pretty greasy and not the best Indian food we've had, but it was plenty good enough. Best of all, it meant that there was a restaurant we would actually be happy to eat at within 25 miles of our cabin; the vegan food desert it sits in is not the Sahara; it's more of a Gobi. Among the foods Gretchen ordered was one thing that didn't end up being vegan, but we'll be eating it anyway (even though it does taste kind of disgusting to a someone with a vegan palate).
As we drove southward from Albany, Gretchen played some music by Lil Nas X, a melodic rapper whom Gretchen likes (partly because he is gay, I suspect). A lot of his melodies remind me of those found in songs from mid-period the Police, especially their classic about age-inappropriate lust, "Don't Stand So Close To Me."
Back in Hurley, I was curious about anything our house sitters and their friends (at least one of whom was very much unwanted in our house) had wrought. Things were mostly as they should've been, though I saw that someone or something had knocked the live plant I keep in the laboratory's north-facing window from its shelf. That person had then put the plant back on the shelf, but not without the little tray to catch the moisture that comes out of its bottom. Also, someone had filled a plastic drinking cup with urine and put it on the steps out to the laboratory deck. I can't completely rule out me as the one who had done this (perhaps when drunk, distracted, or both). But I've never peed in a drinking cup before (except when driving and not wanting to stop).
This flower is candy tuft, and it was included in the wildlflower mix we got from the Hudson Valley Seed Company.
Click to enlarge.
These bladder campions are more spontaneous. Neither of these flowers are native.
Click to enlarge.
Oscar and Diane snuggling with me on the laboratory bean bag after I came home this evening. I'm drinking a scotch cocktail and watching YouTube videos. This photo was taken with one of my trailcams, which I set up in case anything weird happened with the house sitters while we were gone.
Click to enlarge.
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