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the mud component of sand
Sunday, July 16 2023
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Last night Gretchen slept with both dogs in the bed that I normally sleep in, in the bigger of the two bedrooms downstairs, while I slept upstairs in the biggest bedroom by myself. I had a dream before I awoke that must've had me as I am now, but living with my parents. In the dream, I awoke to find my father (who is often alive in my dreams) telling me that I'd slept through all of the Friday workday and it was now 5:26pm. As then gradually awoke out of that mental state to realize that it was Sunday, my father was long dead, and I was at the cabin. I'm pretty sure the dream reflected anxieties about not having gotten work done in my day job, but it was a relief to realize I had at least simulated a full workday on Friday.
During the night, there had been a long, heavy shower. So I went out to the ditch along the east wall to see any effects from all the surface runoff on the strange man-altered landscape I'd created. I found that water overflowing from the gutter at the bottom of the south-facing roof (the one with the solar panels on it) had landed on the ground along the south wall of the cabin and then washed into the still-deep ditch ending at the cabin's southeast corner. In so doing, it had eroded away a fair amount of soil at the east end of the cabin's south foundation wall (soil I will be removing anyway later in the foundation insulation project). The water had pooled in the ditch at the south end of the trench along the east wall, giving it an opportunity to sort by particle size. The sand used as "soil" around the cabin usually behaves like beach sand in that it easily brushes away when it's on your skin. But the surface of the sorted runoff material was more like traditional mud; it was extremely sticky and likely blocked water from draining away. I wanted the soil in the ditch to be conducive to draining, so I scraped off all this fine muddy material (it came to about ten gallons' worth) and dumped it north of the cabin, where it can help improve the soil with its muddier, better-water-retaining properties.
Gretchen made a couple attempts to go down to the lake but kept being thwarted by intense showers. During one such shower, I managed to glue an additional sheet of Wonderboard to the styrofoam at the north end of the now-fully-insulated east foundation wall. As I did this, the rain temporarily trapped me under the screened-in part of the east deck, which is a dry environment due to the solid roof over the screened-in porch.
As the rain was letting up, I went to check the erosion I'd noticed earlier into the south end of the ditch along the east wall. I saw it had filled again with water, and there had been further erosion of sand from along the south foundation wall at its east end. I'll probably be removing more of that fine muddy material from the bottom of the ditch the next time I'm up at the cabin.
Because of the continuous threat of downpours, Gretchen and I decided to leave the cabin earlier than usual. At some point along the way, our friend Alana called to ask if we'd survived "the tornado." Evidently one or more twisters touched down in West Hurley, though of course if anything bad had happened, we'd missed it all.
I drove us to the Trader Joes near Albany so Gretchen could buy a bunch of things that she only buys there, including bags of nuts and seeds, sour cherry juice, as well as cans of giant beans in red sauce (among other things).
Back home in Hurley, we found no evidence whatsoever of any tornadoes having passed through. I was delighted to find that some cannabis seeds I'd produced in 2022 that I'd assumed were sterile were not, meaning I will be able to produce plants from them. Some of those plants will be males, which will help me produce another generation of cannabis seeds, ones not nearly as inbred as the ones I'd been producing (since I am also growing plants from seeds just given to me by my high school friend Eric in Staunton).
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