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line of Hitlers
Friday, July 21 2023
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Gretchen's friend Lisa and her husband Bill would be coming to spend the night at the cabin today, so this morning after coffee and Spelling Bee, I was out in front with a weed wacker trimming the bluestone walkway in front of the house (though I mostly let the weeds do what they want away from the paths; they're so tall now they're mostly falling down, producing chaotic thickets that are difficult to walk through).
Then, in an effort to work up some sweat before going down to the lake, I installed another sheet of Wonderboard (or whatever brand of concrete-with-fiberglass messh I'd bought last Fall) on the styrofoam insulating the east foundation wall. I'm installing these sheets at full-height (so they cover five vertical feet of styofoam) with the goal of not replacing all the sand I've excavated under the decks so I can have a five-foot-high "crawl space" beneath them for storage of things like bicycles.
Last weekend Gretchen helped me move the bundles of styrofoam and sheets of Wonderboard from the front of the cabin (where they were an admitted eyesore) to the back. This morning I moved all the Wonderboard from a place just west of the Bilco doors to a spot closer to the northeast corner of the cabin. This was because I had plans to continue with my installation of styrofoam west of the Bilco doors so as to prioritize insulating the north and west sides of the cabin's foundation wall. Otherwise I'd have to start insulating the south foundation wall, which, because it is on the sunniest and snowiest (that is, the most warm and naturally-insulated) section of foundation wall, should be the lowest priority.
Though there is no urgency, I also need to be looking for another job. I've been adding (and removing) technologies from my resume. At this point I feel like I could probaby do just about any software development job no matter what the technologies are. I updated my info and half-heartedly applied for some software development jobs in the Hudson Valley, signed and mailed my severance agreement, and then decided it was time to go down to the dock for some more lazy floating around the dock while Gretchen read. This summer has been low on both beaver and loon sightings, and the few beavers we've seen have mostly just appeared in the evenings. Today, though, we saw two different beavers during the middle of the day.
Lisa and Bill arrived a little after 5:00pm in their Chevy Bolt, which is black and looks almost identical to ours. But it's a more recent model with silver trim on the roof, a different color of Chevy logo, and possibly a bigger battery. After driving from West Hurley, they still somehow had 190 miles left of range, though they'd taken a shorter backroads-only route through the northeast Catskills (driving through Middleburgh and then Schoharie). While Gretchen was off giving Lisa a tour of the cabin (which, at this point, really is a marvel), Bill was peppering me with questions about things like the photovoltaics and whether or not we come to the cabin in the winter. Bill is an artist and professional museum set designer who built (from a kit) the house he and Lisa live in in West Hurley, so he was interested in various challenges and ingenuities that had gone into the cabin, such as bringing all the bluestone for the walkways up a little at a time in our various cars.
It wasn't long before the four of us humans and the two dogs walked down to the lake to get a sense of that place. We stood or sat on the dock marveling at how idyllic it was, though nobody got in the water. Then we headed back to the cabin for wine with "cheese" and crackers out on the unscreened part of the east deck. While Gretchen sees non-vegans like Bill and especially Lisa as opportunities for vegan propaganda, Lisa has a mission of her own to bring Gretchen around to liking fine wines. That's a tough project, though, because Grethchen has decided that all wine makes her sick. Still, Gretchen gamely played along as Lisa brought out two fancy white wines she'd bought in Woodstock after telling the staff about Gretchen's issues and preferences with wines. One of the wines was so sweet that none of the rest of us wanted any, and Gretchen only had a small amount of that. I don't remember much about the conversation, but it wasn't of much interest to me. Somehow the story of the topic of Faber, Virginia came up. Faber is pronounced "Fauber," which led to me telling the story of my friend Josh F. living on a couch at the residence of a clan of Faubers in Staunton and telling me paranoid stories about how the people living there had killed the Fauber patriarch. Josh's paranoia could be infuriating at times, but in this case he was correct: authorities later found the patriarch entombed in a concrete box in the basement.
We had dinner in the screened-in part of the porch. Gretchen had made a vegan lasagna, though I thought it wasn't her best work; I think I've become sensitized to the soy milk aftertaste, and when I detect it, it's difficult for me to fully enjoy the food that contains it.
After dinner, the four of us humans (this time the dogs didn't come) returned to the lake to go for a "paddle" clockwise around it. Bill was nervous about piloting a kayak, so he and Lisa took the canoe while Gretchen and I each climbed into kayaks. After years of experience throughout our lives, paddling a kayak or canoe comes natural to us, but Bill and Lisa kept having trouble getting their canoe to go where they wanted it to, which caused them to bicker until they finally briefly beached along the north shore and swapped places. With Lisa in the back doing the steering, the boat seemed to know better which way to go.
After hiking back to the cabin the twilight, Lisa uncorked a bottle of red wine and we sat around in the living room talking about things that didn't interest me much (performances at Hudson Valley venues of music that I don't especially care about). Occasionally I'd chime in about things that do interest me, such as listening to KCRW back when I worked in Santa Monica. One of the DJs there, Nick Harcourt, got his start at WDST in Woodstock, and Lisa knew some of his backstory. I admitted that can happily listen to just about anything for audio entertainment, including Christian radio. Bill, who originally comes from Lynchburg, Virginia, said that this was my "Virginia coming out," but I said that that was unlikely. Meanwhile, Gretchen had been playing various tunes on a bluetooth speaker, starting with an Elliot Smith cover of the Beatles' "Because." Gretchen was using Spotify, which inevitably started playing Tim McGraw's "Standing Room Only" (which Gretchen had first heard on the radio and been intrigued by because it sounded like McGraw was singing about a "line of Hitlers" in the bridge). This seemed to cause confusing and even a little anger in Lisa, who apparently loathes country music so much that even a friend listening to it was outside the bounds of what should be.
Clouds over the lake today, looking east from our dock. Click to enlarge.
The lake surface today. Click to enlarge.
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