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footers at different depths
Sunday, July 30 2023
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
After my morning coffee and an all-vegan BLT, I resumed work on the trench project near the northwest corner of the cabin. If it weren't for two collapses of the wall of the trench, I would've had it all done a half hour or more earlier than I did. For this last sheet of styrofoam on the north wall, I managed to dig all the way down to the footing, which was about 10 inches shallower than other places I'd encountered it along the foundation wall. This is because during the excavation of the basement, a ledge of hard bedrock was discovered in the west third of the excavation, resulting in a shallower basment in that area. Indeed, there's a 13 inch step in the concrete basement slab separating the west third from the east two-thirds. Evidently this change of excavation depth also affects the depth of the footings, though it's not consistent. For example, the basement slab was already shallow inside the foundation wall where I put the first sheet of styrofoam west of the Bilco doors, but the footing on the outside of the foundation wall was still below 91 inches of foundation wall. In the slot for the last sheet of styfoam I was clearing of soil today, there was only room for an 81 inch tall sheet of styrofoam. (I don't know why the slab elevation differs 13 inches inside the basement, while the footing elevation outside the basement differs by only ten inches in these separate areas.)
Eventually it was time to cut and glue the final sheet of styfoam to the cabin's north foundation wall. There was only room for a sheet 43 inches wide, including the two-inch overlap with styrofoam that will going along the west foundation wall.
The weather had taken a turn for the cooler, so I didn't feel inspired to go down to the dock this evening. Instead I took a bath (my second since the fall down the basement stairs) and then ate another cannabis edible. It kicked in fairly strongly while I was lying on the couch in the great room as daylight dimmed on the trees outside. I was listening to Sugar's Copper Blue playing from the tinny speakers of a Windows 10 laptop up in the loft. This is music I've been listening to periodically ever since it first came out in the early 1990s, and I've always loved it. But listening to it stoned made me think maybe I'd never actually been stoned while listening to it. I found myself marveling at the nuanced control Bob Mould had on the strings of his guitar, making them sing cleanly or growl, do some combination of the two, or sometimes even produce a wonderful bouquet of accidental tones that aounded like they were probably not so accidental at all. He would do this with different strings in different ways, all simultaneously, and it seemed very different from the way most people approach the playing of a guitar.
Sometimes I'd experience a peak in my cannabis experience, and I'd wonder if perhaps I was putting too much pressure on the tender tissue of my brain so soon after falling down the stairs (and hitting it repeatedly). But nothing bad came of any of this.
The west end of the north foundation wall before I installed the last styrofoam sheet.
Note the generator and, beyond it, the Bilco doors, open to the sky.
That penultimate sheet didn't reach all the way to the footing, but you can see it almost did.
Click to enlarge.
This evening the setting sun was shining down the hallway from a window in one of the bedrooms down the hall to the wood stack against the east wall near Neville. I dubbed the phenomenon "cabinhenge."
Click to enlarge.
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