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a fog of little cubes
Sunday, August 25 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
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Gretchen and I hadn't played collaborative Spelling Bee in awhile, but we did this morning. It was cool enough for us to play it in the great room instead of out in the screened-in porch, though we haven't yet felt the need to have a fire in the woodstove, which is crammed-full of paper debris in need of incineration.
When Gretchen and Charlotte headed off to the dock via the old dock trail, I tried unsuccessfully to get Neville to go with me down the Mossy Rock Trail. Down at the lake, Gretchen was able to swim, but she was finding the coldness of the water a bit more daunting today and would only swim for a few minutes at a time. When there is nobody else at the lake, she often swims naked, though this morning while she was doing that, a couple people showed up at the public dock and eventually got into a canoe to do some fishing in the southwest region of the lake (between the public dock and Ibrahim's dock). I'd been out cutting more little stumps down on the Mossy Rock Trail, but when I returned to the dock, Gretchen called out to me to put a towel and a shirt next to the ladder so she could quickly cover herself. I told her that it hardly matter; I can barely resolve a human form at the public dock without magnification and would have difficulty seeing whether or not they were clothes without the help of my camera's telephoto lens.
Eventually I got into the canoe and slowly paddled into the outflow bay along our parcel's shoreline looking for flat rocks suitable for use as flagstones to better build out the Mossy Rock Trail, especially its west end near the cabin, where it attaches to a mostly-bluestone-paved patio around a fire pit surrounded by Adirondack chairs. I'd seen some nice paving-suitable pieces, some of which I'd incorporated into the causeway-dam that makes it easy to cross the outflow creek on the way to the old Boy Scout camp. There is a place on the south lakeshore near the outflow beaver dam where the gneiss bedrock seems to be bedded at an angle that slopes into the water, and in places it delaminates into inch-thick flagstones. But today I looked aggressively for any such stones that were small enough for me to lift (and this involved a lot of steeping into very deep layers of muck and, in one case, tripping and tearing yet more skin from the sole of my already-injured right foot on a sharp rock) yet I found only a few little pieces, the largest of which was about the size and shape of a small QWERTY keyboard. As an indication of how desperate I was, I also collected a few pieces about the size of my hand. In an effort to make the rock-gathering foray not a complete bust, I also gathered some blockier rocks, which I then added to our dock's "ice-wall," the stone structure designed to protect the permanent part of the dock from the strong forces of mid-winter lake ice.
Back up at the cabin, I managed to find a TTL-level serial adapter that I wanted to try using in another experimental attempt to get data from our cabin's Navien boiler. But then I got stuck in a supremely-annoying form of hardware driver hell, perhaps because the serial adapter I was using was "counterfeit." ("Counterfeit" hardware is often perfectly usable, but, since it rips off someone else's design, it gets hit with that label.) The driver was giving me the message "pl2303hxa phased out since 2012." I didn't care if it had been phased out; the hardware still could work, and it was the only hardware I happened to have. I eventually got it working (because hardware "phase out" is really not a thing), but I still failed to get any data out of the Navien boiler.
By this point, it was time for us to start wrapping up our visit to the cabin. I did some cleaning and Gretchen packed up the food that needed to go back to Hurley. We both left at about 4:00pm, driving our two separate vehicles. I was the one with both the dogs and the road beer and Gretchen was the one with the cooler-bag full of food. We bother traveled the Middleburgh route (though Gretchen prefers the Thruway route and had actually driven to the cabin using that this time).
Back in Hurley, the plan was to pick up our neighbor A and her boyfriend J and go have pizza at Ollie's in High Falls. The mosquitoes, which there hadn't been many of before we went down to Washington or even on my one day back in Hurley before going to the cabin, were now terrible, attacking us ruthlessly after we got out of the car. At the time A's dog Henry seemed to be the only one there, and he barked at us suspiciously. Eventually A materialized from "the cellar" (that's Canadian for "basement) and we tracked down J from inside. I then drove us to High Falls via Hurley Mountain Road and the Lucas Turnpike. There were a lot of people at Ollie's when we arrived. We would've been happiest with an indoor table, but the wait for that was 40 minutes. Fortunately, the threat of rain seemed to have passed, so we felt safe sitting outside. Initially we planned to order a "grandma pizza," but Ollie's was out of that, so we just got two conventional pizzas with garlic and mushroom on them. J and I both got some kind of IPA that somehow cost $11/each, while got a glass of white wine and Gretchen got an orange wine. Topics of dinner conversation included my telling the story of how my brother is digging a hole to put my mother in when she dies. And it included us talking about some of the interesting family dynamics we clued in on when visiting Gretchen's parents. ([REDACTED]) Talk of how my mother more-or-less disowned me had J telling about how a similar dynamic played out with his mother after his father died, but that she's since got a new husband and abandoned her estrangement. Meanwhile A was distracted for awhile by a videochat to get her kid to fall asleep. But when she rejoined the conversation, she talked about how cruel the movie/television industry can be. She specifically mentioned getting fired from a fun acting role in the television series Picard, where the character she was playing was unceremoniously eliminated, with someone actually overheard saying that "no one will miss her."
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Neville resting his head on Charlotte this morning on the front stoop of the cabin.
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