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tiling with old CDs
Thursday, October 17 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
A $2000 dual-zone minisplit was supposed to be arriving at (or near) the Adirondack cabin today, and I wanted to be there when it arrived in case it rained or I needed to sign something. So late this morning I set out in the Forester with the dogs, leaving Gretchen behind (there were Woodstock Film Festival films she wanted to see, among other things). As is customary, I stopped in Cairo on the way north, this time to get gas, a few groceries, and some liquor from Spirits of Cairo.
Soon after arriving at the cabin, I learned that the minisplit would not be arriving today after all. It was a beautiful day at the cabin, with clear skies and temperatures in the upper 40s. I started a fire in the woodstove, of course, but Charlotte was content just lying in the sun out on the east deck.
Last fall, I covered all the exposed concrete of the concrete bulkhead basement entrance in styrofoam to keep it from being cooled by contact with winter air. That styrofoam covers all exposed concrete inside the bulkhead entrance and all of it to a soil depth of two feet (or more) on its exterior. I've also covered that styrofoam with a thin layer of fiberglass mesh and portland cement on the outside to protect it from kinetic and ultraviolet damage. But I'd left the styrofoam on the inside uncovered, figuring that ultraviolet light wouldn't be able to get it there and I could avoid damaging it if I was careful. But the plan had always been to cover it with something, but what? Something like twenty years ago, Jessika was living with a guy who decorated his music studio was old CDs, which seemed like a clever use for them at the time. Its true that CDs don't exactly convey the rustic look one would want at a cabin. But they're made of tough polystyrene, and their foil layer would act to reflect infrared energy that might otherwise escape. If I could tile them onto the styrofoam surface and then maybe cover that with mesh and portland cement, it would form an extremely tough protective skin for the underlying styrofoam. (And, because the CDs would all be buried beneath cement, it wouldn't look like the inside of a UFO from the late 1970s.) I'd stored away every old CD I'd no longer had a use for just for such a project, and I'd brought them all to the cabin with me today.
Using Gorilla Glue, I glued down a tranche of CDs (all of them label-side-against-the-wall) just above the sloping wood of the step assemblage. But as I did so, they kept breaking free and rolling away, eventually bouncing off something and sometimes ending up glue-side-down. It wasn't easy, but eventually I managed to get the whole tranche on the west bulkhead wall glued in place and held tight against the styrofoam with various wooden props. Later, after walking the dogs, I came back and glued down some more CDs, and these were much easier to install because they could sit atop a solidly-glued base.
As I worked, I wondered if some day some historian would unearth treasured computer files on these CDs, much the way certain priceless Greek documents can only be found in palimpsests that were scraped clean of their original words to make boring old bibles telling us things we very much already know.
As for that dog walk, both Charlotte and Neville came. We first walked down to the lake via the Mossy Rock Trail and then went along the lake, cutting west near the beginning of the outflow creek and sticking to the base of the line of cliffs that curve around the west side of the hill that our cabin sits near the top of. I'd only been this way once before, back before I knew the lay of the land, so it was good to have another look at the dramatic cliffs, shallow caves, and various boulder piles.
Back at the cabin, I cooked up a box of spaghetti and ate it with Rao's marinara sauce mixed with pieces of broccoli and cauliflower I'd nuked for four whole minutes in the microwave. It made for a relatively healthy meal that tasted good and took little effort to prepare. (Gretchen had packed me a container of pre-cut broccoli and cauliflower in an effort to get me to eat more vegetables when I'm at the cabin by myself.)
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