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very squat trapezoids
Sunday, October 20 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
At the cabin, Gretchen usually sleeps in the upstairs bedroom, sometimes with Charlotte. And I always sleep in the larger of the two downstairs bedrooms, usually with Neville. Charlotte often sleeps on the beanbag by herself, though sometimes she tries sleeping in the other beds, where she occasionally makes a mess of them trying to burrow beneath the covers by herself. She doesn't like joining Neville and me in the downstairs bed, probably because Neville has been mean to her there a few times. Early this morning at some point she trotted in and looked around, and when she did, I lifted up the blanket on the side of the bed far away from Neville and the wooden steps that make it easy for a dog to get into the bed. She liked what she was seeing, so she leapt in directly, never having to get anywhere near Neville.
It was so warm today that I didn't even start a fire in the woodstove. After the usual Sunday rituals of coffee and Spelling Bee, I resumed working on the porch ceiling clapboard project, this time with a focus on blocking off the two narrow triangles just beneath the clapboards on either side of the high part of the gently-sloping ceiling (where the rafters join the rest of the cabin). Closing in those triangles was complicated somewhat by the presence of pieces of blocking material between the rafters above the side walls and the fly rafters, so I had to measure carefully to cut out the pieces that would go there. But the rest of the triangles needing to be filled-in were squat trapezoids, with the two parallel sides measuring one inch and two and a half inches respectively and the two non-parallel sides being over forty inches in length. These were fairly easy to cut with a power handsaw, and it turned out that accuracy wasn't that important, since the sides of the clapboards would be covering up most minor errors. The main problem for installing these pieces was there was essentially nothing I could fasten them to using conventional fasteners like screws or nails. I pretty much had to glue them in place. And of course, while trying to wrangle them into position, they would slip away from me and fall into a void in the very soffit they were supposed to be walling off, and I'd have a hell of a time reaching through the narrow gap and down into that void to recover it. iIn so doing, I got wood glue all over my hands and lower arms. (That's unpleasant, but not nearly as bad as it would've been had I been using Gorilla Glue.)
Once I had the trapezoids in place and the glue could start drying, I took Neville with me down to the dock, where Gretchen was enjoying another stunningly beautiful day. The skies were blue with a large amount of cirrus clouds, though soon these blew away and the skies were crystal-clear. Most of that happened while I was out paddling counterclockwise around the middle of the lake.
Back at the cabin, I tried to attach a one of the trapezoidal pieces described earlier with a screw, but the glue hadn't yet had a chance to dry, and the damn piece broke free and fell into the soffit void yet again. So I had to fish it out, reglue it, and wait some more before installing additional clapboards. At some point Gretchen returned from the lake and helped me carry the third (that is, the last) of the big twelve foot six by six columns up to the deck atop the porch. She headed back to Hurley not long after that, wanting to get home in time to watch the last game of the WNBA finals live on YouTube TV (which she'd joined just for this one thing). (Happily for her, the New York Liberty would win, and it would be their first-ever finals victory.) I left about an hour later, after first installing some clapboards (which didn't seem to affect the still-drying glue of the triangles) and then making a temperature probe for my ESP8266 Remote Control system that could record temperatures under the wooden steps in the basement bulkhead entrance. (I also want to make probes to monitor soil temperatures at various depths.)
On the way south, I stopped in the donut place in Cairo to get some Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos and a six pack of beer, mostly so I could have a road beer for the final leg of the drive. (Under my personal road beer rules, I can crack open a beer if I'm heading southbound and have passed the intersection of Cairo's Main Street and Route 32.)
Charlotte and Neville on the dock today.
Click to enlarge.
In this photo of the cabin's porch ceiling, you can see clapboards being installed and one of the trapezoids creating a little extra wall below the clapboards and above the wall header where it meets the cabin.
Click to enlarge.
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