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unpleasant stone gathering
Saturday, May 16 2026
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Given how disabled I remembered being last night, I was feeling surprisingly good when I woke up this morning. Perhaps the cannabis had worked as intended and kept me from getting a hangover. There was something a little off in my brain, but it could've been within the spectrum of normal. So when I took the dogs for a walk this morning, I decided to bring my firewood hauling backpack in hopes of bringing home some choice bits of flat gneiss from the delta where East Bifurcation Creek joins Virginia Creek. That delta is particularly rich in such rocks, which leads me to think that something about that landscape there (where five or six different brooks and streams all come together) that sorts for flat rocks.
We started on the Mossy Rock Trail as usual, and when I got down to the dock, a large bird flew up from the vicinity of the floating dock. When I saw it land in the lake some distance away, it looked to me like either an enormous grebe or perhaps a cormorant. Later idenfification confirmed that the bird was indeed a cormorant; nothing of that size and long neck has its distinctive hooked beak. The cormorant (who I decided to name Stanislav) is apparently the source of the bright white layer of guano on the two corners of the floating dock furthest from the shore. He probably likes to hang out there with his wings outstretched to dry them, the way cormorants famously do. I've seen cormorants in rivers and harbors all over the world, but I'd assumed they mostly prefer salt water, since I haven't seen them much in places that are decidedly inland. But Woodworth Lake is very fresh and it is about as inland as one can get in the northeastern United States.
I then walked mostly down East Bifurcation Creek to where it empties into Virginia Creek, and there I found a number of good pieces of flat rock. They were all smoothed from millennia of being tumbled in the creekbed. Such rocks are especially tough, since any weak parts will have broken away. Unfortunately, my backpack was more designed for hauling bucked tree trunks than rocks, and there was no basket or bag to put them in. I tried making it so the triangular corners stuck through the metal caging on the additional tiny Boy Scout backpack designed to serve as the other half of a "mouth" for holding loose things. I then tried to lace things tight with bungee cords. But rocks started falling out before I'd even carried my load 300 feet uphill. On top of that, I was feeling increasingly weak from not having eaten enough food. The walk home ended up being incredibly uncomfortable, with me feeling like I might pass out if I pushed myself too hard. And when I got the the steepest part of the hike (walking up a switch-back trail through the line of cliffs between the lake outflow and the cabin), I had to take a nice long break where I lay down and looked at the sky. By this point I was realizing that I almost certainly had a hangover. After all that suffering, I'd only managed to bring home four smallest flat rocks that collectively didn't weigh more than about thirty pounds.
As I recuperated at the cabin, I took occasional breaks from my YouTube watching to process the small pile of unprocessed firewood near the chopping block (a big chuunk of tree of heaven, likely the most northerly example of it in all of Fulton County). I also cooked up a box of medium shells (the pasta) and then fried up a pan of oyster mushrooms that Fern had given me along with onions and tofu. Mixed together, all these components made for a great meal of comfort food.
Later, I assembled some supplies for some work I wanted to do down at the dock. This included a five gallon plastic bucket containing about twenty pounds of dry concrete mix, a pair of latex gloves, a small gardening trowel, a little radio (for entertainment; I'm back to listening to the zany mix of music punctuated by Rossbach Shoes and MyPillow ads on WFNY), a trailcam, and what was to be my first beer of the day. Down at the dock, I set up the trailcam pointing out the souteastern gauano deposit on the floating dock. I was hoping the cormorant would show up and trigger a close-up picture.
With the concrete, I used the trowel to mix it with lake water and then I packed one of the pieces of 1.5 inch galvanized steel pipe as best I could, using a stick as a ram-rod to eliminate pockets of air. (I also closed one end of the pipe with a plastic bag so it wouldn't blast out that end.) I hadn't expected the pipe to require so much concrete, so I didn't have quite enough for the other use I had in mind: securing one of the always-wobbly stone steps a couple hundred feet up the Mossy Rock Trail from the dock. While I was doing all these things, Neville made a belated appearance, though he aborted the walk after I was done doing things at the dock and walked with Charlotte back to the cabin via the lakeside trail and the switchback path up through the cliffs.
I wasn't exactly atoning for today's hangover, though I didn't drink much as I hunted through the data serial data collected by the SolArk Copilot in hopes of finding grid power levels. To help with this, I also ran the generator briefly so that I could look for data that was different depending on whether it was running or not. Eventually I found the data I was looking for and added it to the data collection system. Now my inverter data collection was actually slightly more advanced than what it had been back when SolArk changed their serial data specification back in October of 2025. The only truly useful data left to find are measurements of the string voltages from the two solar strings.
Stanislav the cormorant. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte standing in cormorant guano at the corner of the floating dock. Click to enlarge.
The beaver pond just below Woodworth Lake. Click to enlarge.
East Bifurcation Creek viewed from atop some cliffs to its east. Click to enlarge.
East Bifurcation Falls. Click to enlarge.
Oyster mushrooms with onions, tofu, and medium shells just before I ate it this afternoon. Click to enlarge.
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