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slurping away the clay Friday, November 8 2019
Today was brutally cold, with temperatures barely rising above freezing. That's the kind of weather one normally expects in January, not early Novemeber. Back at the house, this meant the burning of lots of firewood, as the boiler hasn't yet been turned on and none of the heat pumps are operational.
At lunch today I drove down to William's Lumber to get supplies for the heat pump installation. They had a better selection of circuit breakers than I'd seen at Home Depot, and the prices were also generally better. The only thing they lacked that I really needed to proceed was a short (25 foot) length of metal-jacketed 10 gauge two-conductor Romex. So at the end of the workday, I stopped at Lowes to get a few more items. At the time, I was on 150 grams of pseudoephedrine, which had me feeling a little like a space alien homunculus driving a human-shaped planetary probe.
This evening after I got home from work, I resumed work on the drain I'd drilled through the basement slab just inside the boiler room door. I got out my big masonry bit (the one capable of drilling 1.5 inch holes) and used it to drill as deep downward below the slab as I could. Things went quickly at first but then, about a foot below the surface, progress slowed considerably, suggesting I had hit bedrock. Had the armature of my cheap 120 volt Ryobi hammer drill not started smoking, I might've continued drilling, but it was clear I had gone beyond the low-hanging fruit of drainmaking. I immediately tested the bore's percolation rate by dumping in a quart or so of water. Dismayinging, the water didn't drain at all. It seems I'd stirred up a bunch of clay with my bit and this had plugged up all the voids between the gravel. Fortunately, all I had to do was use a wetvac to slurp all the stagnant water out of the bore hole, and with that came all the clay. From then on, percolation tests showed that the hole could dispose of water at a rate of at least a gallon per minute, fast enough for just about any drainage need.
Later this evening I experimented with some two-year-old marijuana that had been collecting dust in a jar. It had proved unsuitable for smoking (as it produced almost no effects after I'd smoked emphysema-inducing amounts). But attempting to drink a "tea" of it led to a day-destroying dysphoria, suggesting I needed to pay close attention to dosage. So tonight I took a smallish dose consisting of a bud the size of a lima bean. Combined with the pseudoephedrine I'd had earlier, this definitely produced effects. At some point in the night I was so stimulated that I had to take a xanax to get back to sleep. Before that kicked in, I was treated to intense electric-pattern visual hallucinations whenever I closed my eyes. [REDACTED]
I drove to work extra early this morning, catching a sunrise almost aligned with the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge.
Surveillance video at the Lowes self-checkout.
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