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tiny bits of tinfoil
Saturday, August 8 2020
location: southeast shore, Twenty Ninth Pond, remote Minerva Township, Essex County, New York
This morning before Gretchen got up, I went down to the dock and recorded a few video clips of the lake for possible use to fill a video screen serving in the capacity as a window. When we build our cabin at Woodworth Lake, for example, it won't be on the lakeshore, so maybe we'll want to have tranquil scenes of the lake playing on a screen. That might sound pathetic now, but who knows what it will seem like in a bigger post-apocalyptic hellscape. I then decided to set out in the kayak to record some video from that. I could just point the camera somewhere and let the wind blow the kayak around, which would introduce enough slow change of scenery to make for a compelling scene in a virtual cabin window. And then I noticed a belted kingfisher high on a branch in a dead tree rising from the boggy shoreline of the pond's northwestern lobe. Better still, there was a waning gibbous moon in the background. This presented more of an opportunity for still photography than video. By then the sun was high enough that I wanted to get back to the cabin to get out of it; I had a bad sunburn on the left side of my neck from having been too cavalier about the Adirondack sun some days ago, and I didn't want it getting any worse.
At some point I went down to the Prius to retrieve my old Sony Vaio PCG-GRS700, a 2002-vintage Pentium IV laptop I recently installed Windows XP onto just so I could compile Delphi 5 source. The Prius still smells terrible after one of our water containers leaked all over the floor mat, but we've been airing it out, so it's not as bad as it was. We'd left the windows down one rainless night, and evidently some varmint had take opportunity to root around in the car for anything edible. There hadn't been much of anything except an old piece of aluminum foil that had once been in contact with a sandwich, and the varmint had nibbled off many dozens of tiny pieces of that and spread them all over the floor. Someone in the guest log had mentioned that earlier this season "mice" had broken into their car and had "a large party" with their almonds, but it was more likely to have been either Anton the Chipmunk or a red squirrel.
At around 3:00pm I went for a kayak counter-clockwise around the pond with my phone, my camera, and a can of Hazy Little Thing IPA. I sat for a time on the west shore of the pond's northern lobe reading about the head-scratching circumstances of Jerry Falwell Jr.'s leave of absence as president of Liberty University.
I hadn't checked in on the Johns Hopkins coronavirus map in nearly a week, but today I just barely got it to load at the nearby cellphone spot. Looking it over, I saw that the corridor of deepest red connecting the northeast to the southeast hot zones had still yet to completely close in Sussex County in Virginia, and there still were no deep-red corridors reaching east-to-west across central Georgia. But the last county in Rhode Island had turned deepest red, meaning there are now four states will all deep-red counties: Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. (Massachusetts would qualify were it not for its coronavirus-free offshore counties.) The next state to go all-deep-red is probably Florida, which only has two not-completely deep-red counties left (though they're darkening quickly).
At around 5:00pm I impulsively decided to cut my hair for the first time in the pandemic. Looking around in the cabin's little tool closet, the only scissors I could find were two different pairs of tin snips. I first tried the newer ones, which I assumed would be sharper. But it turned out that the older ones (Blue Bird 7 inch, made in USA) were. I cut my hair in the woods about 50 feet up the hill from the cabin, letting the disturbingly-grey tufts of hair collect on the pine needles. I hate having bits of hair on my back, where they inevitably stick me like litlle porcupine quills, so I immediately took a shower afterwards. I'd only used a mirror at the very end to make a few light edits in the front. It didn't look terrible from that angle, but Gretchen indicated I'd done a horrible job in the back. Thinking about this particular haircut, I realized it was probably the furthest north one I'd ever had. The furthest south would've probably been in San Diego.
This evening, Gretchen ate the last of my beam glurp and I ate most of the other of our two Amy's veggie supreme pizzas. Later we watched yet another episode of the Black Lady Sketch Show and then Gretchen watched the last of her Beyonce content.
[REDACTED]
A kingfisher with the setting moon in a dead white pine on the west shore of the pond's northwest lobe.
Click to enlarge.
A sundew (a carnivorous plant) growing on a sun-bleached white pine log on the west shore of the pond's north lobe.
Click to enlarge.
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