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pillows at a Gloversville Walmart
Friday, August 13 2021
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
I'd taken the day off of work and Gretchen and I would be spending the night at the cabin on Woodworth Lake in the Adirondacks tonight, and this time we tried not to forget to bring the many necessities we'd failed to bring our July 4th weekend trip. I'd also been amassing various ways to power small devices in the absence of working electrical outlets, including 120 volt inverters for both the 12 volt car outlets and 18 volt Ryobi One+ batteries.
Yesterday I'd taken delivery of a $30 solar panel advertised as being both "100W watt" and "300W," knowing there was no way it would produce that much power. When it turned out to only have about 60% of a square foot of collection surface, I'd written to the seller saying it generated less than 10 watts in full sunlight (which is about all it could generate) and requesting a "substantial" discount. When the seller tried to say that everything was specified correctly in his eBay write up, I immediately left bad feedback saying "solar panel advertised as '300W' AND '100W' is less than 10 watt. numbers have meanings" Sometimes leaving bad feedback is the resolution to eBay problems that I most prefer.
In the last few days, our builder at the cabin had told us about the floor protection needed for the woodstove we would be installing, and this had caused Gretchen to order a rectangular slab of bluestone from Woodstock Landscaping (the folks who did an unsatisfactory job building a hump and planting white pines atop it along the road in front of our bouse back in 2010). At 48 by 40 inches, the slab was so big that it wouldn't fit in the Chevy Bolt, so for this trip to the Adirondacks, we'd have to be taking the old Subaru. Our first stop was to pick up that slab. We had to push the back seats flat to make way for it, and of course the gentleman helping us wrestle the 325 pound object into the car had to say something sexist in the process. But then we put all our stuff (including our cooler and our dog bed — with dogs) on top of it and we were ready to go.
As always, we stopped for provisions at the Honest Weight Food Co-op in Albany, though unfortunately this time, the prepared food had been cleaned-out of all our favorite vegan options, particularly the tempeh salad. Even the possible productions of the sandwich artists were limited, and I could not (for example) get an Asian tofu sandwich and had to settle for a Beyond-Burger-based Cowboy Burger. Gretchen ordered a lentil loaf that looked gross to me and that she later decided was inedible because it had been made without salt. Still, we managed to get a good diversity of things. We also discovered where at the store the cold-pressed coffee is, and we got four different units of that to see which was the best. (There is still no easy way to make anything hot at the cabin). I should mention that nearly everyone at Honest Weight (all the employees and nearly all of the customers) are back to wearing face-masks, this time to protect their mostly-vaccinated selves from the coronavirus Delta variant. Gretchen had just taken delivery of maximally-protective N95 masks, and that was what we were wearing. (I've also been wearing cloth masks recently when going into Home Depot, though I didn't wear any mask at all yesterday, not even in the Hannaford, though there were few people there at the time).
I'm a little sketched-out by the Subaru these days, particularly after that nightmare where it lost all its transmission fluid and I had to walk the dogs home all the way from the center of Old Hurley. So as I was driving west up the Mohawk Valley on the I-90 part of the NY Thruway, I kept checking the thermometer, since that's gives a good aggregate sense of how healthy the engine is. I'm familiar with where that meter should be, and today it was a bit higher than that. But the weather was unusually hot and we were running the air conditioner at full blast. Still, I did what I could to keep the engine temperature as low as possible, mostly by climbing hills (none of which are steep in the Mohawk Valley) at speeds lower than 65 mph.
The major challenge to the Subaru came as we climbed up the Adirondack escarpment on Route 309 heading north between West Bush and Bleecker. With that big heavy slab in the back, the car didn't much like going uphill, and I watched as the temperature gauge crept steadily towards the area marked red in its range. But then we were at the turn to Woodworth Lake and it could cool back down.
At the cabin, there were a good four or five tradesman and Joe, the project manager. They all drive expensive vehicles, with a concentration on oversized trucks that worksites tend to age prematurely. So it felt good to roll up on our $300,000 cabin in a $2000 Subaru with obvious rust holes. The guys eagerly wrestled the huge slab out of the back of our car and carried it into the cabin, tipping it sideways to get it through the door and setting it down on the floor near where it will eventually be. I should say that I feel a little bad about bringing a characteristically-Catskill rock to the Adirondacks (we really should've gotten a local Gloversville stone yard to cut us a slab of granite, which would've been very expensive). But bluestone is a much more useful form of rock for this purpose than granite.
I should mention that the cabin is looking amazing; the quality is nearly perfect and much of the work is done. All the larch siding on the outside is installed, the decks are completed (though there was confusion about what all was to be done), most of the drywall is in place and finished, and there isn't just an interior stairway down to the basement, there's a wall around that stairway. There are also steel bilco doors over the basement's exterior entrance. There were, of course, still plenty of things to discuss with the crew, particularly the siting of the propane generator, a new requirement now that the cabin will be off-grid. It didn't take long to decide to put the generator just north of the cabin near the northwest corner, which happens to be closest to the circuit breaker box (already installed). There's still a need to find a site for the 1000 gallon propane tank, which Gretchen wants as close to the house as possible after hearing a $700 quote from Amber at the gas company for the expense of running fifty feet of gas line.
By the end there, it was just us talking to Joe while the tradesman were hanging out drinking their Friday end-of-shift beers (one of the brands I saw was Busch; this was clearly a pre-IPA-revolution crowd).
After everyone left, Gretchen and I walked down to Woodworth Lake, which we apparently had all to ourselves. Though the air temperature seemed a little chilly for swimming, the water was warm, and Gretchen went for a big swim that (at least from my perspective) seemed to take her nearly across the lake. As for me, I waded into the water, slipping on the slimy stones and taking steps from one irregular surface to another until I was in up to my chin. I found a large water-logged tree trunk that seemed best to remove from the water, given that this will be where we will be coming to swim. But I'll probably want to add rocks and such to make the bottom a little less unpredictable. As all this was happening, Ramona kept watching Gretchen swimming far out in the water and was whimpering continuously with what sounded like anxiety.
I walked south some distance down the shoreline to look for where our neighbor Shane's parcel began. Eventually I found a survey stake and, just beyond it, an overturned canoe and tarp.
When Gretchen got back to the shoreline, she kept gushing about how amazing everything was. Jokingly I asked "buyer's remorse?" something she'd had a hint of when we'd been here last back in early July. Not today! It had taken us eight minutes to walk back from the lake last time, but today it only took five.
Despite our best intentions, we'd managed to forget to bring about as many things on this cabin visit as we had on the last one. This time Gretchen forgot to bring any reading material, even though reading is how she spends much of her waking time. We'd also neglected to bring pillows, which I discovered we'd need when I unfolded the futon and found we hadn't left any. Gretchen was pretty sure we'd need pillows, and that meant we'd have to drive back to civilization and buy them. She wanted to go to Target, since Targets are the most cheerful of the mainstream big-box shopping options, and she could even picture buying a book there. But the nearest Target was in Amsterdam, something like 20 miles away. I preferred to shop closer, even if it meant going to a Walmart. It turned out the Gloversville Walmart was less than six miles away, which is closer than Kingston Walmart is to our house in Hurley. So we drove down to the Walmart, executing all the weird twists and turns down multiple side streets through depressingly-run-down Glovesville neighborhoods that Google Maps always sends us on. Before venturing into the Walmart, we donned our N95 masks. All the employees in the store were wearing masks, though some of them wore them below their noses and even their mouths. Only about 10% of the customers were wearing masks, and that's in a county where slightly more than half of the people older than 18 have been vaccinated (a rate more like Ohio than New York). After comparing various pillows, we went with ones that seemed best. We also bought a couple fold-out black camp chairs with fold-out side tables. (Ideally we'd have gotten Adirondack chairs, but these had "Ozark Trail" branding, possibly due to the proximity of Walmart's headquarters to that other, possibly more-Real-American, mountain range.) As for reading material, Walmart had books, but it amount to one small rack of hard covers, one small rack of magazines and soft covers, and rack of kids' books, all of them near the electronics and other entertainment. After some deliberation, Gretchen found something suitable: Harlan Coben's Gone for Good. Gretchen said she couldn't remember the last time she'd bought a book from any place that wasn't a bookstore.
As always at a Walmart, there were plenty of scenes that one can't expect to see anywhere else. The one that distilled everything for us, though, was the vision of a morbidly-overweight young woman with a skinny boyfriend greedily carrying an enormous and horrifyingly garish birthday cake in her hands. I had a feeling that cake wasn't long for this world.
Back in the cabin, Gretchen and I played a rousing game of Banangrams (something Gretchen had remembered to bring) and she won of course.
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Gretchen returns to the Woodworth Lake shoreline, where an anxious Ramona awaits. Click to enlarge.
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