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fries for a leg
Sunday, November 21 2021
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
As I was gathering firewood northwest of the cabin today, I decided I needed better footwear so badly that I should drive back to civilization and buy some today. And there were other reasons to do commerce today as well. I planned to work remotely from the cabin tomorrow, but I'd failed to bring a mouse, and my work-issued laptop's trackpad was driving me crazy (somehow it had even reverted to do "tapping," a feature I always disable the moment I detect it).
After more of the snow had melted, I attempted to walk the dogs through the cliffs down to the lake, but there was enough snow still getting into my Crocs to cause me to abandon the hike and cut over to the main lake trail and then back up to the cabin. Neville was with me for part of this, but then from the cabin I saw him holding his head high in the air and heading eastward off-trail through the woods. He was gone for enough time for me to grow concerned. But then I saw him coming home with a complete deer leg in his mouth. It was super fresh and looked to have a large piece of haunch meat attached to it. This was, of course, going to trigger Neville's Mr. Hyde persona. But I didn't want him shivering in the cold, so I let him drag that leg into the cabin and then over to the dog bed, where he menaced Ramona until she left. To keep him from growling at us constantly, I erected a barrier consisting of the cardboard box that had contained the flat pack of the computer desk.
I thought maybe a good opportunity to get the leg away from Neville was to announce that we were going for a ride in the car. But only Ramona wanted to go on such a ride. So we left Neville behind and drove down the Adirondack escarpment into Johnstown.
Our first stop was at the Ace hardware store, where I needed a tub faucet for our bathroom (there probably had been a faucet that came with the house, but I'd been unable to find it). I also got an expensive (about $50) splitting maul, some tamper-resistant outlets (for eventually wiring the basement), and I tried to get some rubber boots. There was a size 13 that fit me perfectly, but there was only one of them (it wasn't a pair). So our next stop was the Gloversville Walmart, a little less than three miles northeast on Comrie Avenue. There I managed to find perfect boots, as well as a mouse and stereo earbuds. (I went with the $10 ones instead of the $1 for obvious reasons.)
I should mention that almost nobody (except a few employees) were wearing masks in the Ace hardware store, though a good third of the shoppers in the Walmart were. Evidently people are so sick of wearing masks that they don't care that there is yet another coronavirus wave cresting in the northeast.
There's a Burger King directly across Comrie from the Walmart, so I went through its drive-through line and got an Impossible Whopper (with no mayonnaise) and two large orders of fries. The dogs love fries, and I figured I could use them as currency to "buy" that deer leg from Neville.
Back at the cabin, Neville had moved himself and his leg up onto the couch and he was being a bit less of an asshole. I found that he was so excited by french fries that when he was eating them he was momentarily distracted from the leg (which he'd barely gnawed on at all). I eventually used a broom handle to lift it away, and then I threw it out onto the upstairs deck (where I'll probably be dividing it into less guard-worthy pieces on future trips). With it out of his life, Neville (as always) seemed relieved, and I rewarded him with a few more fries.
I tried out my new boots on another firewood gathering mission, this time cutting up pieces thick enough that I also used the new splitting maul. I'm not sure exactly what species the dead trees I am burning are, but since most of the trees around the cabin are either maple or beech (mostly beech), that's probably what most of it is. (There are also some white ash, which are often sickly but, unlike in the Catskills, not completely dead.)
After setting up my laptop at the new computer desk (which I'd built up in the loft), I realized the cable I'd brought was not an HDMI cable but was probably a DisplayPort cable, which meant I wouldn't have an extra monitor to work on. That was a dealbreaker right there, so I changed my plans and decided to drive back to Hurley. I did the usual cleaning and then wrote some notes to John Jr. (the stoner plumber), who would be installing a basement heating zone in the cabin. (I wanted him to also install a shutoff valve to keep well water out of the hydronics and to make sure to leave the generator in a state where the thermostat turns it on when temperatures fall below a certain value.)
I drank a single road beer (a Guinness Extra Stout) at the beginning of the drive and then nothing after that.
Back home in Hurley, Powerful was eating some soup Gretchen had made. The coffee table was now a complex array of medical devices, medications, and gadgets, which I jokingly referred to as "the command center."
There was no fire in the woodstove, but the boiler had been on all weekend and some misconfiguration of the hydronics had caused the basmeent slab zone (something we rarely if ever heat with oil) to be heated as well. Some of that heat had even thermo-siphoned up into the solar panel, which is not something you want to have happening.
Neville approaching the cabin with his deer leg this afternoon.
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