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avoiding whatever it is she has Monday, October 24 2022
Oscar was bothering me for awhile before I finally got up and gave the cats wet food. When I looked at the clock, I was stunned to discover it was a little after 9:20AM, only a few minutes before the morning scrum! Unusually, I didn't have any last minute work to do before that.
This evening after work, I hurried (as I often do on Mondays or Wednesdays) through the making of spaghetti (cooked with cauliflower) and a frying pan of tempeh, onions, mushrooms, and a little spinach. I had so much going on that I added the cauliflower a bit too late to the cooking pasta, and it only had a little over a minute in the boiling water. But that turned out to be nearly enough.
Gretchen has been sick for over a week from something that isn't covid (she's tested negative) but she can't seem to shake. Today she took 50mg of pseudoephedrine so she could power through her bookstore shift, and that had helped. The illness affects her appetite, and she only ate a small amount of the spaghetti I'd made.
I wanted to take a bath this evening, but it had been raining on and off all day and been cloudy for days, and there was no solar-heated water and the just-in-time electric water heater hasn't been reliable, so I gave up on that plan. It was an unseasonably balmy evening, allowing me to sleep in the greenhouse. This would get me away from the cats and Gretchen's coughing fits. (So far I've managed to avoid whatever it is she has, but that obviously could change.)
While watching various things on YouTube (mostly murderer interrogations), I researched hand-powered come-along ratchets. It had suddenly occurred to me that I might be able to leave the hinged part of the dock in place in the lake over winter if I simply install a temporary pole down to the lake bottom off the end of it and then jack the dock up the pole until its floater hangs above the highest level the lake is likely to reach over winter.
Such a pole would have to have a base to spread the load of that section of dock (which would come to 150-200 pounds unloaded) across a possibly mucky surface.
A further issue is that snow loads could stress a dock jacked up like this, but the worst that could happen would be the dock crashing down an inch or two and landing on the ice.
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