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Charlotte's contribution makes the pack different
Friday, June 14 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
This morning the four of us (Mary, Katie, Gretchen, and me) sat out on the east deck drinking tea (them) or coffee (me) and eating various things Gretchen set before us. Eventually she came out with four wine glasses in which she'd put some sort of creamy material, strawberries, and bits of some sort of cake, a containerized strawberry shortcake.
As we sat out there, we discussed a number of topics, including our real estate empire and how it has made it possible for me to be jobless for nearly a year. We stressed that the key to making this work is an absence of debt, coupled with years of prudent saving, and some very well-timed transactions (which is always luck). We didn't mention Gretchen's parents, who have been very generous over the years, but maybe that goes without saying. "We don't have any expenses," I said, adding that the main one these days is taxes, that is, real estate taxes.
We also talked a little about our somewhat-famous neighbor A and how well she and Gretchen get along. When we talked about her boyfriend, pointed out that A and her boyfriend met on a dating app "specifically for famous people." (But since there are supposedly a lot of tech bros on there as well, perhaps money is a separate path to being able to use the app.)
After that, there was a long discussion of menopause, hormone replacement, and issues such as vaginal dryness. (The three women present are all of a certain age.) I didn't have much to add to this conversation, but it was still interesting. Mary kept apologizing, assuming for some reason that I wouldn't want to hear it. She compared it to a conversation about basketball. I responded that I myself would much rather overhear women talking about menopause to people discussing basketball.
After the three women headed off to Woodstock together in Mary's rental car (a ridiculous black Dodge Charger), I loaded the dogs into the car and drove up to the Adirondack cabin for the weekend. I had so many leftovers and such that I didn't need to stop anywhere on the way.
I'd bought a bunch of sanding supplies so I could further sand the rustic stool I'd recently made. The best sander for this job was probably the sanding pad that chucked into a normal drill, since it allowed me to sand a couple inches inside spaces where there wasn't enough space to get other sanding tools. I was using my 120v Ryobi hammer drill, as it was the only 120v drill at the cabin. It's a pretty good tool for drilling holes in concrete, though its quality is a little suspect; sometimes when I really stress it, I can see smoke coming from its internal coils. Today, though, after first tripping an arc-fault circuit breaker (at which point I moved it to a circuit that doesn't have that feature), it started to crap out, running only intermittantly. I figured it was suffering from some sort of brush failure, though I would have to take it all apart to get to the brushes. [This turned out to be exactly the problem. I've used a lot of tools that use brushes, but this was only the second time I've ever had brushes that wore out; the other time was in a Dremel.]
Later I was in the back (northwest) of the cabin, marveling at the diversity of plants springing up, when I saw Charlotte looking with great interest at something at the bottom of the stone retaining wall. She then charged, and I saw a bunch of little birds flying in all directions as well as a big mother ruffed grouse. I think this was the same grouse that Charlotte had chased a couple weeks ago. Her babies are a little bigger and can now fly amazingly well, but the mother was still doing a bit of her "oh shit, I'm badly injured" routine.
Later I convinced the dogs to walk with me down to the dock, where I set out in a kayak to check out various things along the shore of the main body of the lake. For example, I saw a tiger swallowtail butterfly pollinating some beautiful purple native irises in the mouth of the lake's main tributary on its east shore. While I was out there, I heard some people arrive on four wheelers at the public dock. I always think of the people going there as teenagers trying to get away from their parents, but they're usually adults from the "redneck camp."
When I got back to the dock, Charlotte and Neville were waiting patiently for me. (Somewhat surprisingly, they don't follow my kayak along the lakeshore, something Neville and Ramona used to do. But Charlotte's contribution makes the pack act very differently.) We went on a walk down the lake's outflow creek and then went down the west bifurcation until it left our parcel. At that point I started walking along the Adirondack State Park boundary uphill towards the cabin, but when I got to the first cliffs, I opted to head westward up a more gradual grade. From there, I could see a series of bogs below me to the northwest and figured they were downstream from a narrow wetland that the Lake Edward Trail crosses at the bottom of the little mountain our cabin sits near the peak of. At some point I resumed climbing the mountain, eventually arriving at the set of cliffs below my "lookout rock," only a couple hundred feet west of the cabin. There's a slot in the cliffs with a relatively gentle grade, making it easy to get up the slope and back to the cabin. This new route from the outflow creek to the cabin was so easy that I will probably be using it more in the future.
A tiger swallowtail on native irises in the mouth of Woodworth Lake's main tributary on its east shore. Click to enlarge.
People and their dogs on the public dock this afternoon. Click to enlarge.
Some sort of lily on the walk from the west bifurcation back to the cabin. Click to enlarge.
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