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especially large lumber on the roof rack
Wednesday, August 21 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
It was another cool morning at the cabin with just me and the dogs. I decided that today was a good one for taking a recreational 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine.
After my morning coffee, I eventually grabbed the big eighteen inch Kobalt battery-powered chainsaw and took the dogs on a walk down to Woodworth Lake. But we didn't go directly to the dock. Instead we followed the old seldom-used section of trail that goes straight to the lake north of the dock and then I went north from there, to where a large rotten tree of some sort (probably a beech) had fallen across the trail and been blocking it for months. I managed to cut through the tree and get it out of the way. (Neville had been able to climb over it, but he'll be happier now that he no longer has to.)
Then I went down to the new tree dock in the outflow bay and used the chainsaw to cut hatches into its top surface, thereby rendering it non-slip even in wet conditions.
I'd driven the Forester to the cabin last Sunday because I expected to use it to pick up some large pieces of dimensional lumber from the Home Depot in Amsterdam while I am up here. This afternoon when I asked the dogs if they wanted to go for a ride in the car, they clearly didn't want to come. So I left them behind. At the Home Depot, I found that, as with Lowes, they only stocked eight foot and twelve foot pressure-treated six by sixes, not the ten foot kind I wanted. Green twelve footers weight nearly 100 pounds each, so I looked to see if there were any there that had had time to dry out. There weren't. I was a little buzzed from a strong road beer and this caused me to wonder if perhaps I was biting off more than I could chew as I struggled to load the three twelve foot six by sixes I needed onto a lumber cart. I wondered if I would really be attempting this if I were completely sober. But I managed to load the lumber, along with two twelve foot two by eights that I also thought I would need. I also bought sixteen five foot lag screws, the kind used for attaching ledger boards to the sides of buildings.
After paying the money (something like $220), I rolled the lumber car out to the Forester and then began making arrangements to haul the big pieces inside the cab, either sticking out the back, the passenger window, or both. But as I was doing this, a skinny young Home Depot employee randomly showed up and asked if I wanted any help. I said sure, ideally I'd like to put those big six by sixes up on the roof, "but they're very heavy." With his help, it was no problem getting them on the roof rack, two on one side and one on the other with the two by eights. (I don't put heavy lumber in the middle of the roof rack, as I've had bad experiences with the crossbars collapsing in the middle.)
After tying everything down, I made a brief stop at the Hannaford next door mostly to get Tofurky and sauerkraut. I then went to Black Bear Liquor a little ways north on Route 30 to get a half gallon of vodka and a litre of Evan Williams (they didn't seem to have either cheap gin or much in the way of scotch, the two forms of distilled liquor I normally buy.)
On the drive in on Woodworth Lake Road, I stopped in a few places to gather loose stones from the ditch for my many stone-using projects. I've been finding uses for rounded stones when making improvements on the Mossy Rock Trail, but I've also had a need for a lot of flat rocks, the kind that can really only be found in Woodworth Lake or imported from the Catskills (that is, bluestone). And I've almost exhausted my stockpile of bluestone.
This evening I was trying to figure out the source of a problem with my ESP-8266 Remote Control system when 150 milligrams of diphenhydramine kicked in, and I had to give up on it for the night.
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