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tele-real-estate
Friday, September 20 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
This morning after Gretchen walked Charlotte, we all loaded up on the car to drive to our accountant's office to pay an unexpectedly large tax bill (like $13,000, near the upper limit on what we will pay for a used car). But then it turned out the accountant's office is closed on Fridays, so the drive was a complete waste of time (and energy; particularly so given that I'd loaded a couple hundred pounds of bluestone in the back of the Bolt last night).
A little later in the morning, Danielle, a realtor in Rochester, used her phone to show us as house we were interested in possibly making an offer on. The main floors of the house were in beautiful shape, a little too beautiful, indicating a lot of recent superficial work that might've been covering up problems. My main focus when I look at a house is the basement, since if that's done right most of what's wrong with the rest can be fixed (and if anything else is too bad, Gretchen will catch it). The basement of this house was musty, featured a dirt floor, and had only five feet of headroom. But the realtor said the walls looked good and, most importantly, nobody had made any recent fixes. But my main problem with this house was that it was probably the nicest one on the block, and it's always a better idea to buy the last crappy-looking house on a nice block (since the house you buy is the only one you can fix, though the neighborhood counts for a lot).
After that virtual tour, I loaded up the Bolt with food, a laptop, various things I needed (such as a second set of computer speakers and another micro-USB cable), got the dogs to join me, and headed out on my own to the Adirondack cabin. Gretchen had to stay back for various social and medical obligations (including Oscar needing to visit the vet again for another steroid injection).
As usual, I took the route through Middleburgh, stopping at the Cairo Hannford for last-minute provisions like tempeh, tofu, grapes, nuts, cold road beer, and bread. Unfortunately this time they didn't have any bread of the sourdough persuasion.
The day was warm, even at the cabin, though conditions there are increasingly autumnal. Soon after arriving there, I took the dogs on a walk down the Mossy Rock Trail and found it was already covered with fallen leaves, most of them brown and wrinkly, probably from sugar maples (which seem to shed some of their leaves early). Down at the lake, there was the sound of earth moving equipment over at Pyotr's cabin site, which he's been fucking with now for well over a year. I paddled over to the public dock in a kayak to see if the abutment modifications I'd made there were still in place and found that they were.
The dogs and I walked back to the cabin a loop through Shane's parcel, passing a little south of a second (and smaller) gorge that is just south of the Backwards Cliffs Gorge. Those gorges are kind of unusual, but beyond them the landscape is unremarkable, and there's not all that much of it before your're at the edge of the clearing around Ibrahim's A-frame.
Back in the cabin, I ate a small amount of cannabis, which gave me what might be considered a "micro-dose," something I could feel, but only just. I also drank a fair amount of booze, but I was careful not to drink too much or too continuously, breaking it up with cups of black tea so I wouldn't wake up tomorrow with a hangover. The booze killed my ambition, and, after a nice hot bath, I ended up in bed even before it was dark at a little after 7:00pm.
Neville on the dock viewed through my telephoto lens from the public dock.
Click to enlarge.
The public dock abutment with our dock in the distance across the lake.
Click to enlarge.
Charlotte and Neville on our dock.
Click to enlarge.
A white-throated sparrow on our woodpile. This one had collided with the screen of one of the cabin windows a few seconds before. According to Wikipedia, white-throated sparrows collide with windows so often they are among a small group of birds called "super-colliders."
Click to enlarge.
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