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uses for old mylar balloons
Saturday, September 28 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
It was another gorgeous sunny day at the cabin, and I took the last sips of my coffee under the porch, where I continued digging a hole to place another big sheet of styrofoam. I'd taken a recreational 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine and as it kicked in, I kept feeling light-headed when I'd finally stand up in a place with sufficient headroom. Such headroom doesn't normally exist under the porch, where there is less than sixty inches of clearance. But once I'd done a little digging and could step down into that hole, I could stand up fully. Those head rushes were a little scary, but they also felt kind of good. It's possible that my only problem was that I needed to eat more food. But when I'm doing a project like this, I let myself get into the zone and don't typically take a break until some milestone. In this case, the big milestone was to lay that sheet of styrofoam down and then fill in any gaps between it and existing styrofoam with styrofoam scrap. But I actually did take a few little breaks before achieving that, since that's a big job. As always, I had to deal with trench wall collapses, though they weren't as big as usual because I'd driven rebar and stakes diagonally into the trench walls to give them better support. When I finally got the styrofoam sheet in place, I heard it crack a few times under my feet (I'd leveled the surface it was lying on, but perhaps not enough). So then I got some big polyethylene foam sheets to lie over top it to better block any new cracks that had developed. I then put a little effort into burying it, but stopped well short of filling the hole back in completely because Charlotte really needed a walk.
I took the dogs down the Mossy Rock Trail to the dock and then sat sat for awhile and drank a beer. Neville stayed close but, as usual, Charlotte was off doing her own thing. She really likes it when I take her for a walk, but then she spends most of the walk out of sight having her own adventures. I took them past the Woodworth Lake outflow creek bifurcation and then hiked down West Bifurcation Creek until it turned north. From there, Neville and I walked southwestward through the wilderness at the base of the hill our cabin sits at the top of, eventually reaching the Lake Edward Trail and taking that up the hill to the cabin. After leaving the vicinity of the lake, human artifacts are extremely rare (unless one counts stumps). But there's one kind of human artifact that can be found almost everywhere, no matter how remote the wilderness: mylar balloons. I found an electric blue one and decided to take it with me. I have a few applications for this material, such as gift wrapping. I would cut this one so it could form a complicated two-dimensional shape and then glue it to the now-exposed styrofoam of the cabin's east foundation wall so it would form an impenetrable barrier over the butt joints of several different pieces of styrofoam.
This afternoon I drove with the dogs down to Nobel Ace Hardware in Johnstown to get some provisions for some projects I wanted to work on. I needed a big bottle spray foam for an anti-chimunk barricade in the big plastic box we keep down at the dock. Then I needed a pulley and some string so I could make our bird feeder so I could refill it without needing a ladder. I also hoped to find some hardware that could mount an umbrella support to the side of the dock. Finally, I wanted some deck hardware for attaching a big six by six post to a surface. On that last item, Ace wasn't the place, as all they had was hardware for four by four posts. I managed to find most of the rest of the stuff, and I even allowed an employee to find the stuff for me (something they want to do whether I want it or not; usually I'd rather dedicate the mental energy of communicating with a stranger to the more essential task of thinking through what is needed and what might work in a pinch).
On the drive back to the cabin, I also stopped at the Johnstown Price Chopper mostly to get a twelve pack of Hazy Little Thing IPA, a half gallon of orange juice, and two different shapes of pasta. By the time I left that store, my pseudoephedrine had me feeling like a space alien piloting a human-shaped space ship and almost (but not quite) blending in. I love that feeling, and it's why I like to go shopping while on pseudoephedrine.
Back at the cabin later this evening I worked to further restore the landscape beneath the porch towards its normal configuration. In the process, I carried several buckets of sand to places along the Mossy Rock Trail to make it somehow even straighter than it already was. Then, in an effort to get the sand off my body, I took a nice hot bath.
A map of the horizontal styrofoam sheets I have placed at the level of the foundation footings near the cabin's northeast corner, with the dates of installation. Note that this graphic shows a gap betwen the wall and the styrofoam sheets. This gap was filled with styrofoam when I'd originally glued the styrofoam to the foundation's walls.
Click to enlarge.
The hole along the east foundation wall that I dug today with its styrofoam sheet at the bottom (and covered with scrap styrofoam). I used that upside-down bucket as a step to get into and out of the hole, which was a little more than three feet deep.
Click to enlarge.
Another view of the hole.
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The view to the Woodworth Lake boathouse today.
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The view of the south shore of Woodworth Lake today.
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Neville jumps over a log on the walk today.
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The mylar balloon as I found it in the woods today.
Click to enlarge.
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