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Neville steals Gretchen's glasses Saturday, October 12 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
We'd had to stay in Hurley through Friday for the Jeff Tweedy show, meaning we got a late start for our weekend at the cabin, the first for Gretchen since before our boat cruise in Germany. (That all sounds very bougie, I know.) We left in the mid-morning, taking the slightly more direct route through Middleburgh, past hundreds of signs for Marc Molinaro and Elise Stefanik along the way. There was some sort of street fair happening in Middleburgh slowing traffic to a crawl, so when we came to a promising intersection, we followed some cars in front of us that busted a right (that is, northeastward). As we were driving through suburban Middleburgh past a few more Harris-Walz and pro-abortion signs than expected, Neville got excited and stuck his head between us, as he often does. This time, though, he managed to dislodge Gretchen's glasses, and she couldn't see where they'd gone. Then she happened to notice that they were on Neville's face, as if he was trying to wear them (though they were upside-down). Had we tried to put them on his face to take a silly picture, they would've immediately fallen off. But this time they stayed long enough for Gretchen to take a picture.
Further on, we stopped at Love Shine Tea Shop, the little crypto-vegan café in Schoharie. That place was surprisingly crowded when we arrived, which made us feel better about its long-term viability. (We'd half suspected it would've had to close down by now; we hadn't been there since before we flew to Europe.) Since it was so busy, we didn't order anything that required work to prepare, mostly getting pre-made baked goods and various packed snacks. I also got a coffee.
I let Gretchen and Charlotte out at the Woodworth Lake entrance gate a mile before our cabin so they could walk the rest of the way. The weather was sunny and beautiful, and not even too cool (temperatures were in the upper 50s). At the cabin, I was expecting to find some packages I'd ordered from Home Depot that had supposedly been delivered, but they were nowhere in sight. I was just getting a bicycle ready to pedal out to the other places the packages might be when Gretchen arrived on foot carrying them. They had some note about "for the safety of our driver and your dog" they'd been left at the end of Dug Hill Road. How did Home Depot know we had a dog? And if they knew that, how did they not know there were actually two dogs they weren't there when they made the delivery?
Gretchen and Charlotte immediately went down to the dock so Gretchen could sit there and read (it looks like swimming season is over). Meanwhile, I turned my attention to fixing a slow gas leak that has existed near the generator for over a year but whose source I only recently discovered. The leak was past some 3/4 inch NPT threads that apparently hadn't been correctly sealed with thread compound. I'd bought and brought all the thngs necessary to fix the leak, assuming I would be replacing the NPT nipple, a ball valve, and a 5/8 inch male flare fitting. To help me remove the nipple, I'd bought a set of internal pipe wrenches, which are designed to fit inside the nipple and expand enough for some teeth to grip it and rotate it out. (I hadn't even known such a tool existed until discovering it on YouTube a week or so ago.) I had some trouble getting that internal pipe wrench to work, but with some effort I extracted the nipple. Instead of replacing all the plumbing I'd planned to replace, I ended up cleaning the threads as best I could and only replacing that 3/4 inch nipple. I put a lot of thread compound on the female threads, since it seemed that putting them on the male threads was less effective (the process of tightening scrapes the threads clean, and then they advance into the female threads without any compound). When I had it all back together, I soon discovered that now the flare fitting was leaking, and no amount of tightening fixed the problem. To fix that, I had to take the connection apart and make sure the female flare fit nice and orthogonal to the male fitting. After that, the fitting no longer leaked. I came back several times with the leak-detection fluid (basically soapy water that visibly bubbles if there is a leak) and could find no leaks. And I held my nose directly against the joints and smelled nothing. (Back when it had been leaking, I'd occasionally gets whiffs of gas fragrance from as far as ten feet downwind.)
Before we'd left this morning, I turned on the cabin's heat remotely, so it was 57 degrees when we arrived. After running the stove for a couple hours, inside temperatures got up to sixty nine degrees. Alright!
Neville wearing Gretchen's glasses as we drove through suburban Middleburgh.
Click to enlarge.
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