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winterizing, 2024
Sunday, December 1 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
The plan today was to shut down the cabin for the winter and to take everything likely to spoil from both parts of the refrigerator. First, though, I wanted to make some improvements to the hotspot watchdog that doubles as a weather monitor for the cabin upstairs. It has existed for two and a half years as a wired-together constellation of three small circuit boards with a few twisty-ties to keep them from colliding in unhelpful short-inducing ways. This improvised setup has worked for most of that time, but occasionally some jumper wire will come loose from a pin or, as happened some time over the summer, one of the wires that should be going to big marine battery will get detached and then watchdog can no longer function when the power fails. So this morning I found a little square scrap of one by six to mount all the boards to, including another XY-3606, which would be replacing a cheap automotive USB power adapter. I also took the time to actually solder the fat wires carrying power from the marine battery to the terminal clips (instead of using those clips like clothespins to pinch the wire in place). By the time I was done, I had a neat little board with four sub-boards mounted to it attached to the pole supporting the parabolic antenna that the Moxee cellular hotspot lives near the focus of. I was even able to hide the marine battery behind the smoke stack coming up from the woodstove. Having the hotspot and antenna inside is itself something of an improvisation, but it's a convenient one, because I don't have to weatherize anything, it works well enough this way, and it doesn't really occupy any valuable indoor real estate.
I did a little preliminary cleaning while moving lots of canned goods, beer, and anything unlikely to fair well when frozen solid down into the basement, where I can be fairly confident temperatures will stay above freezing. Then I removed everything from the refrigerated part of the refrigerator (as opposed to the freezer), put it in bags, and schlepped it the 900 feet through the snow out to the Forester parked on the side of Woodworth Lake Road. Once I'd done that, I undertook all the drainage procedures to empty the cabin's pipes in preparation for the arrival of freezing temperatures in the upstairs. Finally, I removed all the items from the freezer (this included a whole bag of injera), divided it up into bags, and carried them, along with the house plants, my computer, and a cup of hot kratom tea, on the final second schlep to the Forester. (Since it was so cold outside, I put two room-temperature jarred items as thermal masses in with the plants and covered them with a teeshirt.) At that point, I was done with my winterizing and could begin my drive back to Hurley. It wasn't even 2:00pm yet, so I was able to do the whole drive in the daylight.
When I got to Hurley, I found the cold wave had reached there too. While temperatures outside the cabin today had been in the teens, in Hurley they were in the upper 20s. The dogs had just managed to destroy their dog door in a way that had Gretchen assuming we needed to buy a new one. But she didn't know that I'd glued it back together dozens of times and that was all it really needed. This time, though, the top part of the door frame had broken loose, which caused the whole thing to flop around on its pivot like a dead animal. Using superglue, I managed to get the top frame back together. After that, the other repairs were fairly easy, although in some places I should be using Gorilla Glue instead.
This evening we'd be doing dinner with Lynne an Greg again, and I lobbied that dinner be at the Bear Cantina instead of the Garden Café, as I can eat at the former every night of the week and not get tired of it, whereas I can only go to the Garden Café once a month without getting sick of it. (Our most recent eating out experience had, after all, been at the Bear Cantina.) Gretchen called ahead of time to be sure we'd get a table back by the fire place. A fair amount of dinner conversation concerned a friend of Lynne's who became much less of a friend after marrying Greg's brother. My main contribution to the conversation concerned Thanksgiving. It was: if there's no racist uncle at your Thanksgiving, you're the racist uncle. I should mention that I'd ordered the Presidente maragarita again, though I felt a little sick as I was drinking it. The feeling actually made me refrain from eating all of my Impossible enchiladas, so I took Gretchen up on her perennial offer of a to-go container for the leftovers I ususally never end up having.
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