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an osprey and a loon
Saturday, June 21 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
The plan today was for me to drive all by myself to the Adirondack cabin, leaving behind not only Gretchen and Andrea but also the dogs (and cats), since Gretchen thought Andrea would want to spend more time with them. Since Andrea was probably going to be sleeping in late like she did yesterday, I could just pack up my stuff (which included styrofoam scraps, bits of bluestone, and a DeWalt plunge router) and leave without saying goodbye. This would have the added benefit of making it so I wouldn't need to hose off her perfume as the first order of business after getting to the cabin. The forecast for this weekend was for hot, humid weather, and it seemed like maybe jumping in the lake would be something I would want to do.
But when I got to the cabin at around noon, temperatures were only in the low 70s. It was sunny, which Saturdays hadn't been for a long time, but it didn't feel like swimming weather.
I took a recreational 150mg dose of pseudoephedrine and started working on the main task I'd scheduled for myself: lowering the floor outlet I'd installed some weeks ago in the great room so that a brass floor plate for it wouldn't be sticking up like a mushroom. (I'd figured out that I needed to lower it about a half inch.) Since I'd nailed and spray-foamed the outlet box in place, this meant I had to do some annoying rolling back of those things. I'd brought that DeWalt plunge router so I could make hollows for the various bits on the outlet box that project out sideways near the top, but then it turned out that the bit I intended to use didn't fit. So I used a Dremel knock-off instead. After a fair amount of carving away, I managed to get the outlet box lower in the floor so that the brass plate covering it mated neatly against the floor surface. With that out of the way, I could then finish the end of the buried outdoor electrical cable running to the vicinity of the propane tank (since it is on the same circuit as the floor outlet), installing some PVC conduit and an outlet box that will eventually be attached to the south side of a tree.
After I'd finished all that, I hiked down to Woodworth Lake via the Mossy Rock Trail. As I arrived there, I heard a bird of prey in the treetops along the south lakeshore and saw Throckmorton the Loon several hundred feet off our dock. When I later saw that bird of prey, I saw that it was an osprey. I fired my camera randomly into the sky hoping to get a few pictures and it later turned out that I had.
There were a couple young women sunning themselves on Joel's dock and I could hear voices from Pyotr's boathouse. But otherwise I had the lake to myself. I paddled a kayak to the public dock and back and then paddled over to the northeast shore to get a picture of the osprey when she landed in a tree over there.
By this point some moldy cannabis I'd eaten was just starting to kick in. I'd taken cannabis a few weeks ago and had barely felt anything, but this time it actually worked, marking the first time I could feel the effects of cannabis since Donald Trump won his election back in November. I was concerned that the creeping fascism might make me paranoid, but it didn't. I didn't even freak out that Trump had decided to drop massive bunker-busting bombs on Iran after building much of his political career on criticizing "stupid wars" (along, of course, with racism, counterproductive xenophobia, and gratuitous ignorance).
I wanted to stay up late feeling the effects of the cannabis while drinking, but I knew that if I continued drinking booze that I would not have a good day tomorrow. So I went down to the basement and got a gallon jug of apple cider I'd left down there over the winter. It had fermented and the jug was swollen with carbon dioxide. I poured a glass of it and found it was better than fresh cider, as it lacked the cloying sweetness. This was more sour, though certainly not vinegary. It was probably alcoholic, but I drank at least a quart of it without getting any more drunk than I already was. It's a good beverage and I need to lay up more gallons of cider next fall so I will have lots of this fermented version in the summer of 2026.
A compilation of my shitty photos of the osprey. Clearly no AI was used here! Click to enlarge.
Throckmorton the Loon. Not a great picture, but the best one I got today. Click to enlarge.
A tiger swallowtail on bladder campion. The former is native, the latter is not. Click to enlarge.
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