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sober socializing on the dock
Saturday, July 26 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
It being Saturday (and because I'd taken 150 mg of diphenhydramine last night), we awoke rather late and had a slow start to our morning. Our friends Greg and Z (the librettist and character-actor couple from Olive Bridge) would be arriving this afternoon and staying the night, so we (or, more especially Gretchen) couldn't just hang out on the dock all day without paying attention to the time. Gretchen headed down to the dock a bit before I did while I tinkered with the timing algorithm for resetting the Moxee cellular hotspot when it craps out. I had been noticing when it craps out that it wasn't getting enough time to develop a proper connection during the phase (which is every other reboot) when it isn't uselessly showing an icon of batteries being charged.
After several hours of this, I prepared myself a vodka-containing beverage (so as not to get a comment about the alcohol content of my beer) and went down to the dock, where I again set out in an innertube from the dock while Gretchen continued reading her book on a zero gravity chair on the dock.
It was a gorgeous sunny day and there was an unusual amount of activity on the lake today. Little kids were jumping off Pyotr's dock and a fairly large group at the public dock kept setting out in kayaks, paddling into the outflow bay and back. Usually when you see people from the public dock in watercraft they are fishing, but all these people were just recreationally paddling.
I let myself drift northward and, when my drink ran out, I paddled to shore only a couple hundred feet north of our dock, which made getting back to the dock an easy walk. By then it was nearly 2:00pm and Gretchen decided we (or she) should go back to the cabin to be there when our guests arrived.
But it turned out they'd taken the scenic route (through Middleburgh) and were running late. But after a half hour or so, we heard their Subaru rolling up our driveway, so the dogs ran out and our guests got a first look at our cabin. It's looking pretty crazy these days, what with the eight-foot-tall sweet clover and goldenrod towering on either side of the bluestone path to our door. But it's all in keeping with the wild and wooly Adirondack lifestyle we want to be having.
We gave the requisite tour, but it was a bit hurried because our guests wanted to go down to the lake. They didn't even want to snack first, so I suggested bringing the cheese plate (which also included crackers, nuts, dates, and red pepper dip) down to the lake. We went down via the original dock trail.
We ended up just sitting on the dock, socializing for several hours. That's a lot of socializing for me, especially without an adult beverage in my hand, but the conversation was interesting at times, at least when it wasn't focused on some big interests that the guests share with Gretchen that I do not have: contemporary novels and theatre. The conversation focused for a time on the Aspergery traits of Z's brother, which we compared and contrasted to those of my brother. Later conversation briefly turned to the relationship between academic credentials and my career (nobody, I said, has ever cared about what my credentials are or are not). At some point Gretchen went for a brief swim and the people from the public dock continued paddling back and forth on their kayaks.
When it was time to hike back up to the cabin, we took the Mossy Rock Trail. Gretchen then spent some time preparing the extras for dinner while heating up a vegan lasagna she'd made. The extras included garlic bread, green beans, and a capers-forward salad. We ate out in the screened-in porch as usual, and had a fairly interesting conversation about times we'd been fired. For a hard-working supporting actor like Z, being fired usually happens by word-of-mouth and the people doing the firing don't even bother to call because they want to avoid the awkwardness. But the acting world at that level is pretty small, so there are plenty of opportunities to run into each other again and experience that awkwardness anyway. When I'm fired, of course, I "never see" the people doing the firing "ever again." Then Gretchen told a surprisingly long version of her falling out with the Bard Prison Initiative, culminating with the time we got kicked out of a graduation ceremony at Eastern Correctional Facility.
Later we moved into the great room, and still nobody was drinking alcohol. At some point after that, Z told the harrowing story of how his ancestors had been treated in Slovenia during Croatian collaborationist times (in World War II) and during the Yugoslavia period. In the former, some of his ancestors were taken from a prison and hanged as a message to anti-government forces who had blown something up. And in the latter, one of his ancestors (a father or grandfather) was imprisoned for stealing his equipment back from the government after his business was nationalized.
We ended up staying up until nearly midnight talking about things like this in the great room.
A big pickerel frog on the coltsfoot growing along the cabin's south foundation wall this morning. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen and Charlotte on the dock today with my knees. Click to enlarge.
Unknown kayakers enjoying Woodworth Lake today. Click to enlarge.
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