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Henry the dog goes kayaking
Sunday, October 12 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Neville loves A so much that he ended up going up the stairs and sleeping with A, J and Henry in that big king-sized bed. This morning Charlotte wanted to join them, but her insistence on snuffling Henry in his face makes him sort of hate her, so A and J decided not to let Charlotte in.
I made something like three french presses of coffee this morning, drinking the first one all by myself while I tinkered with my Meshtastic code. The plan was for Gretchen to go down to the lake this morning before 11:00am so she could enjoy it before starting another week managing a group of abortion funding coordinators, something that requires her to be near a means of internet communication (and thus not an easy thing to do from the dock). But the morning was chilly and cloudy and our collective inertia was high. We ate some toasted bread with homemade vegan cream cheese, drank smoothies, and had refills of coffee. When the time came for Gretchen to begin her shift, she did that for awhile until all the pressing work needed to be done. Then she roped us all into writing more get-out-the-vote postcards to send to Virginia voters, something A actually seemed excited to be doing. Meanwhile Gretchen played music from her eclectic Spotify playlist, which kept triggering discussions about songs such as Paul Simon's "American Tune" and Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You." Along the way, I learned that A doesn't like much grunge singing because she hates what she calls "throat singing" (think Eddie Vedder). I responded that I hated the tinny fakeness of 80s production (with its layers of primitive synths) that I found the grunge revolution, and its restoration of real instruments, to be so refreshing that I didn't care what the singers sounded like.
At some point we had lunch, and even did it out in the screened-in porch despite the lingering chill. It was during that meal that we got to talking about goofy white-person spiritual woo. Then Gretchen got me to tell the story of that time me and Bathtub Girl allowed ourselves to be given fake Indian complexions so we could be models for a series of photographs depicting the the positions of the Kama Sutra. Surprisingly, J knew all about the Los Angeles goddess scene that I was briefly a part of.
At some point the others went down to the lake while I stayed behind to monitor Gretchen phone to tell her via walkie-talkie if there was anything she needed to deal with (no such things came up). When it was clear that nothing was happening and I'd done all I felt like I needed to do with my Meshtastic nodes for the time being, I went down to the lake myself, this time carrying some s'mores-based snacks Gretchen had ordered and some beers, the latter so I could drink one while kayaking around the lake. When I got to the lake, J had gone swimming and even taken Henry out in the kayak. (He's small enough to fit in a lap, unlike Ramona, who'd caused me to capsize back in 2021.) I took the kayak counter-clockwise around most of the main part of the lake while Throckmorton the Loon stayed near its middle. (I'm a little worried about him staying at the lake so late. Perhaps he lost some feathers and cannot get airborne, in which case he is doomed unless he can be rescued.) While I was doing my paddling, J went out for a second time in a kayak with Henry, though I didn't know this and was a little confused to see his leash left on the dock. (Henry recently had knee surgery and must be on a leash at all times when outdoors so he doesn't overstress his repairs.)
Back up at the cabin, A, J, and Henry eventually began their drive back to Hurley and Gretchen and I left a little behind them. The days are now so short that we were unable to get enough of a charge to drive back to Hurley, so we were forced to stop at a fast charging station on Albany. The one in the Walmart parking lot was offline, so we tried a new one in a run-down downtown neighborhood instead. The chargers worked and there was no line, so we got to charging right away and walked the dogs around a huge block to pass the time. Neville being Neville, he made this take much longer than it otherwise would have as he stopped to sniff everything that could be sniffed. When we got back to the car, it had 110 miles of range, which was plenty, so off we went. Again we were listening to episodes of Heavyweight, including one about an old VHS tape containing a priceless old television interview of the family patriarch after he'd been wounded in Vietnam and how it was overwritten with a Billy Ray Cyrus concert. In the another, our host Jonathan Goldstein discussed his somewhat-problematic drinking habit in various takes over the course of a year of sobriety.
As for me, soon after we'd gotten back to Hurley I began doing my own problematic drinking in my usual style (that is, alone, and without ever stopping to consider than perhaps I have had enough).
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