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in the Adirondacks to receive a refrigerator
Thursday, October 16 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I woke up a little before 4:00am and sent a message to everyone in the company saying I would be out sick today, since that is the protocol. Say what you want to about the company, but the casual, impersonal way one declares time off is about as painless as it gets.
When I got up this morning, I made a french press of coffee and immediately began preparing the place where our new refrigerator would be going. This mostly just meant rolling the old refrigerator out of the way, plugging it in elsewhere (so it would stay cold, since the food was all still in it) and then sweeping up the escaped Cheerios and dust bunnies that had been underneath it.
In the late morning I got a message from Gretchen that the delivery was 20 minutes away, so I thought I'd drive out to the Woodworth Lake gate to open it (since people have been keeping it closed of late, though it had been open last night and I'd left it that way). But the delivery truck was already at our driveway and was about to back into it. The driver was a skinny black man with long braids and his stocky sidekick looked to be a Russian who didn't speak much English. I had them follow me as they backed the truck down our driveway. I'm always struck in these situations by how unnecessarily big the truck is. Our refrigerator could've been brought in a van, which would've been much easier to maneuver. But then it couldn't also deliver other bulky appliances to other customers on the same run.
When the big truck got to the end of our driveway, the dogs came rushing out, and I calmed them down, repeatedly telling them that we were getting a new refrigerator. Gretchen had told the guys about our dogs and they weren't scared by them (as others often are). The skinny guy with the braids did an initial reconnoiter and determined that the doors on the refrigerator had to be rehung so the hinge would be on the left, and he and his sidekick spent a good amount of time unpacking and switching the hinges out in the driveway, making a lot of sounds with an impact driver that suggested a bit wasn't well-seated in a fastener. Then they carried it in and did more fastener work followed by the ripping off of protective plastic. The new refrigerator was a Whirlpool and, strangely, the plastic seemed to have been put on before various pieces of trim, meaning that when it was ripped away, little bits of it remained, peeking out from under the trim. Meanwhile I sat on the couch between the dogs, with Neville resting his head on my laptop or licking its screen.
Once the delivery guys were gone, I transferred all the food to the new refrigerator, which (unlike the old one) completely filled its space and was noticeably bigger inside, with enough room for a whole gallon of apple cider on one of the shelves in the door.
I went down to the basement to look for a rope to lash the old refrigerator to the hand truck and was horrified to discover a substantial puddle on the floor near the heat-pump-based hot water heater. Had it failed? It was only six years old? If it was failing, I didn't want the leaking water to spread out across the basement floor. So I decided then and there to make a low dike to force any leaking water down a hole I'd made through the slab (which I use as a handy zero-plumbing drain). I had some old clotted portland cement that I could pound back into a powder and mix into a paste (as such cement, unlike mortar or concrete mix, never seems to go bad no matter how much moisture it picks up). While I was building my dike and sponging up the water, I happened to notice the source of the leak was actually just a hose that had not been completely turned off. But since I had the makings for a dike, I built it so it will be there when the hot water tank does eventually fail.
Using the hand truck, it was fairly easy to get the old refrigerator down the steps onto the bluestone walkway. There I used a hose to help me clean it as best I could. Since it's a good refrigerator, I figure I can try to sell it. (Lowes offers to haul away the old one, but the idea of a perfectly good refrigerator ending up in a landfill conflicted with my feelings about materialism, not just environmentalism.) Once it was reasonably clean, I used the hand truck to get it to the highest point in our driveway so it wouldn't be an eyesore for however long it is before someone takes it.
I then took Charlotte on the walk she'd been wanting for hours. We hiked down to the lake, where I saw on the dock drinking a beer and scanning the water for Throckmorton the Loon. It was possible he was out there somewhere, but I couldn't see him. Hopefully this meant he'd begun his flight to the ocean to spend the winter. While i was sitting there, I heard someone stomping towards me through the leaves and looked up to see it was Neville, who had initially seemed like he wasn't coming.
At that point I felt the need to go diarrhea (I knew it would be that), but where could I go where the dogs wouldn't immediately get into it and then smell like diarrhea for the rest of the weekend? I realized that they probably cannot get up onto the big molar-shaped rock that is the largest visual object one sees from across the lake when looking towards our dock. So I climbed up on it and shat. I figure a resourceful bear could get up there, and one probably would, since bears love human shit at least as much as dogs do. In any case, it would be baked by the sun and turned inert in a week or so, so doing this wasn't much of a crime against sanitation.
Neville and I headed north along the lakeshore, crossing a fresh new beaver skid path along the way. (I could tell it was new because it had been brushed mostly clear of leaves.) Then Charlotte joined us and we continued across the outflow creek into the woods, crossing East Bifurcation Creek where it passes a line of low cliffs somewhere above East Bifurcation Falls. We somehow wandered into property belonging to Adirondack State Park, crossed West Bifurcation Creek, climbed a lesser hill, and then climbed the brutal slope up to our cabin. As I did so, I noticed something of a steep gulch running down through the cliffs that made for a gentler slope to climb. Perhaps I can establish an actual trail down this gulch.
I'd been living mostly on nuts and buttered pieces of sourdough bread, so by this afternoon I needed to eat something more substantial. So I made a box of cavatappi pasta and a pan of tofu, onions, and mushrooms. I ate a bowl of all this together with some fresh sweet peppers and habañero hot sauce (but no marinara sauce) and it was exactly what I wanted to be eating.
Later this afternoon, I went to gather various rocks for a purposeless stone wall that I've been building near where our driveway leaves our parcel. As I did so, I could hear that Ibrahim's Generac generator was running, and it was doing so longer than the usual test sequence such generators do for about five minutes every two weeks. As I walked out to Woodworth Lake Road, I could also hear that the backup generator for the big antenna installation south of Woodworth Lake Road was running as well, indicating we were in a power outage. But such power outages have no effect on an off-grid cabin like ours.
The new refrigerator is definitely quieter than the old one, but from glancing at the graphs of power consumption recorded in my ESP8266 Remote Control system (which has distinctive crenellations when the refrigerator is on), it didn't really seem like it was using any less electricity. The old one gave no indication that it is EnergyStar rated, though the new one is festooned with yellow decals proclaiming it loudly.
Neville at the sunny place just south of the Boy Scout campsite in our parcel. Click to enlarge.
Much like Donald Trump, as depicted on a recent cover of Time, Neville has a "nussy." Click to enlarge.
A block of rock along East Bifurcation Creek. Click to enlarge.
Along the side of that block. Click to enlarge.
More of that block. Click to enlarge.
Neville in East Bifurcation Creek. Click to enlarge.
Another big block of rock along East Bifurcation Creek. Click to enlarge.
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