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migratory duck near the dock
Thursday, October 30 2025
Even before I got fired, I had developed plans to go on one last drive to the Adirondack cabin before an upcoming European trip so I could do one season-related task I'd neglected to do: to turn off the outdoor hose and remove it from the spigot. Leaving a hose on a spigot, even the kind to designed to be freeze-proof, will eventually split the stout brass it is made from, requiring replacement (something I'd had to do a year or so ago). Gretchen had wanted me to get Ibrahim to do it, but there's weirdness in that neighborhood relationship from the rare occasions our dogs appear on their surveillance system, so I hadn't wanted to do that. I also wanted to retrieve my main cabin laptop to maybe get some files off it. So this morning while we were still in bed, I announced my plans to Gretchen. She said it was fine for me to do this but she wanted me to do my chores first. These chores consisted of me filing for unemployment, getting Gretchen the handbook from my recent employer so she could ghost-write me a letter to the CEO, and fixing up my menorah website so it would look good when posted on Facebook (it turns out there is some data Facebook looks for in the meta-data that I didn't know about).
When I was done with all that, I began my drive up to the cabin in the rain. I'd decided not to bring the dogs, so it was just me in the Forester listening to various things on YouTube streamed on my phone. I had a fairly bad hangover from drinking too much last night, and cracking open a road beer didn't help as much as expected.
Temperatures were in the upper 30s when I got to the cabin. I'd grabbed some stones along the road on the drive in, and after unloading those and dealing with the hose I'd left connected (it was still fine), I went into the cabin and turned on the heat. The Navien boiler has been throwing mysterious exhaust blockage errors that I tried to get to the bottom of, but I couldn't figure out. What might've helped was to block some perforations in the bottom of the unit with LDPE foam, but only time would tell.
To further help with my hangover, I made myself a glass of Jameson on the rocks and took a bath. Then I did some tinkering out on the upstairs deck trying to tweak the one post out there to be as vertical as possible. That proved more successful than expected, so then I walked down to the lake in the rain (with an umbrella) to look to see what the bird life was like down there. I saw several ducks individually doing things (there were no flocks of them), including one near the dock who wasn't particularly alarmed to see me. I snapped a picture and later tried to have various online AIs identify it. Google Image Search would say it was a Steller's eider, which can't possibly be true (we were well out of that bird's range) and another online bird identifier would think it was a lesser scaup.
Back at the cabin, Gretchen had sent me an urgent message saying I needed to return tonight because she'd just gotten me a last-minute appointment at the dentist. This was big, because it would mean I could get work done covered by my dental insurance, which would be turning into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight on November 1st. So I immediately wound down my operations at the cabin and drove back to Hurley.
On the way, I drove at my usual speed, which is mostly 65 mph on the Middleburgh route, unless I am driving through a village. Often there are slower cars in front of me that slow me down, but today I was at the back of a group of three cars that were all going 65 mph as we approached Livingstonville, where the speed limit briefly drops to 40. Just as we were arriving there, someone who had been riding my ass occasionally decided to pass us all, and he had to go at least 90 mph to do so. Just as he got around us and was about to hit the 40 mph zone, he passed a sheriff's truck parked at the entrance to the hamelet, which then wheeled out with his lights on. The speeding car immediately gave up, pulling over near the center of Livingstonville. It was the most excitement that hamlet had seen in years.
Meanwhile Gretchen had made a soup of heirloom beans (cooked from dry beans in the InstantPot) which she had shared with our friend from New Palz, Colleen. Our house sitter for our upcoming absence was also supposed to show up, but she never did. It later turned out that she'd come to our house and for some reason knocked on our garage doors, which is not something anyone from our culture would be expected to do. (Mind you, she's a white lady from High Falls.) Gretchen and the dogs never heard her, and she ended up driving away. As I would later say about it, this was like "some pre-contact human stumbling out of the Amazon."
The duck I saw near our dock today on Woodworth Lake. It's probably not a Steller's eider, but it might be a lesser scaup. Click to enlarge.
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