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flashing before the storm
Tuesday, July 28 2026
Since Gretchen started organizing the march to end animal testing, she's gotten comfortable with ordering people around. Sometimes it's easy to forget context when switching from the world inside your phone and the world that has dirt, sticks, and red blood cells in it, and I feel like she's been ordering me around more of late. Last night the problem has been affecting her right leg was so bad that she couldn't really sleep all that well, and by this morning her leg was in such bad shape that she didn't feel like she could take Charlotte on her morning walk. So Gretchen pretty much ordered me to take Charlotte for a walk, and she specified in detail how that would have to go down. She wanted me to drive Charlotte to the abandoned bluestone mine and walk her there, since it was unlikely I could convince Charlotte to walk with me in the hours when Gretchen would normally be leading the walk. But I needed Gretchen's help to get Charlotte into the Chevy Bolt, as she's reluctant to do anything that Neville isn't doing (and, due to this phase of his heartworm therapy, we're trying to keep Neville from getting much exercise).
Once I had Charlotte in the Bolt, I drove up Dug Hill Road to Lorenz and then took that all the way back to the middle of the abandoned quarry, parking it next to a place on the cliff that forms the old mine face where a mass of cantilevered bluestone had fallen several years ago. I figured I could find a few nice pieces in there to place on the Mossy Rock Trail in the Adirondacks.
I then walked south out of the quarry and into a patch of forest that had been logged not all that long ago, though only a smattering of large trees had been removed. This patch was beside a long continuous pile of bluestone rubble that must've been part of a mine, though the presence of reasonably mature forest suggested it was much older than the treeless section where I'd parked the Bolt. Further back in there, I found interesting little channels through the rubble that led to another cliff that had once been a mine face, but it wasn't as high, and the rubble pile in front of it was only a dozen or so feet away. I'd like to know more about the history and technology of bluestone mining (a huge industry in this area) so I can better understand what it was that I was looking at.
I continued further south until I encountered the southern limit of the bluestone rubble. I then turned west and began to follow the landscape as it descended into a valley. But at that point I felt like I had done enough walking, so I turned around and began walking back to the car. Interestingly, at this point Charlotte went off on her own, heading even further south, apparently concluding that all she had to do was rendezvous with me back at the car, and she knew it would take me awhile to get there on my slow primate legs.
Charlotte did indeed appear again, well before I'd made it back to the Bolt. But at the Bolt itself, she was very reluctant to get in the car. If Neville or Gretchen had been there, she wouldn't've hesitated. But our relationship is full of enough asterisks that she kept hesitating. My solution was to just get in the car and drive a little bit. She would follow, not wanting to get left behind, and then I'd stop and open up all the doors and tell her to get in. After a couple cycles of this, she hopped in, and I praised her lavishly and petted her on the head when it appeared between the two front seats from the back (unlike Neville, Charlotte does not default to riding shotgun).
This afternoon I had a landlording chore scheduled at the Brewster Street rental. Heavy thunderstorms were predicted and by noon the sky was full of menacing clouds, so I opted to set out to do the job early. I first drove to Herzogs in Uptown, where I bought some square sheets of sandpaper to help me with my stool making projects at the Adirondack cabin. But I also needed some sort of roof waterproofing, and ended up buying a tub of it that unexpectedly cost $60. While I was in the area, I also went into Hannaford and bought three boxes of their hundred-count store-brand black tea, since that is something I always need to keep on hand.
At the Brewster Street rental, I immediately set up the ladder I'd brought so I could climb up to the top of the shed roof in back from the alleyway. The problem I was there to fix was leaking from heavy rains in the place where that shed roof attaches to a vertical wall in the back of the house. I'd thought maybe there was no flashing, so I'd brought rolls of it. But there was flashing, and it didn't even look particularly half-assed. So I ended up a rolling out another run of flashing under the existing flashing, extending it another six inches. Since the shed roof has a fairly gentle slope, I could see this being helpful, particularly in windy or ice-dam situations. As I worked, the tenant heard me and eventually opened the window. She told me more details about the leak, but it didn't really add to what I already knew.
When I opened up the tub of waterproofing, I was surprised (and unhappy) to find that it was bright pink. Anywhere I put it would then be that color! Why couldn't it be black or maybe white? I put bright pink globs of it on top of the nails I'd pulled out and hammered back in through the additional layer of flashing. Then I looked at the top of a window and wondered if maybe water was getting into the wall there. So I used a putty knife to put a thick layer of pink waterproofing atop the window trim of both windows. By that point a threatening thunderstorm had started spitting raindrops on me, and I was in a bit of a hurry. This caused me to accidentally flick some of that bright pink waterproofing onto the shed roof itself. Again, why did it have to be pink?
Gretchen was in a horrible state this evening, rendered almost bedridden from the mysterious problem in her leg. She'd gotten sick of eating the soup I'd made yesterday and had the idea of cooking up a box of buccatini. But all she'd been able to do was get the pasta out of the food closet. So I ended up making it instead. I even cooked up a pan of tempeh and onions (we haven't had mushrooms since returning from the Mediterranean). We ate it while watching Jeopardy! and the second episode of the second season of Dark Winds, a show I am rapidly losing patience for. Later I took a bath, the first in quite a few days.
I ended up staying up later than usual. I'd taken 120mg of pseudoephedrine late this morning, and it's always fun to stay up late after taking that and then taking diphenhydramine.
Charlotte passes through a gap in an old stone wall. Click to enlarge.
Piles of old bluestone rubble. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte contemplates the alleyways in the rubble near an old bluestone mine cliff. Click to enlarge.
A meadow near where I turned around on my walk. Click to enlarge.
Some creature, probably a bear, was digging here and had overturned some rocks. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte walking back to our car, which is parked in the roadway along the bluestone mine face cliff. Click to enlarge.
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