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shale from the side of US-209
Thursday, August 13 2026
This morning I took Charlotte on another walk down the Gulleys Trail into the bottom of the Valley of the Beasts and then back home via that trail that cuts across that valley and takes one to the Stick Trail. But instead of taking the Stick Trail, I hiked to the Farm Road via the entire length of the Chamomile Headwaters Trail. In the past couple days, I've noticed a new species of large mosquito that is definitely a mosquito and not, say, a crane fly. I know this because it bites, and it particularly likes to bite right through the shoulder of a teeshirt, in a place you're unlikely to have applied insect repellant. (To prevent the mauling that would otherwise happen, I'd applied such repellant before setting out.)
Back at the house, I snuck off in the Bolt without any dogs to run some errands. On the way down Dug Hill Road, I encountered an enormous turtle crossing the road, which the oncoming mail truck had to swerve to avoid hitting. I got out to pick him up and he looked like big box turtle, though with a somewhat flatter shell. [I would later decide this one was probably a wood turtle, the first I had ever seen.]
I needed to get paint and other waterproofing supplies for the spiral staircase from Lowes, though it wasn't really clear in the paint section what product was best for waterproofing and rust prevention. Rustoleum is a product name and "Stops Rust®" is a registered trademark. But does that mean they actually work to prevent rust? Nothing on the packaging made any such claims, so it probably doesn't. (In my experience, spray paint hasn't been very good at protecting steel from rust.) So I broadened my focus to include water-stopping technologies like roofing asphalt and rubberized paints. I ended up blowing over $100 on these things.
Then I drove to nearby Adams Fairacre Farms to buy things for our house in anticipation of the arrival of Grechen's parents later this evening. I bought casual browsing fruit like grapes, strawberries, oranges, and bananas, mushrooms, lettuce, lemons, cauliflower, asparagus, cheap Skippy-brand peanutbutter (for getting Neville to eat his pills), unsweetened soy milk, and, of course, an impulse purchase of canned cold-brewed coffee (the only product I could find that was suitable for vegans also contained a dose of CBD, though so far I have never experienced a noticeable effect from that particular chemical).
On the drive back home, just west of the highest part of US 209 as it crosses through a massive roadcut from a lesser Hudson watershed to the Esopus watershed, I pulled over to a little utility road used primarily to managed material eroding from the roadcut's unstable slopes. I've seen people with their trucks backed up to the slope shoveling material into their truck beds and noted this for future use, but this was the first time I'd ever gone their to get my own fill material. I'd only brought four five gallon buckets, so I couldn't gather that much. But that was about what I needed to fill a hole that has been growing in our driveway about fifty feet from Dug Hill Road. As for the nature of the material available, it looked like a fairly finely-flaked shale, perhaps with a little bluestone admixture as well as a small amount of old leafy organic matter. Unlike the sand I used to gather on the banks of the Esopus, it was easy to shovel, and I was doing wasn't potentially illegal. Getting rid of that material is in the interests of everyone, and the signs at the site only forbid dumping. Those shale flakes ended up being a pretty good solution to the massive pothole I used them to fill.
Having easily run all those errands, I decided to make a rare swing by the Tibetan Center thrift store, where I hadn't been in awhile. One of the first things I noticed there was a huge collection of crutches, which is good to know the next time one of us needs them. Otherwise, despite the accumulated clutter in boxes in the place where electronic detritus ends up, I could find nothing of particular interest. One thing that thrift store has a massive amount of, though, is WiFi routers, so if I ever need to update my increasingly aged hotspots, that would be the place to go.
[REDACTED]
Meanwhile, Gretchen's parents flew from National Airport in Washington to the Albany airport. The original plan had been for them to drive to the cabin, but Gretchen's leg problem and Neville's heart worm treatment protcol caused the plan to switch to them just visiting us in Hurley. They rented a car and then picked up a bunch of sandwiches and other things (like vegan hot wings) at a vegan deli in Albany and then donuts and such from Bitchin' Donuts (also in Albany). Gretchen gave Neville some extra trazodone so he would be a little less excited when they arrived a little after 6:00pm.
Gretchen's parents showed up in a muscular-looking black Mazda CX-50 hybrid. In amongst enough food for all four of us to live on for days was a cute little bird house made to look like a timber-beam cabin, complete with a chimney. The first conversation I had with Gretchen's father was about how maddening the Mazda's bluetooth setup had been. He bemoaned how different all the entertainment system user interfaces were between various vehicle manufacturers. "Why can't there be a published standard for that interface that companies could then claim to follow if they do?" I wondered.
Other topics of conversation included large language models (currently referred to as "AI"), a technology Gretchen's father now uses reflexively whenever he has a question, and I don't think he's been burned by it (or, at least, been aware of how much he has been burned by it) as much as I have, so he continues to drink the kool aid, at least to all appearances. He refers to the persona he deals with in Chat GPT as "Chet," and he has another persona for some other provider of LLMs. He showed us how Chet had looked at some photographs of a type of pewter urn with painted glass panels and figured out exactly what period of Chinese history they were produced during and referred to a specific museum that specialized in them. Chet had asked for specific markings on the bottom of the urn, something Gretchen's father had completely overlooked, and sure enough there were markings there to help narrow its provenance even further.
One big topic of conversation was the march Gretchen is organizing to end animal testing. This time her parents seemed interested, perhaps because at this point Gretchen has actually managed to build a substantial organization, and it's something they can be proud of.
For dinner, my sandwich (ordered with my preferences in mind) was an oyster mushroom po'boy. It was good, but very salty. There was also the issue that Gretchen's mother had ordered a deviled egg salad sandwich. It was vegan, which was good and should've meant I was spared in terms of my egg aversion. But she kept talking about it and even wanted to offer me a taste, and that kind of skeeved me out.
Everyone ended up staying up until 11:00pm, but after that it was my night to spend with Neville. Unfortunately, he was very restless until after midnight, causing me to keep getting up to let him out or babysit him when he decided he really just wanted to flop down on the bare wooden floor outside his corral instead. I drank a little booze during this period, though his restlessness persisted well past when I had decided I needed to stop drinking.
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