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insomnia at the lake
Friday, August 28 2026
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Last night I figured out at some point that I could just sleep in a bed, so that was what I did. This morning, in addition to my usual coffee and toast, I also took a recreational 150mg dose of pseudoephedrine, hoping it would help me power through the details of attaching the new spiral staircase to the deck it arrives at from below. First, though, I needed to touch up the paint, and I realized I would need a bigger paint brush. There were multiple unpainted blotches, some of which had already turned orange with rust. I also needed to paint parts of the metal frame that supports the top landing pad.
When I was fairly satisfied with all that, I walked down to the lake, stopping along the way to add more stones to the Mossy Rock Trail west of that stone causeway I'd built last weekend. The pseudoephedrine had me in a fairly obsessive mindset, and I was able to find enough flat rocks to pave something like twenty feet of path, connecting the causeway to the base of the stone steps leading up through a rugged pile of glacial debris.
Down at the lake, I was there all by myself without any evident people or wildlife. As I liked to do, I lounged on an innertube with a beer in my hand. Periodically I would try to scrub away paint that was stuck to my fingers.
Meanwhile Gretchen was driving up from Hurley with the dogs in the Chevy Bolt, though she arrived as the sun was setting, so she didn't get a chance to go down to the lake. We both made ourselves tofu sandwiches for dinner, though mine also included cucumbers.
I began doing the work of fabricating the pieces of cedar allowing me to attach the top landing pad of the spiral staircase to the treated-lumber upper deck. The reason I was going with cedar and not treated lumber was that it is naturally rot-resistant while not containing chemicals that would eat into the steel. The fabricated piece I made turned the four-by-four into a piece with an L-shaped crosssection where I removed a 1.5 by 2 by 23 inch stick.
Gretchen and I ended up sleeping mostly in the bed, where Neville joined us for a time. But I woke up early in the night and could not get back to sleep. This might've been because I'd taken pseudoephedrine but couldn't take diphenhydramine, since I'd already taken it two nights in a row. So I tried lying with my laptop and a glass of Jameson on the couch in the great room, reading articles and playing Spelling Bee in hopes of developing a sleepy feeling. At some point it occurred to me that I'd left my camera on the dock when I'd been down there earlier, so I grabbed a flashlight and went the Mossy Rock Trail to the lake. It was serene and quiet down there, with only the occasional hoots of a barred owl. Despite a bright moon and my lack of corrective glasses, I could clearly see familiar arrangements of stars in the sky, centered around Orion in the southeast. My astigmatism smeared all the stars into short vertical line segments, the reddest one being Betelgeuse. Above Orion were the Pleiades. At some point I fetched a Hazy Little Thing from my redneck refrigerator (it was pretty cold!) and continued watching the sky. I kept seeing satellite hurrying across the sky from west to east and figured they're probably been launched that way to benefit from the additional velocity of the rotating earth. I only saw one meteor trace a brief arc from northwest to southeast a little left of the Pleiades. As for my camera, it was covered in beads of due, but I know from experience that it can easily handle that amount of moisture.
Back at the cabin, I eventually returned to bed and was able to sleep.
Looking west down the newly-paved part of the Mossy Rock Trail to the base of the stone steps. Click to enlarge.
Looking east down the newly-paved part of the Mossy Rock Trail from atop the stone steps. Click to enlarge.
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