Floating in the Lake

Hey y'all, Old Coot here coming at you live and direct, correct, in full effect, break yo neck! Today is one of those days. "What kind of day is that, Old Coot? What kind do you mean?" You know, a Saturday.

What's nice is that I found that excuse not to go to work yesterday. Instead I went out kayaking at 6:00 in the morning, then headed to Albany to help JO with the summer's hottest project: a picnic table. More on that later.

It was Thursday night when I had the bright idea to play hookey on Friday and go for an early morning paddle. I had planned on going to Albany anyway, but this just solidified my resolve to not work. Originally, I wanted to be out there before the sun came up to watch from the lake as it rose. I figured that would be a real inspirational way to start the day. Fortunately, I also figured that was way the hell to early to get up and out this time of year. That mess comes up about 5:15.

So the plan was to pick load up my boat, head over to pick up LS (AKA MB) from the Crazy Running Group (RCG) and hit the lake by about 6:15. I ran a little late, there were complications with loading the second kayak onto the car, and so on. We got to the lake around 6:45 or so. Still mad early, that lake was quiet and still. The following pictures show you how calm it was out there. If you click on some of them you'll see that there's a layer of fog over the lake due to the chill morning and warm water.

Getting Geared up for the Trip

Fog in the Boat Launch Cove

Paddler in the Mist

Pretty neat, huh? When I'm out a-paddling there's nothing I'd rather be doing.

Next subject: JO's picnic table

I headed out to Watervliet or wherever the hell he lives around 11:00. The plan was to leave a lot earlier since it's a little over an hour from my house ("as the grandma drives"). Nevertheless, I had a coffee that needed drinking and the garden needed a watering. I had some lunch and hit the high road.

When I got there, we were waiting for his cousin and his truck. Unfortunately, the cousin was working until 2:30. We had some time to kill, so I bought a chisel. Next stop, 84 Lumber. I'm gonna trash that place right here, right now. The people were dumb as hell, not informative, slow-witted, and funny looking. And smug to boot. It took forever and they couldn't help with any of our questions. It probably took about an hour and a half to buy 15 boards and some hardware after all was said and done.

When we left 84 Lumber, we followed the salesman's directions to a hardware store where we should be able to find the last few bolts we needed. There was no such store.

After that, we went to Home Depot and found exactly what we needed. That kind of mess doesn't happen around these parts, but out in Latham or wherever we were they have all kinds of perks. Time to start.

Once we layed out the directions and started figuring out the exact process, two things became devastatingly obvious. The first was that this thing was going to take us forever to finish. It was after 4:00 by the time we had the lumber, there was no way we were putting this beauty together today. Instead, we concentrated our efforts on cutting the pieces that the plan called for. The second was that the plan was rife with errors. Pieces called out with the wrong parts, misspelled words, ambiguous descriptions, and so on. This was a professional, purchased plan. Being engineers, we were able to figure out the intent of the plan and cut the parts using our modified plan.

It took until almost 10:00 before we had cut everything we could. Many parts will have to be cut on the tablesaw, so I packed those up and brought them home. I can whip those out one of these nights instead of sitting at my laptop blogging. We had some dinner at a diner in some other region of the Albany area, then I headed home, tired as hell. The drive was treacherous due to my sleepy state, but I managed to defeat Death again and arrive home safe and sound.

That's it! It's too damn nice out for me to sit in here typing. I'll holler at you later.

Over and out,
Old Coot