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big dead pine
Monday, August 3 2026
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Charlotte actually came with me when I took her for a walk this morning. We went down the Chamomile Gorge Trail nearly to Dug Hill Road, with me taking pictures of the many mushrooms that had popped out of the ground in response to recent rains. One of these was a ghostly white Amanita that I would later troll NextDoor with, posting the picture and asking, "Yo yo, Marbletown homies, whazzup! I found this beautiful mushroom in the woods. It smells really delicious, and I was wondering if it's edible. My inlaws are coming this weekend and I would like to make a stew!" (Trolling on NextDoor is even better than trolling on Facebook used to be back before it was deeply enshittified, since people really do see my posts.)
Charlotte and I came back homeward just upslope from Dug Hill Road, sticking closer to it than I had in the previous two times I'd been through this part of the forest. I discovered that the trail that Tommy made that I thought ran parallel to Dug Hill Road and then rejoined it clear does not, since it is cut off from Dug Hill Road fairly early by a line of cliffs.
Soon after we crossed the driveway to Crazy Dave's house, Charlotte decided to head home the rest of the way by walking in the middle of Dug Hill Road, which wasn't ideal.
This afternoon when I got around to it, I resumed work on the south deck, where I needed to fix problems with the railing on its west edge. The deck had settled in a way that forced it somewhat eastward, along with the rest of the house (a process that had made the rooms in the basement have elevations that looked like parallelograms). This had skewed two of the rail posts along the deck's west (uphill) edge way out of plumb, and I needed to fix that before I could fix anything else. I could see that the bottom of these posts were mired in the soil below the deck and couldn't be made plumb without either jacking up the deck or cutting off the bottom of the posts. So I tried jacking, using the bottle jack that I also use when doing chores like brake work on the cars. After getting the deck about an inch higher than it had been, the southmost of the problematic posts could be made plumb. But then it just came loose around the lag bolts securing it and I soon discovered that the interior of that four by four was completely rotted out. I haven't found much rock in this 30 year old deck material, but where it exists, it is complete. Seeing so much rot made me find a bucket of toxic green wood preservative in the garage, whch I then painted on various surfaces, especially the end grain of any of any board that I was keeping.
This evening while I was sitting at my computer, I heard the loud crash of a falling tree. When I looked to see what tree had fallen, I saw it was the moderately big white pine that had died years ago and that had been leaning away from the house towards the artificial mound containing our septic field. It had landed on the field, smashing branches off much younger white pines in the process. Neville and Charlotte were very excited by this development and went down to investigate. I then remembered the dead woodchuck I'd put atop a little wooden tower I'd made for secretly growing marijuana and worried the tree had smashed through that and now Neville would reclaim the fat rodent he'd killed over a month ago. But when I went down to see what the damage was, I saw the fallen tree had missed the tower by a few feet. Not only that, but a little platform I'd screwed into the side of that dead pine back when it was still alive (again, to grow marijuana) had survived the fall and I could now reuse it for some other purpose.
As for the woodchuck corpse, it is still there, but at this point it's just a husk of skin with some long incisors protruding from one end.
This evening our neighbors A and her boyfriend Jamie (along with her little dog Henry) came over for an evening visit. They wanted to see how if Gretchen's mobility had improved any, and it had, but only slightly. "Body's are weird," Gretchen observed. "Yeah," I agreed, adding "especially when they are buried in your basement." This led directly into my crazy story about the Faubers and how my buddy Josh Furr was living on their couch when their patriarch was found interred within a concrete bench that I had remembered sitting on. When the conversation inevitably turned to the march Gretchen is organized and she tried to more thoroughly explore A's celebrity connections, I started feeling uncomfortable. It was a good thing that I'd poured Jamie and myself glasses of scotch from a bottle of single malt Laphroaig that Jamie had brought me months ago.
For the past couple weeks Jamie has been missing his upper left second incisor, the exact same tooth as my "punk rock tooth," the one broken off in a Blacksburg mosh pit back 1994 that caused me numerous problems until I got a bone graft and implant some years ago. Jamie lost his tooth in a similar way and had a crown there for a time, but recently it fell out and he now needs a bone graft and an implant, but an estimate for the job was $11,000. My implant with a crown was less than half that much, so Gretchen and I have been encouraging him to talk to our dentist.
Later this evening I tried again to fix my All-Sun EM420A multimeter, the one that had gone out of calibration some weeks ago at the cabin. Looking at the circuit board inside, I found a place where a surface mount resistor seemed to have fallen away. I didn't know what value it should be, so I decided I'd use the value of the nearest resistor to that one, which was about 50 kilohms. I then found such a resistor on a scrap board, removed it, and soldered it on the circuit board of the All-Sun. (None of this was easy, and I lost one or two tiny resistors before I could actually get one to stick.) But even with this resistor, I could not get the multimeter perfectly accurate; its readings were now 5% too high. But that's actually not terrible. Perhaps I should try a 20 kilohm resistor in that location.
At some point this evening, a light shining down on the laboratory deck came on spontaneously for the first time in many years and I needed to turn it off. I knew it was controlled by X10 technology, a primitive smart home protocol from the 1980s that I had implemented in various places back in the Naughties. To turn it off, I just needed to push a button on a remote, or so I thought. Somehow the batteries in a remote that I had not pushed a button on in well over a decade were not dead, but I could find no device plugged into an outlet capable of receiving its radio signal. This resulted in a search of the laboratory until I found a plastic bin containing various old-school remote outlet control technology. In there was a wireless transceiver. I plugged it in and pushed buttons on the remote, but the light outside never winked off, indicating the X10 module controlling it had probably just died due to a power surge or whatever. But this experience reminded me of X10 technology, and I wondered if it might still have some utility, particularly at the cabin. It's full of limitations, but it's fine for turning a small number of devices on and off, and the reaction time is impressive. To use it, I would have to put an X10 bridge mechanism in my ESP8266 firmware so that I could send commands via my ESP8266 Remote Control system. But that would be a fun thing to implement!
A puffball. Click to enlarge.
That scary Amanita I used to troll NextDoor. Click to enlarge.
A bolete. Click to enlarge.
Cortinarius perhaps, with Charlotte in the background. Click to enlarge.
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