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expectations of object permanence
Friday, March 18 2016
Gretchen left early this morning for Atlanta, Georgia, where she'd be attending a training for a program that will teach her how to present animal-rights-positive lectures in high schools. She's been hired to give these presentations in nearby New York school systems, though I have a feeling she won't be doing it for long. While the job aligns with her propaganda goals, the pay is terrible and the work is thankless, and she's also in competition with another person in the program who has already called dibs on Ulster and Dutchess counties, that is, the two closest ones.
I took the dogs for a walk through the abandoned go-cart track and homeward west of the Farm Road. Not too far from home, I pulled down a long-dead skeletonized Chestnut Oak, bucked it into pieces, and assembled a 100.8 pound load. It's significantly easier bringing home loads from west of the Farm Road than it is to bring them back from my usual haunts along the Stick Trail. The reason I don't more often is that most of the land over there is owned by someone who is known not to take kindly to others doing things on his property.
This afternoon, I drank some kratom tea and then drove into town, heading first to the Stewart's on Route 28 so I could get some cash from the ATM. Then I headed towards Kingston, stopping at first the Tibetan Center thrift store and then ReStore (the habitat for humanity thrift store) along the way. The Tibetan Center had gotten rid of a lot of lingering items in their unsorted, untagged electronic gadget section, and there was nothing for me there. As for ReStore, this was the first time I'd ever actually managed to get inside. It's a large well-organized store, with lots of furniture and big architectural salvage items like sinks. But the high level of organization meant there were none of the amazing random treasures I find so frequently at the Tibetan Center. There was, for example, a box of unlabeled (and increasingly anachronistic) SmartHome X10 gadgets, but at ReStore one had to buy the whole box for $40, which made it significantly less of a deal than it would've been had I been able to buy just the things I wanted for fifty cents each.
Another problem with ReStore is that their parking lot is down a steep driveway below Route 28, and getting back onto the busy road usually requires waiting for the right moment and then quickly acclerating. But my Subaru's clutch is apparently on its way out, because RPMs above about 3000 cause the clutch to disengage. Rapidly acclerating up the slope and onto the highway did something kind of bad to my clutch today, because I could smell it afterwards. I don't think I'll be visiting ReStore in the Subaru again, at least not with its existing clutch.
After buying groceries and OTC pharmaceuticals in and around the Uptown Hannaford, I drove home through Hurley and let the dogs out in the middle of the corn field south of Wynkoop. I'd brought my Syma X5C+ drone, along with several replacement batteries and a laptop to confirm whether or not the camera had recorded video after each flight (with this model of drone, you never know). This would be the first flight since adding a proper WiFi antenna to the controller. After one good flight, I determined that it had recorded video successfully, so I sent it on another flight. This time it went very high and drifted with the wind eastward towards the Esopus (and the suburban neighborhood just beyond, where Ray and Nancy live). Before it could get near the trees, I brought it down in a series of steps. It fell and landed just beyond a hump in the field out of view. But when I ran over to where it had landed, I couldn't find it. So I began systematically searching the field nearby, walking in a broad sinusoidal pattern. Where it could it be? The grass was short and green and the drone was white, but it was as if it had vanished from the earth, calling into question all my expectations of object permanence.
As the dogs became increasingly bored, I continued looking, widening out my search into a broad patch of dead grass (killed by herbicide in the practice of no-till agriculture, I assume) near the forest along the Esopus. If the drone had landed there, it might be harder to see. But if it had landed there, it could have also gone into the forest, gotten stuck in a tree, or perhaps even fallen into the swollen brown Esopus itself. I walked all the way to the edge of the Esopus, but of course I found nothing.
I could tell I'd been searching a long time after becoming familiar with all the white things in the area. In some cases these were rocks, though there were also scraps of plastic and paper. Not knowing what else to do, I eventually abandoned my search. On the way home, I grabbed one of the many largish pieces of cut-up White Ash along the lower part of Dug Hill Road.
Later, after watching some Moonshiners and trying not to drink too much, I returned to the corn field in the dwindling twilight. This time, I'd snuck out without the dogs. I hoped that the drone might still be blinking its lights and that I might easily be able to see it in the darkness wherever it happened to be. But I saw nothing. By this point, I was pretty certain that it hadn't fallen anywhere along a gentle east-facing slope just west of the Esopus (41.923410N, 74.076141W). I'd been able to stand in one place and look it over like the seats of a theater, and if there had been something white anywhere on it, it wouldn't have been able to hide. But now it was dark and I couldn't see anything, so I was forced to return home empty-handed (save for yet another piece of White Ash from the bottom of Dug Hill Road).
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