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last evening at the pond, 2020
Sunday, August 9 2020
location: southeast shore, Twenty Ninth Pond, remote Minerva Township, Essex County, New York
Yesterday I could tell I had a good day in the Adirondacks because I never had to put on my shoes (the only shoes I'd brought were flip flops) the entire day. It was never cold enough to require socks, and I was able to walk to the nearby cellphone spot barefooted. Today I had another such day. It was our last evening at the cabin on Twenty Ninth Pond, so it had all that final-day torque. Unlike on past summer retreats to a cabin, this one had been unusually unproductive. Microsoft had given me shit everytime I'd tried to work offline, and I had a similar problem with an old Delphi application. My only other project was bird photography using a Raspberry-Pi-based spy camera, but no birds showed up to eat the cracked corn I provided.
But there were still lakey things to do. So, for example, at some point this afternoon, I kayaked with Ramona over to the beaver lodge on the western shoreline of the pond's nothern lobe, and then we walked around on the steep slope rising from the water's edge. I found some trilliums bearing red fruit, one of which I harvested in case it had some value. While I was trying to maneuver the kayak over to where Ramona had wandered to, she slipped off a log she was walking on and fell into deep water. Trying to get out of the water, she fell in a second time, thoroughly soaking herself. I later rescued her from a nearby clump of willows.
Every return to the cabin teaches me something about things I always need to take with me when I go there. In the past, the things I've needed have included a soldering iron, a USB A-to-B cable, and an external speaker for a laptop (to make watching a movie more enjoyable when Gretchen and I watch one together). I really nailed the external speaker option this time when I brought one of those bluetooth "speaker bulbs" that can also produce any color of the rainbow. Those things have surprisingly good sound, much better than I've ever heard a laptop speaker produce. But I did have one important omission this time: an ethernet cable. Without that, I had no way to reconfigure the networking on my Raspberry Pi 4 (I have a 4 gigabyte version). And without networking, I had no way to access it, since I also hadn't brought a microHDMI adapter (though I had brought mice and a USB keyboard).
This evening, Gretchen cooked up Gardein-brand burgers in the kitchen while I built up a roaring fire in the outdoor fire pit, fueling it principally with small dried limbs from nearby evergreens. (Gretchen didn't want to barbecue on a meat-tainted grill, and finds burgers best cooked in a kitchen anyway.) It had rained briefly this afternoon, but everything was still fairly dry. Meanwhile, Ramona and Neville was convinced that Anton the Chipmunk was still somewhere up a large white pine, though I knew for a fact he'd come down and escaped during a brief period when I picked up carried Ramona away (Neville is not enough dog to keep a chipmunk treed up a tree with having a trunk with such a large diameter). I liked my Gardein burger, but there was something about them that Gretchen didn't like, so she made a sandwich of other things.
At some point I switched from drinking beer to gin on the rocks. And then Gretchen and I watched the sixth episode of the Black Lady Sketch Show, which was the best one we'd seen so far.
The kayak at the beaver lodge where Ramona and I landed at the western shoreline of the pond's nothern lobe. Click to enlarge.
A trillium with a berry.
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