Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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got that wrong
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Like my brownhouse:
   relentless rain at the cabin
Monday, September 5 2022

location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY

I heard a dim sound coming through the cabin's double-pane glass windows that turned out to be rain, and the rain would continue all day. I'd procrastinated away nearly all of Friday and wanted to have more to talk about at tomorrow's scrum, so buckled down at my computer and, using a combination of SQL queries and clicks in a web-based user interface, figured out much of what I needed to know to solve a fairly simple problem in the extremely baroque codebase that at some point I should better understand.
Then I walked with an umbrella down to the lake to shut the dock down for the week. This involved collapsing the one non-collapsed chair and dragging the canoe ashore at the tree dock. It had accumulated several gallons of rain water since I'd last seen it.
Meanwhile Throckmorton the Loon was out on the lake just hanging out. Evidently he was done fishing for the time being, and the rain didn't much bother him as he sat there on the surface.

My internet setup at the cabin consists of a Moxee cellular hotspot with an ESP8266, relay, and various sensors, mostly there to restart the Moxee when it becomes unresponsive. I have all this in front of the sliding doors out to the upstairs deck, and hotspot itself is in the focus of a parabolic dish I've placed there to amplify the signals to and from the nearest reachable cell tower (based on the angle the dish points, I think it might be this one). Gretchen had asked me to figure a better arrangement for this equipment, one that doesn't block access to the deck. So one of the things I'd wanted to do this weekend was to set up this stuff more permanently outside. But with the unrelenting rain, I obviously couldn't do that. So instead I made an indoor stand (basically just a wide board with a pole from it) to hold the parabolic dish so that it could point horiztonally southeastward out through some large east-facing windows under the gabled part of the great room's ceiling. Putting it there meant it was no longer blocking the sliding glass doors, and I was also getting reasonable speeds when I ran an internet speedtes, about 5 kb/s download and 0.3 kb/s upload, which is better than our old DSL back in Hurley. I've gotten better (as much as 15 kb/s download) but perhaps the signal was degraded by all the wet leaves in its path. This setup isn't intended to be permanent, but it'll be easier to live with until I get the nerve (and the weather) to put something better up in the sugar maple just east of the cabin.
Another little task I did was to replace a circuit breaker for one of the kitchen's circuits with an older 15-amp unit lacking arc-fault technology (which is now evidently required by code). The arc fault tech was causing the circuit breaker to trip whenever Gretchen used an old blender I'd got her at the Tibetan Center thrift store, and, she didn't want to have to go down to the basement (where the only non-arc-fault circuits are) just to make a smoothie.

It being a dreary, rainy day, I decided to drive back to Hurley earlier than I normally do on the last day at the cabin. I left a little after 3:00pm, got stuck in some horrible rain-related traffic between Exit 24 and Exit 23 (the rain never relented), and was home at around 5:30pm.
After chatting for awhile with Gretchen (who had attended Lisa P.'s father's funeral over in Connecticut on Sunday), I went up to the laboratory, fixed myself a drink, took 150 milligrams of diphenhydramine, and watched the latest episode of House of the Dragon.


The dock today in the rain just before I put the canoe away.
I'm done working on the dock's stone abutment, and that's how it ended up. Click to enlarge.


The pile of water-logged wood I've pulled out of the shallows near the big tooth-shaped boulder. Click to enlarge.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?220905

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