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wood-carrying exhaustion
Monday, November 7 2022
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
Today was so beautiful and warm that I wore a teeshirt and shorts when I went to gather a backpack load of firewood some distance down the Stick Trail at noon. The wood I gathered was from a tree I'd tried to cut down some years ago but had chickened out about after cutting most of the way through. It had stood for a long time this way, but eventually a wind blew it down onto another tree. Today I had to cut through the trunk in a couple places to get it to fall all the way down. After that, I bucked the whole tree into pieces, though it was much more wood than I could carry home today. When I weighed my load, it came to about 72 pounds, which isn't that much. But I found carrying it as far as I had deeply exhausting, especially given how little I'd eaten today. After I'd put the wood in the indoor wood rack, I ate two bowls of Special K with Chobani oat milk, which was exactly what my body was craving.
But I didn't feel quite the same for the rest of the day. The exhaustion from carrying that wood lingered, making me feel almost like I had a hangover. I had to relax for a time on the beanbag.
Meanwhile, things were going about as badly in the remote workplace as they had been going on Friday. But I'd been thinking about things this morning before I got up and realized I might actually have to master using the Chrome debugger to get the heart of the mysteries in the ArcGIS Javascript code. This morning I'd done some research and found out how to pretty-print minified Javascript (which is always a problem). That didn't help much, but then I followed some of the Javascript logic and figured out that a server URL really was coming from a field in a database. Realizing this made me more comfortable with the Javascript, which allowed me to play with it more freely. In so doing, I changed one tiny thing, and suddenly the basemaps that hadn't been loading started loading. This was a huge achievement, and I ended the workday on a high note. I took a celebratory bath and shaved my face for the second day in a row.
This evening as I was lying in bed, Gretchen took a call from a friend and proceeded to have a loud conversation about her anxiety before the mid-term election. I've been so anxious about that subject that I've been mostly avoiding the news for the past couple weeks. Having to hear Gretchen talking about it (even through a closed door) was going to put me in the wrong mental state to sleep peacefully. So I got up and went down to the greenhouse to sleep. It was plenty warm down there, and I didn't need the heat. Conditions did cool fairly dramatically overnight, but I was able to make it to daylight with just a single blanket and no consumption of electricity.
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