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sleeping in the laboratory
Sunday, November 27 2022
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Given all I'd drank last night, which the cannabis never really kicked in to quell, I was worried when I awoke during the night about the possibility of a hangover. But it turned out my problem was worse than that. I now had a cold, which I could feel with every phlegmy swallow through my swollen, slightly-painful throat. Back on Monday, I'd had a nascent sore throat manifesting on the gums around my lower left wisdom tooth. But now it had spread to my whole throat. I also had a cough, which I'd first detected last night. It was deep in my lungs, making them itch on the inside. Deep coughing is painful, and the payoff in dislodged phelgm was modest at best. I figured this was probably the same thing Gretchen has had off and on now for several months. It's not covid, but it's not a conventional cold either.
I managed to scrape myself out of bed somewhat late, make myself a french press of coffee, and played the Spelling Bee for awhile. When I eventually became hungry, I had no interest in yesterday's pasta, particularly with stuffing. Instead I made myself, over the course of an hour or so, four small avocado, lettuce, onion and Grey Poupon sandwiches on sourdough bread. Given my hangover and mystery illness, this was exactly what I wanted to be eating.
Eventually I found it in me to go out with the big chainsaw (which I'd brought to the Adirondacks) and cut down a medium-sized dead white ash a little west of the driveway a couple hundred feet from the cabin. After being bucked and split, it ended up being enough wood to fill the indoor woodrack to the limits of what it can hold. There was some snow on the ground both where I cut it and where I split it, but I managed to avoid bringing much into the cabin. A good technique to keep snow off logs being split is to split them on a snow-free surface, such as another unsplit log. Then, if the pieces land in the snow, their impact will be soft and not much snow will stick to the wood and what little does can easily be knocked off. With this in mind, I've been looking for a large piece of elm to use as a splitting block, since elm is impossible to split.
I don't always get my weather-related timing right, but this time I did. I'd gathered my last piece of firewood just before a cold rain began to fall.
One chore I've been meaning to do for months now is to figure out a better way to log data from the SolArk inverter. That data can be viewed (in snapshots ten minutes apart) on a Chinese site called PowerView, which doesn't provide any JSON interface to make it easier for me to write code to do things based on things such as the battery being full, the sun being out, or the battery nearing some low threshold. I'd read that there are ways to get this data using a ModBus adapter plugged into one of the SolArk's several digital interfaces. So today I tried my luck at logging this data using a ModBus adapter, a modified ethernet cable (to plug into the SolArk), and a diagnostics program called ModPoll. I couldn't really tell what ModPoll was for and why it needed an IP address (the connection is used appeared to be some sort of serial port), but I tried some of the examples, non of which worked. And when I switched the slave drop number from "00" to "01," the inverter through an error and quit supplying power to the cabin, which spooked me enough that I didn't want to do any more experimentation for the time being. Clearly I need to read more about this stuff.
I then cleaned up and packed up the cabin, taking all the indoor plants this time (several small succulents and an enormous tomato plant) as another step towards eventually winterizing the place. I wasn't feeling too great, but I was good enough to drive. Unfortunately, the rain was now a downpour and would make driving that much more miserable. And, do to last night's overindulgence and my nascent illness, I would be denying myself road beers. The rain let up and driving improved south of Albany, but then I hit a patch of slow traffic near an auto accident a little north of Catskill.
When I got home, Gretchen was about to go out to see a movie with Kate. She said that, given my illness, I should go straight to bed. I tried being in bed for awhle, but Oscar (who is always affection-starved when I return from the cabin) insisted on being on my belly and chest. Normally I can indulge him when he places these restrictions on my movements. But I was sick and I had no patience for cat stuff. I eventually dragged a blanket into the laboratory, shut the door behind me, and slept on the bean bag. I think this was the first time I'd ever slept in the laboratory in the more than 20 years I've had it as my main work space.
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