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the perils for efts on a rainy driveway
Saturday, June 24 2023
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Gretchen got up early so she could drive to Poughkeepsie, take the train from there to an intimate PETA event in Manhattan, and then return in time to see Aimee Mann at the Bardavon. It was raining when she left and that rain continued almost continuously the rest of the day.
After I was finished with the usual Saturday morning rituals, something compelled me to go down into the basement and add additional 120 volt outlets in one of the basement's several "outlet deserts" (places too far from the nearest outlet). I thought that if I add control electronics near the inverter and battery, I should have an outlet there. And if I have an outlet there, maybe I should have an outlet on the drywall near the Bilco doors on the other side of the battery. The first required conduit, since the wall it would be on was concrete foundation wall, whilte I figured I could thread wire for the other down through the top of he drywall with the assistance of an auxillary hole. I managed to do all these things before realized I lacked a crucial component: a 3/8 inch romex clamp for where a new circuit would be entering the circuit breaker box. I thought maybe I'd have one somewhere, but none of the correct size could be found anywhere in the cabin. This caused me to take the dogs on a drive into Gloversville, where I bought ten such clamps at the TrueValue hardware store. I also got a tape measure for exclusively basement use. What I forgot to get, though, was a number of "old work" outlet boxes for the new outlets that would be in the drywall on either side of the Bilco-door exit.
Driving to and from the cabin in the rain (as Gretchen had done this morning and as I'd done to get to Gloversville and back this afternoon) is not a good idea if one is concerned about the red efts, which spread out on all surfaces (including roadways) when it's wet. I found three that had been crushed to death later this afternoon just on a brief walk between the cabin and the highest point on the driveway several hundred feet away.
While I'd been working on the electrical stuff, I'd had my laptop down there in the basement with me so I could watch streams on YouTube to stay abreast of a crazy situation developing in Russia. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the thuggish leader of a mercenary band called the Wagner Group had become fed up with the higher-ups in the Russian military (whose dirty work they are often assigned, often unofficially). So Prigozhin and his band of mercenaries decided to march on Moscow, and were making rapid progress to the capital seemingly unopposed when, only 120 miles from their destination, Prigozhin decided to accept exile in Belarus instead. This seemed to indicate that Russia is in a much more precarious state than anyone had imagined.
My drive to and from Gloversville had caused me to consume two road beers (Guinness Extra Stouts), and that made the rest of the day something of a mush. I was able to briefly rally and write some .bat scripts to help me with the code generation project I mentioned yesterday; they made it so I no longer had to manually copy files from a canonical directory into a source directory following every reversion of faulty code generated by my in-development code generator.
Late this afternoon I ate some cannabis and then climbed in the bathtub for a bath. While I was in there, the power for the cabin was turned off by the inverter because apparently the battery was getting too low (and clouds had prevented much generation of solar power). So eventually I ran the generator for awhile just so get enough into the battery so the refrigerator would stay cool through the night. By this point I'd drunk so much that I decided it best to go to bed even though there was still a lot of light in the sky.
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