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mummified bird in the skylight
Tuesday, April 2 2024
Early this afternoon I took a step ladder over to the brick mansion where we rent out four units on Downs Street and met with Matt, the guy renting the top (third floor) apartment. He's had some trouble with leaks now and then, though none of them serious (recently at least). I'd brought the step ladder so I could get up under the skylight that sits at the peak of the center of the slate-shingled roof and figure out two things: how it might be leaking, and how I might replace it, hopefully from the inside. Matt helped me get the ladder up the narrow spiral stairway and seated among the slats supporting his mattress in the loft and then I climbed up to check out the skylight. It's a plastic dome that allowed my head high enough to see the seals and such. They all looked sound, and for the most part they work, though there was that one time back in the fall when a driving rain caused a drenching flood into Matt's bed somehow. I took some measurements and wondered if perhaps I could just saw off the dome, build an openable structure in its place, and do all from the inside. This seemed feasible. I also tried sticking up some velcro tape to hold open some wooden doors designed to, when they're down, block the light from the skylight. But for some reason the sticky tape would not bond to the wood. There was also a dead bird that had been up behind one of those doors since Matt moved in. It appeared to be a chimney swift and was completely mummified. I should've kept it, but instead I threw it in a trash bag.
Back at the house, it was cool rainy day and I didn't have much I needed to do. So I thought about (but didn't implement) a plan for making an eight-bit Arduino serve as an I2C slave to add extra output pins to a NodeMCU, since they don't turn out to have many usable digital outputs. I'm actually starting to run into the limits of those after only using three of them in my cabin's remote control. I have a good basis for such a slave already, an Arduino Mini I'd programmed as an I2C slave to add additional inputs to a Raspberry Pi used as a weather station.
Gretchen was out for most of the afternoon, and soon after returning, she suggested we needed to make a pizza with an extra pizza dough I'd bought at Adam's last week, which, she said, was "not getting any fresher." So I got it out, and it still looked and smelled good. So Gretchen and I collaborated on a pizza, with her making the sauce (using marinara sauce and tomato paste) as well as a tempeh crumble. The results were an amazing pizza, one nearly as good as the pizzas Gretchen makes me on my birthdays.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?240402 feedback
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