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hard April frost
Sunday, April 21 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Initially there was a little sun this morning, enough to keep me from ever making a fire in the woodstove (even though indoor temperatures were in the 50s). Meanwhile outside, there'd been a hard frost last night, freezing the water in a grill Gretchen had put outside (because of how it smelled).
At some point I returned to the keyboard matrix on that old Canon calculator. I wondered if somehow that old calculator chip was messing with signals from the ESP8266 even though I wasn't actually supplying it with power. (I know of examples of low-power electronics somehow getting the electricity they need to run just from digital signals arriving on their non-power pins.) So I cut all the traces on the calculator's printed circuit board just before they arrived at the surface-mount printed circuit. Then, amazingly, when I tested the keyboard matrix, I was now finding that a little over half the keys were working, and working very reliably. I wasn't sure why the other keys weren't working, since there wasn't any consistent issue (there was no one row or column that had no working keys). So I tabled that issue for the time being. Since I only need three buttons to build my local remote, if I use that old Canon calculator keyboard for something, it will be something that demands more buttons.
At some point, I went on another hike down the nascent Lake Edward Trail and managed to find yet more indications of the alignment I'd laid out less than a year ago. These got me pretty far into a tract of entirely deciduous woods, far from the hemlock groves at the bottoms of valleys, near the split rock, or the high cliffs. The landscape was drier, and there was less underbrush, meaning most of the work of marking the trail consisted of laying sticks end to end, the method I used to mark the Stick Trail over twenty years ago. But for whatever reason, sticks suitable for this purpose are surprisingly uncommon.
After cleaning up the cabin and figuring out what food needed to go back to Hurley, I began my drive back to the Catskills at around 3:00pm. I started with 145 miles of range, and again I only needed 20 of those miles to get to Middleburgh. When I left the cabin, it was 41 degrees Fahrenheit, and temperatures rose to as high as 47 degrees in the Mohawk and Schoharie Valleys and fell to as low as 43 degrees in the Charleston highlands. Back in Hurley, temperatures were at around 53 degrees.
Meanwhile, Gretchen had begun another week of volunteer work for the NY Abortion Access Fund, this time handling calls for women needing abortion who were coming from out of state. This demographic was a smaller one than the "outside NYC" demographic she'd worked with a couple months ago, so she was having a relatively stress-free day.
After Jeopardy!, I was feeling sleepy, so I took a rare early-evening nap. I woke up a little after 9:00pm and ended up staying up until around 1:00am tinkering with LCD displays having I2C interfacing backpacks. These particular backpacks were different from the kind sold by Adafruit, which was why the Adafruit library wasn't working with them at all. Once I figured out I needed to use the YwRobot library, things started working for me. (I was on diphenhydramine at the time, and I find that it makes me very cranky, though at least I am aware enough of this crankiness that I can do something to combat it, particularly when interacting with Gretchen.)
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