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local remote is working
Sunday, April 28 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I was still drinking my coffee when I returned to work on my local-remote, the work I'd had to abandon last night due to the effects of diphenhydramine. In short order, I added weather data to the ESP8266-served web page where device features can be turned on and off. Then I added the ability to read such weather data to the local remote itself. With a little tinkering, I soon had a functioning mode button that could switch instantly from providing control of device features to showing weather data. Since the weather data can come from a different ESP8266 from the one controlling device features, it allows the local remote to, for the first time, consolidate data viewing and control of multiple devices.
I now had a device simple enough to allow anyone to control the various cabin systems. Now all I needed to do was package it up into something other than three or four boards with colorful interconnecting ribbon cables. I found a double-size grey PVC junction box to be about the perfect size. I just needed to modify it a little, using a Dremel-like tool to cut down the posts where screws normally go so that they'd be deeper in the box and at a good level to support my four-button keyboard. I would've done more work on this, but none of the screw holes in the electronics matched up with any of the ones in the PVC box, and I found that the only PVC cement in cabin had gone bad (so I couldn't add posts to the box either). Still, I had a consolidated control unit I could place on the table in the southeast corner of the cabin's great room.
With that project in a nice state of completion, I took the dogs for another walk down the nascent Lake Edward Trail. [REDACTED]
Back at the cabin, the weather had become absolutely gorgeous, with temperatures reaching 70 degree Fahrenheit and glorious sun shining down. I managed to charge the Chevy Bolt all the way to a range of 200 miles before high clouds drifted in and ruined the sun. At around that time, Charlotte and I walked down to Woodworth Lake, the first time I'd been there in a couple weeks. When I got down there, I saw a fairly substantial flock of small ducks way out on the water. They had substantial white on them, so they were probably buffleheads. While Charlotte was off snorting around, I took a kayak out on the water all the way to the beaver dam at the lake's outflow. Along the way, I scared up a pair of mallard. Then I saw a beautifu kingfisher in a tree above the small beaver pond just downstream from the lake. Then I heard a rustling on the shore and saw a delightful little red squirrel foraging among the leaves. Finally, as I passed the rocky islands in the mouth of the outflow bay, a beaver made a dramatic splash and I tried to take some photos.
It started to rain on the walk back to the cabin. Not unexpectedly, Charlotte had beat me home.
When the rain eased up a little, I used the big Kobalt electric chainsaw to cut up more of a white ash that had fallen across the trail not far below the stone retaining wall. (While there, I saw my first Adirondack red eft of the year.) When I was done with that and went to put the chainsaw in the back of the Bolt to take back to Hurley, I noticed it was now missing the cap on its oil reserves. (These chainsaws are not built for the brutal life I give them; anything not bolted down — such as the chain wrench — quickly falls off and gets lost. But I wasn't willing to give up on that oil cap. I went looking down below the retaining wall, and when I couldn't find it there, I went looking southeast of the cabin, where I'd been cutting wood last weekend. It was only after returning to below the retaining wall and looking a little further down the trail to where the cap might've rolled that I saw the little fucker.
After giving the cabin an unusually good cleaning, I loaded up the dogs and started driving back to Hurley at a little before 5:00pm.
Back in Hurley, Gretchen was going through menus to plan meals for some guests from the United Kingdom who will be coming later this week. We chatted about our respective weekends, which, for Gretchen, had included a fair amount of last-minute abortion access work. Gretchen also said that Alan had come over for a visit. The last time I'd talked about Jeff and Alana, they'd just had a bunch of mold remediation done that their homeowners' insurance had unexpectedly refused to cover. Gretchen then talked to her favorite realtor who suggested a lawyer, and this led to more talks. Happily the crisis ended when the insurance company agreed to pay. But the the kicker of this story was how much the remediation had cost. I was thinking maybe twelve thousand dollars, but no! According to Gretchen, it was sixty five thousand dollars, a number that stunned me. I couldn't think of any scenario where mold remediation would cost so much, so the whole thing must be some sort of racket. Perhaps the insurance people called their bluff and are paying a much lower amount, but who knows.
It being near the end of Passover, Gretchen make potato pancakes from a pancake mix, and they were surprising good. I ate mine with spaghetti, tofu, mushrooms, and cooked broccoli, to which I added a little gochujang sauce.
Late this evening, Gretchen and I had to give Charlotte a bath because she'd rolled in something disgusting. Gretchen thought it was probably a dead animal. This was the first time I'd ever known Charlotte to roll in anything.
Yes, those appear to be bufflehead ducks, which only migrate through on their way to the boreal forests of Canada.
Click to enlarge.
My new haircut! I don't know what that crap on my lips is. Probably coffee.
Click to enlarge.
A delightful red squirrel near the lake's outflow beaver dam.
Click to enlarge.
I thought this hemlock stick that beavers had stripped of its bark would make a useful walking or poking stick.
Click to enlarge.
A beaver near the rocky islands separating the main part of the lake from the outflow bay.
Click to enlarge.
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