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large fallen trees are actually rare
Saturday, June 15 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
After drinking my usual french press of coffee and absorbing the latest news from my usual web haunts, I had it in mind to do some work on my remote controller software. I wanted to make it so it would be easy to create a configuration string for a series of sensors and use that to produce a single row of data in my weather_data table, making it possible for an ESP8266 running my code to serve as a weather station, logging all the weather data in each record. The way things had been was that all such data could be recorded, but each sensor would get its own row, many of the columns of which would end up being null. I had a way to deal with this, but it was imperfect. What I really needed was a function that could replace the first pipe in a delimited string with another delimited string, a task I would eventually outsource to ChatGPT. (Sure, I could've done it myself, but now I routinely have ChatGPT perform such dull tasks.)
But then I noticed that both the dogs were done. Where could they be? After an hour or two I really began to worry. Perhaps they'd wandered into the redneck camp and been won over to their side with the simple bribe of real meat. Not knowing what else to do, I got in the Bolt and drove west on Woodworth Lake Road. As I passed the redneck camp, I saw a few people sitting around on camp chairs there, but I didn't see any dogs. I continued out to a little beyond the gate, where I found some nice rocks in the ditch to bring back for my various rock-based projects. I then drove down to near the public dock, but turned around at the top and headed back to the cabin without taking the risk of driving down the steep road down to the lake.
Eventually, to my great relief, the dogs returned. There was no telling what they'd been doing. But they weren't injured and, with exception of some green smudges on Neville, they weren't even dirty.
With my attention fully turned to my remote controller software, I quickly discovered that I'd somehow failed to put the latest copy of the code on Github. I could get the latest copy of the backend off my server, but there was no way to reach out and get the latest version of the code that runs on an ESP8266. So I was forced to reconstruct that.
Since some of my changes (particularly to a naming convention of variables in the config.c file) would break all my existing devices running the software, I decided to take the opportunity to shuffle around where some items in some of the delimited strings fell. I wanted to keep all the sensor data values together and not have them be intercut with non-sensor data, as would be the case should I need to add any. This made me move all possible sensor data values into one block of the delimited string, with four additional ones at the end for future expansion. Only then did the delimited string contain non-sensor data.
With all that working pretty well, I fetched a beer (a Boatswain Double IPA from Trader Joe's — it's strong and cheap, though not very good) from the refrigerator, grabbed my big Kobalt electric chainsaw, and headed down to the dock, soon to be joined by Charlotte and Neville. I amused myself for a little while by dragging a powerful magnet along the lake bottom to see if I could dredge up any treasure as I paddled north of our dock, along the rocky islands at the entrance to the outflow bay, and then diagonally back to the dock. The only thing I found doing this was a quarter inch of rusted steel wire, probably the remains of a fish hook, near one of the rocky islands.
When I was done being at the dock, I hiked straight up the hill, which would be a great direction for the shortest possible path back to the cabin to run. But this time I was carrying my chainsaw not to clear the trail but to cut a chunk out of a nice fallen tree should I encounter one. I'd been working under the idea that the woods is full of big fallen trees, since one such tree fell across the dock trail a couple years ago (and if one would fall there, many must've fallen in the forest more generally). But I didn't really find any such trees. There were some smaller fallen trees, nearly all of them white ashes killed by the emerald ash borer. But none of these trees were anywhere near as large as the sugar maple I'd recently used as the source wood for that rustic stool I made. Eventually I found a fairly large fallen white ash. It wasn't as big as the sugar maple, so any stools made from it will be smaller. But I was interested to see how white ash is in such an application. Unfortunately, my chainsaw (whose blade seems to dull quickly when used for milling) ran out of juice before I could even cut out a single block.
Late this afternoon I began work redoing the terrain on the east end of the north basement wall. There had been serious erosion here earlier in the spring when the gutter downspout got blocked and water spilled over the sides of the gutters and fell two stories onto the sandy, mostly unvegetated ground. I'd set up elaborate anti-erosion structures made of leaves and sticks downhill from where this happened, but they were easily overwhelmed by such energetic water, and several five-gallon-buckets-worth of sand ended up in a depression in the woods just below the building site. The downspout blockage has been removed and the is unlikely to be such flooding until the leaves fall from the trees, but I wanted to make the landscape more resilient to such incidents. With that in mind, I intended to build a wall of stacked local stones running north five or six feet from the cabin's northeast corner, and I intended to put landscape fabric directly uphill from this wall. Before doing any of this, though, I decided to dig all the way down to nearly the depth of the cabin's footings near the wall so that I could lay down more of a skirt of horizontal styrofoam I'd been installing in other sectors near the northeast corner, where I've removed some of the soil that the cabin was designed to have there. Without that soil, frost can reach greater depths, so the idea with horizontal styrofoam is that cold coming from above encounters a barrier, forcing it to take a longer trip on its way to the foundation. If you make the horizontal barrier wide enough, ice coming from the sides cannot reach whatever you are worried it might reach. In this case I extended the skirt in a quarter-circle sector northwest of the northeast corner with a radius of about three feet. On its east side, it somewhat overlapped some existing styrofoam I'd installed at that same level on the north end of the east wall. Since all of this ended up being at least two feet below grade, it means cold bypassing this skirt will have to travel a minimum of four feet underground, which is the normal minimum footing depth in the Adirondack climate. Once I had the styrofoam in place, I covered it with a sheet of plastic so it wouldn't jump around and open up voids as I shoveled sand on top of it. Styrofoam doesn't seem like the stuff of firm foundations, particularly not the packing kind that contains weird voids for products being shipped (which some of this styrofoam was). But once I had it buried beneath a couple feet of packed sand, the ground felt as solid as the undisturbed soil. I then began building a stone wall a little below the finished grade, though I laid down the stones directly on the sand. (Sand has all kinds of drawbacks, but it's an especially good bedding material when setting stones.) I continued working until the biting insects that come out after dusk (when the dragonflies go to sleep?) started making me miserable. I should note that my soundtrack for most of my work today was some old music from 2006 by a band I'd liked back then called The Standard (especially from their album Wire Post to Wire). Their music has a darkness to it from their use of weird musical keys, though the frantic bleating of the vocalist is not to everyone's taste. Listening to it much for the first time in over fifteen years, it reminded me how I was back in the mid 2000s. It actually conjured up some of the financial uncertainty that I remember having back then.
This evening I ate some cannabis and then continued work on my remote control system until my the cannabis made it so my brain couldn't do the required thinking. At that point I took a nice hot bath (which felt good in this somewhat unseasonably-cold weather) and then went to bed.
Neville on the dock with one of our kayaks. Yes, we bought these kayaks after seeing them mentioned on Shark Tank. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte and Neville patiently waiting for me on the dock. Click to enlarge.
A tiger swallowtail on what I believe is dianthus (from a flower seed pack Gretchen broadcast two years ago). Click to enlarge.
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