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woodchucks are only a menace to gardens Sunday, June 23 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Since I'd taken a bunch of diphenhydramine and no longer had to worry about Neville spending the night in the woods, I slept well last night. This morning at some point I got up and went upstairs to join Gretchen in that other bed, where I slept some more. By the time we finally got up, it was 10:30am and the dogs were out on the front stoop sunning themselves. The weather was so pleasant outside that we ended up playing our collaborative Spelling Bee out in the screened-in porch.
Not long after that, we walked with the dogs over to Ibrahim's A-frame to get a tour of the all the latest construction there. It's slow going, but they're making progress, and result really will be a marvel. There's lots of fun touches like pocket doors on both bathrooms and a yoga loft in the topmost level beneath the sharply-peaked roof ridge, a fourth floor (if you consider the basement a first floor). Meanwhile the kids were outside trying to play with the dogs, who soon got bored with that and started heading for our cabin back through the woods. After we'd gotten a fairly comprehensive tour (but not of the basement), Ibrahim and family all walked with us back to our cabin, where we showed off what it ended up looking like. Ibrahim had seen it after it was mostly complete in the winter of early 2022 (when he'd helped us wrestle a couch into the upstairs bedroom), but the last time his wife had been there, there was no proper entrance and no flooring in place. The kids were hungry, so Gretchen put out vegan cheese and crackers, which was a little too adult for them. More to their liking were vegan pizza balls made of some kind of foamed carbohydrate. They're tasty, but they're mostly air. We gave a whole tour, including the basement, something that reminded us how amazing our cabin ended up being. Ibrahim works in information technology, so for once I had someone who could understand what I was talking about as I explained my remote control and weather monitoring system. Ibrahim wanted to know the cabin got the data, so I explained how it polls the backend every few seconds to get the state that the relays need to take and then sets them accordingly. And as it does so, it sends the data from the weather sensors.
After I our visitors left, Gretchen went down to the lake in hopes of swimming down there, but the weather was threatening rain, so she ended up not swimming. Meanwhile I was down in the basement capturing more data transmitted by the SolArk inverter to its WiFi dongle. As I did so, took screen grabs of the freshest copy of the data SolArk was displaying for that inverter on its data display page. I was hoping to be able to later go through the raw data and find the byte values corresponding to the displayed data so that I can eventually capture the data directly from the inverter, completely bypassing the SolArk cloud. That would make it possible for my automation system to continue to functioning without even having a working connection to the internet (though this would require moving the decisionmaking code off my Apache server and onto an ESP8266 (or perhaps some other local device).
While I was down in the basement, I also exposed more of the plumbing that runs between the joists overhead. Most of those pipes had been buried in insulation. But now that the basement is so well insulated that it doesn't freeze, it makes more sense to have those pipes exposed to the basement air and not insulated from it. Doing this not only would help prevent water from freezing in them in the winter time, but it also helps me see where they run and branch. Ultimately I would like to take small parts of the plumbing system out of winterization when I come visit the cabin in the winter time, allowing me to wash things and use a toilet. But to do that, I need to see how all the supply pipes are linked together.
I've been running a fan to blow outside air into the basement whenever the outdoors is warmer than 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and this has gradually warmed the basement to a temperature of about 64 degrees. The downside of doing this, though, is that it's caused a lot of condensation to precipitate out on surfaces. I was noticing this condensation was actually making the glass-wool side of the inter-joist insulation overhead wet to the touch. There was also enough water condensing on the newly-exposed cold water lines that they were dripping, sometimes onto things that I would rather water not get into (such as the couch I have down there). I'm also seeing beads of water forming at the bottom of the foundation walls, where the coolness of the deep-soil thermal mass is essentially inexhaustible.
In the early mid-afternoon, I took a beer down to the lake and spent some time just floating off the dock on an innertube. I had the lake all to myself and it was wonderful.
A little after 3:30pm, Gretchen and I began our drive back to Hurley. But on the way we took a detour to visit our friends Lynne and Greg at their house on Hill 99. Lynne and Greg will soon be going to South Africa and, since covid is going around again, they didn't want to risk getting sick by dining in a restaurant. So we'd all ordered food to go from the Garden Café, and Greg had picked it all up and taken it back to their place. We Greg mixed himself and me two drinks containing some high-end bourbon, and we all sat in their massive dining room eating at their massive dinner table. It was so big that one of us could've had covid and the others wouldn't have to worry about being exposed. While we ate, the dinner conversation was mostly about books and movies, with an emphasis on those that touched on the subject of South Africa. (One of my favorite South-Africa-set movies is District 9, though I couldn't think of its name at the time. Meanwhile a family of four woodchuks were coming out of a hole under the corner of a deck and being adorable (I'd put the dogs back in the car for some reason). Lynne of course said that some contractor had said that the woodchucks would imperil her foundation and perhaps kill her grass, and he had a five thousand dollar solution for her. (This is a typical falsehood told to wealthy city-slickers, the kind of people likely to defer to a contractor about something as mysterious for them as wildlife. I assured Lynne that woodchucks are no danger to anything except a garden, something Lynne and Greg do not have. They rent this house out to visitors who will happily spend more than $20,000/month, an income stream big enough that it had me wondering about maybe renting out the Adirondack cabin. (But on second thought, the idea of randos besmirching that magical place is horrifying).
After dinner, we all went to the screened-in porch to resume our conversation. The reason the dogs hadn't been let into the house was that Lynned has serious dog allergies. But there was enough air in the screened-in porch for her to allow the dogs to hang out with us there. Later we got a tour of the upstairs, which has its own deck on top of a flat roof that covered with large puddles that couldn't drain. There were a good number of Greg's landscape paintings in acrylic or pastel on the wall. I particularly liked a black-and white painting of Coopers Lake.

My white-ash stool in front of the woodstove in the cabin. Click to enlarge.

I'm gluing a slip of wood to the bottom of the shortest leg so it won't wobble. Click to enlarge.

One of the woodchucks at the entrance to the hole going under Lynne & Greg's deck. Click to enlarge.

A different angle. Click to enlarge.

Charlotte in Lynne & Greg's indoor deck. Click to enlarge.

Neville in Lynne & Greg's indoor deck. Click to enlarge.
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