|
|
|
the dilapidated Gulleys Trail
Wednesday, July 3 2024
This morning I found an obvious puddle of dog urine in the laboratory near the bean bag. Fortunately, it hadn't been onto any absorbent materials, which suggests that Charlotte (who is the only suspect) knows better now than to pee on the things she likes to sleep on. I cleaned up the mess, but my cleaning was only getting started. There has been a mildly unpleasant sour smell in the laboratory that I hadn't been able to find the source of. It smelled like cat puke maybe, though it would've had to have been a lot of it to produce such a strong signal. So after cleaning up the piss, I went searching for it, and soon found a pile of dogshit behind the desk that I sit at all day. It was in the northeast corner of the laboratory, beneath the steeply-sloping ceiling-wall with only a couple feet of headroom. It's not a convenient place for a dog to shit, but Charlotte had clearly pooped there multiple times. Cleaning it up would've been a lot easier had Charlotte not pooped into a rat's nest of cables. The upshot of this discovery is that our recently-implemented policy of keeping the front door barricaded at night (which prevents the dogs from prowling the neighborhood) had backfired; Charlotte couldn't make it that long without needing to poop. So it looks like we're going back to letting them come and go any time they like. But I might have to resurrrect the invisible fence (which triggers a shock collar) if she and keeps going into the road and she and Neville go back to barking behind the house where the bitchiest person in the neighborhood lives.
Our cleaner came to clean our house today, which tends to bottle me up in the laboratory for most of the time she is here. But early in her cleaning I went out into the garage and drilled a hole through the wall for the first floor minisplit's condensate hose to run through. (That hose only produces water when the minisplit is cooling, but that might happen more than originally suspected.) Initially I tried to drill through the low concrete wall on which the wooden frame of the wall sits. But my hammer drill wasn't making very good progress, so I ended up going out a few inches higher through the much-easier-to-drill carpentry wall.
Later I tried to get a recently-delivered Heltec Wireless Stick Lite V3 to work. It is another ESP32 board with built-in LoRa, but the documentation is a complete mess and the software Heltec steers you to use is an even messier mix of ad hoc garbage. I probably wouldn't've ordered that board had I seen that it was a Heltec product. An example of what's wrong with the documentation: the pinout diagrams never mention which pins are connected to the LoRa module, though presumably some of them are. There's are schematics, but the all differ, and it's hard to tell which one is correct. I've tried all the pin configurations they mention, but none of them lead to working code.
A little after 3:00pm, I took the dogs for a big walk down the Gulleys Trail into the "the Valley of the Beasts" (a shallow upland valley centered three quarters of a mile south of our house near 41.9220, -74.1027). The reason for going there was a patch of chanterelles I knew about there (which I never found). But the most striking thing about the hike was the state of the Gulleys Trail. The last time I'd been on it was was during the early covid pandemic about three years ago, when I'd use it to get near the bus turnaround so I could heckle the shooters down there with my megaphone. But shooting there has been banned now for years, and I hadn't been on the Gulleys Trail since. A huge blowdown associated with a tornado some years back had dropped a bunch of trees across it, making it hard to use. Further on, where a mountain-goat path descends into the Valley of the Beasts, the trail has suffered from erosion, making the narrow path even harder to walk. Further on, a large fallen hemock blocks the path completely. It was clear that nobody (not even our neighbor Crazy Dave) has used it in years. The only reason traces of it remain are that they are used by the wildlife. By contrast, the Stick Trail is still very usable on all of its length, though there have been a few treefalls across it I should clear.
Back at the house, I mowed the grass to make things more pleasant for a house sitter who would soon be residing temporarily in our house.
This evening Gretchen and I did what we could to use up leftovers in the refrigerator so they wouldn't spoil during our up-coming trip to Rochester. I was on a recreational 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine (as I often am on Wednesdays) so my appetite was a bit suppressed, but I made myself a burrito comprised mostly of leftovers and those chanterelles I've been collecting, and it was pretty good.
Late into the night, I was really enjoying the feeling of staying up late from the combined effects of pseudoephedrine and diphenhydramine. It was a good feeling, though it didn't quite overcome the dread I've been feeling since the Supreme Court cynically decided that Donald Trump has all sorts of immunity that surely would've surprised and horrified the founders of the United States. This combination made me want to stay up indefinitely as I tinkered with the Heltect board. I eventually figured out that part of the problem of getting it to work was the fact that it used an unusual radio module, the SX1262. This seems to be some sort of software-definable radio, as there is code to make it do a lot more than transmit and receive LoRa. I recently took delivery of a Quansheng UV-K5(8) VHF UHF Dual-Band Ham 5W Portable Two-way Radio Walkie Talkie, which I bought specifically because of how cheap ($30) and hackable it is. I've yet to hack it, but tonight I used it to test the range of the new Heltec board as it transmitted text data at 433 MHz. Its transmission produced a clear audio signal (one that overwhelmed the background static and superimposed on it little clicks that must've been the data), so as I left the Heltec transmitting, I walked off down the Farm Road with the walkie talkie, listening for the signal to fade. It eventually dropped away completely about a quarter mile from home, which is pretty good considering the Heltec board has circuitry optimized for 915 MHz, not 433 MHz. While I was out doing that, Diane the Cat must've followed me but failed to keep up, because I encountered her about some distance down the Farm Road as I was heading home. It was after midnight and not a good time for a cat to be so far out in the forest, but nothing got her this time.
Another fall white pine blocking the Gulleys Trail about a half mile from home.
Click to enlarge.
A clump of native sedge doing its best to compete with the invasive Japanese stiltgrass on the Stick Trail.
Click to enlarge.
An annotated trail map showing the patches (marked in thick shades of green) of severly-degraded trail quality on the Gulleys Trail.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?240703 feedback
previous | next |
