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fast drive on the scenic route
Tuesday, July 9 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I made myself a proper french press of coffee this morning and then we collaboratively played Spelling Bee out in the screened-in porch just like yesterday. And then Gretchen headed off to the dock and I went down to the basement to work more on the software for my SolArk copilot. My goals now were more modest; I just wanted a system that would regularly send inverter data to the backend and also send the big ASCII-coded hexadecimal data packet so I could examine it during various scenarios back in Hurley to try to find other embedded data of interest.
Once I got that working to my satisfaction, I decided to change gears and work more proactively at finding the alignment for a new, straighter trail from the cabin down to the dock. This trail would leave from near the southeast corner of the building site and go east-north-east (a little south of true magnetic east) in a beeline for the dock, making adjustments here and there along the way to avoid rugged landforms and swamps. To help me with this, I brought both a compass and a phone (running CalTop with the correct alignment already drawn in as a bearing). All I had to do was plot my hike and try my best to conform to that line as the hike progressed. To clear the path and make a walkable trail, also brought the big 18 inch Kobalt electric chainsaw. But of course it decided to misbehave early in my trailblazing, experiencing a chain derailment that forced me to go get a wrench and a screwdriver. But once I had the chainsaw working okay, I made rapid progress, though the landscape seemed to want me to go a little south of the straightest possible line. My chainsaw's battery was exhausted somewhere near the north end of the Backwards-Facing Cliff Ravine, so I just left the chainsaw at the end of the trail so far and walkd down to the dock. The 970 foot trail was already more than half complete.
Down at the dock, I was so hot that I needed a more immersive experience when I got in the water. So I got out one of the two "water hammocks," the things comprised of two floaters with a net between them. You lie on the net with one of the floaters under your knees and the other behind your head and it's very relaxing. I'd brought a beer of course, though by then it wasn't very cold any more. As I paddled about off the dock, I held the beer between my knees. I ended up landing a couple hundred feet north of the dock where there are some rocks that make it relatively easy to get out of the lake (though the water was low and initially I slipped and fell after incautiously stepping on a slippery outcrop).
We started our drive back to Hurley a little before 3:00pm, and I drove very quickly on the scenic route through Middleburgh, getting us home in almost exactly two hours. That route usually takes about two hours and twenty minutes to drive.
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Back at the house, conditions were so hot that I immediately began running the air conditioning in the laboratory. There was also a sound I hadn't heard in awhile: someone with a very large gun and what was probably a bump stock (thanks, Supreme Court!) blasting away down the hill in Catskill State Park. I'd seen a car pulled over in a place a little below the permanently-blocked (with large chunks of bluestone) bus turnaround. It seemes someone went there to go shooting and was going to shoot no matter what the signs said.
At the cabin yesterday, Gretchen had shown me that her poetry website was forwarding to a shady ecommerce page that sells penis pills (are people looking for poetry websites secretly looking for sildenafil?), and at the time it seemed like the best way to solve the problem was to get https working on her website, something I have never done for my personal sites. An SSL certificate from Godaddy cost $70, but I found I could buy one for as cheap as $19, and it wasn't even much of a headache to install. [Later I discovered that some nefarious actor had somehow managed to put an .htaccess file in the root of Gretchen's site. I'm not sure what security vulnerability makes this possible, but a solution might be to just have a script automatically delete .htaccess every time one is found.]
Meanwhile, there are now at least two other people besides me playing my version of Spelling Bee, and those other people are good. So I decided to add a new feature: anyone who gets to the status of queen bee (that is, if they find all the words) then they can see the state of the game for everyone else playing. This would be both fun and informative.
While I was doing that, Gretchen was involved in along video-based orientation for the rehab center where our friend Anna is now a resident. Such orientation is required before Gretchen can visit. As I walked past, I looked at the other people in the orientation, and they were mostly white middle-aged women with the same mousey-brown hair forming an upside-down U around their faces.
The dock today. Gretchen is sitting in the chair on the left.
Click to enlarge.
Yellow loosestrife (which might be the same as "swamp rocket"), a lovely native plant near the dock.
Click to enlarge.
Tall meadow rue, a plant I remember from my 20s in Ohio and Virginia, near the dock. It's another native plant.
Click to enlarge.
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