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a ladder I couldn't take
Thursday, July 11 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
Gilly, our friend from Portland, would be coming for a visit starting tomorrow, and since Gretchen knew it would be a socially exhausting weekend, I opted to give her some alone time by going up to the cabin late this morning. Gretchen had only had a couple days to be with the dogs since we got back from our trip to Rochester, so she wanted me to leave them with her. Since Gretchen would be driving one of the cars to the cabin later and I would be driving one today, I took the Subaru Forester, which would allow me to carry some payloads that are impossible in the Chevy Bolt. Some of those payloads needed to be hauled from Hurley to the cabin, so I spent some time loading them up once it was clear I would be driving to the cabin today. This included four two foot by eight foot sheets of one inch tongue & groove styrofoam I'd had in the greenhouse downstairs for about a decade for a project I never even started (a mechanized lid for the south-facing glass to better retain heat at night), which I want to use to further insulate underneath the soil beneath the cabin's east deck. There was also a sort of half bookshelf that Gretchen thought we could put in the cabin's upstairs bedroom. (It dates back to Gretchen's apartment in Brooklyn, though I've had to repair it using screws that have ruined its ability to collapse into a flat object.) I also wanted to take a ladder that had originally been part of a hunter's stand in the nearby forest. Subsequently I'd used that ladder to access a platform I'd built up in a white pine on our septic mound back when growing marijuana was illegal and I needed a secret place to do it. When I went to get the ladder today, it was ensnared in some vines that grown through it over the years. I tried yanking it free of these vines, but then heard an ominous roaring sound. I then looked up more carefully and saw a grey paper globe about the size of a bowling ball beneath the platform I'd once grown pot on. The roar was the sound of angry hornets pouring out of it like tie fighters from the Death Star. I didn't wait around once I comprehended what was happening and immediately ran to the house, entering through sliding glass doors of the basement master guestroom.
Another thing I wanted to take to the Adirondacks was a bunch of broad-leaf sedge, a plant I recently became aware of on the bluffs above the Stick Trail (and initially assumed was some sort of lily). I took a five gallon bucket a little ways into the forest and managed to fill it all, usually from plants very close to the top edge of various escarpments.
As for the bulky stuff like the bookshelf and the styrofoam, I strapped it all down to the roof rack, doing my best to twist the straps so as to avoid too much road noise (which happens when straps act like the reeds in a woodwind instrument). Even so, there was a fair amount of humming on the drive up to the cabin via the Middleburgh route. I stopped, as I usually do, at the Hannaford in Cairo to get things like beer, sourdough bread, tofu, tempeh, mushrooms, guacamole, and a frozen vegan pizza. I also went to the nearby liquor store to get a half gallon of gin.
Near the end of my drive, I stopped a couple times to pick up rocks from along the side of Woodworth Lake Road for one of my wall-building projects.
At the cabin, I immediately planted all the broad-leaf sedge on the east end of the north side of the cabin, the one on our building site that is still somewhat barren of vegetation. Since this plant tolerates shade and drought, this seemed like a good place for it (though Fulton County is one of the few counties in New York where broad-leaf sedge isn't normally found).
Next I turned my attention to the new, more direct trail from the cabin down to the dock. Armed with the big Kobalt chainsaw with a fresh battery, it didn't take me long to clear the rest of the path and line most of at least one side of it with sticks (the trail-marking technique that gives the Stick Trail its name). I'd brought a beer with me of course and drank it while rafting off the dock the way I like to do.
Back at the cabin, I spent a fair amount of time poring over the data coming out of the SolArk Copilot, which I've had logging its packets to the server. Yesterday while examining those packets, I'd found a strong candidate for a pair of bytes indicating the battery voltage. This afternoon I confirmed that they were indeed the voltage, though one measured in centivolts (if you divide by 100, you get volts). The only other data I really wanted beyond that was the voltages coming from one or both solar panel strings, mostly so I could determine how sunny it was even when the battery is full. (Up until it is full, one could use solar power as a proxy for this value, but once the battery is full, it is no longer useful for that, since after that the solar power value becomes whatever power the cabin can somehow use, which is usually much less than what the panels could be providing.) I was doing a lot of this tinkering in the basement, gradually adding in code from the ESP8266s that perform remote control and weather monitoring duties. As I was doing this, I kept encountering problems that would make the copilot ground to a halt. So I retreated somewhat from what I was working on so I could do something I like to do when I'm by myself at the cabin: eat cannabis, take a bath, and drink a lot of booze.
Woodworth Lake today.
Click to enlarge.
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