leaving for the cabin on the dogs' schedule Friday, August 2 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
This morning when I took Charlotte for the walk that Gretchen would normally take her on, Neville surprised me by coming too (normally he only goes on the morning walk if there are unusual people on it, which in this case I kind of was). I took them to the abandoned go cart track and then hiked home through the scrubby pine-oak forest on the flatlands atop the topmost escarpment. Along the way I saw a huge mound created by the combined effort of hundreds of thousands of large ants with both black and red body parts.
The dogs evidently found some fun project to undertake while they were out, because they didn't return home for another five hours. Meanwhile, Gretchen returned from Westchester, having spent the night in Lynne & Greg's other house down there after attending a Black Pumas show. For a pschedelic R&B band, she'd found the audience surprisingly white. She also had to fend off the physical advances of a drunk guy who was liking what he was seeing. "Pretty good for a 53 year old woman!" I declared.
The plan was to immediately leave for the cabin, but we couldn't do that without the dogs. So we plugged in the Bolt (which needed at least 120 miles of range for the trip, though it had less than 80) and hoped they'd return. When they didn't, I went up the Farm Road on an electric bike calling out for them. That didn't result in anything. So later I basically retraced my walk this morning on an electric bike. It was possible to ride the bike on about 80% of that loop, since our neighbor Tom keeps many trails bikeable so he can ride his mountain bike on them. At the end, though, I had to walk the bike through a short stretch that didn't even have a proper trail, having to carry that heavy battery-powered monster across fallen trees and through pokey walls formed by the dead lower branches of white pines. I called out to the dogs as I went, but again, they failed to materialize.
But then, at about 2:45pm, suddenly Charlotte came panting into the house, followed a short time later by Neville, whose face was filthy from digging. He'd also completely lost one of the claws on one of his hind paws. We hurriedly packed our stuff into the car and started our drive to the Adirondack cabin via the Middleburgh route. By this point we had at least 150 miles of range in the Bolt's battery.
We stopped on the way at Love Shine Tea, the little crypto-vegan café in Schoharie to get cæsar "chik'n" flatbread and various baked goods, including something called a "brookie" (cookie layer on top, brownie layer on the bottom). The flatbread was amazing, though I made a mess of myself trying to eat it while driving.
Unusually, Gretchen didn't want to walk Charlotte the last mile to the cabin. Instead she helped me unload the car and then headed directly to the dock, and ended up swimming during a rain shower. Often she can swim naked in the lake, but despite the rain there were some teenagers hanging out on or near Pyotr's dock. She said swimming in the rain was "magical." She was particularly struck by how slowly the raindrops seemed to descend towards her as she lay on her back watching them fall.
Meanwhile, I'd been building out the details of the permission system that would allow non-superusers to run reports on my ESP8266 Remote Control system. Actual writing of such reports can only be done by superusers, though, because a report can be written to do anything a report-writer wants to the database.
The bluestone globe our neighbor Georges (at the end of the Farm Road) finished during covid.
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In the mid-distance.
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That's no moon.
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The big ant mound. It's about three feet across.
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