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nightime drive from the land of drifting snow
Sunday, January 5 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I woke up at around 6:00am this morning when it was still dark outside and, not really knowing what time it was, made myself a glass of scotch and added some wood to the fire. By then the temperature in the cabin was up to about 45 degrees Fahrenheit. I then climbed back under the covers and fell asleep. When I next awoke, it was nearly 11:00am. The light of day revealed the outdoors to be a spectacle of white, with all the trees painted white on their northwest sides. Not much snow had fallen overnight, and not much fell throughout the day. But I hadn't checked the weather too carefully and was a little worried that if a large amount of snow were to fall, I might not be able to leave until a guy came through to plow Woodworth Lake Road.
It took awhile to get into gear to do the things I'd come to the cabin to do. (It was easier being under the blankets and watching the YouTube Catfished channel.) Eventually, though, I stared cutting big fat six gauge wires to length and crimping terminals on their ends so I could redo the system that switches in a big battery onto the generator's starter circuit. I wanted to add an additional battery (that lawn mower one I'd bought a couple days ago) to power the SolArk Co-pilot and East Basement Controller. But I wanted to be able to switch in that big marine battery to provide additional power to either the generator starter circuit, the new controller power system, or both at the same time. I'd gotten big 200 amp contactors for this switching that I knew from experience could be driven from a single pin on a ULN2003, and these would be replacing the doubled 30 amp relay I had been using. Since the new contactors had beefy terminal bolts, two of which needed to connect to one another, I hammered flat a section of copper pipe and drilled holes through it with the correct 5/8 inch spacing so that the two relays could be joined by a thick conductor where the wire to the big marine battery attached.
Everything was going great until I wanted to bolt wires onto the new lawn mower battery. I'd bought various nut and bolt assortments to help with tasks like this, but when I tried to use them, I realized that the nut assortment I'd bought was all imperial, whereas the bolt assortment was all metric. At this point in the day I was drying out wet firewood on the stove top, and this mismatch was taking up so much of my time that I worried the unsupervised wood would start smoking and make the cabin air unbreathable while I distracted — a little disaster caused by unit incompatibility. Ultimately I was able to bolt the wires to the battery using comically-long carriage bolts that I'd originally bought when I was building the dock.
Next I turned my attention to adding INA219 voltage sensor devices to some of my controllers, particularly the ones that use backup batteries. The highest priority was to add one to the Hotspot Watchdog, which had actually switched off yesterday afternoon after the marine battery powering it fell below nine volts or so. In so doing, I also had to upgrade its firmware with all the changes I'd been working on for the past couple months. This wasn't without its hiccups, and to get more than two I2C devices communicating with my ESP8266, I had to add an I2C hub (which is basically just a Y-connector for a set of four pins). Along the way, I discovered that the weather sensor on that particular ESP8266 was using an unusual I2C address.
Next I upgraded the ESP8266 that monitors outdoor weather on the screened-in porch. For that, I wanted to add a USB lithium battery so it could function during power outages. I also wanted to take advantage of a feature where it can sleep for some number of seconds between data polls, thus saving lots of power. That feature wasn't perfectly debugged, though, and I had to make sure it got confirmation that the data sent to the server was received before it went to sleep. (Under the new authentication regime, some data polls fail because they happen too slowly, and it needed to try again when that happened.) Once I'd fixed all the bugs detected in this implementation, I was sure to fix the firmware on the Hotspot Watchdog as well, even though I'd thought I was done with it.
After that, the update of the firmware for the East Basement Controller went quickly, since I wasn't putting a INA219 voltage sensor on that. Finally, I added an INA219 to the SolArk Co-pilot, which runs a somewhat different version of the firmware from all the other ESP8266s, since its main job is to capture serial data from the SolArk inverter. I got the new firmware working on the SolArk Co-pilot without much problem at all, even though I hadn't had a proper way to debug it as I was building out the improvements away from the inverter. The only little oopsie was that I'd forgotten to include a function call to update the voltage and amperage values from the INA219 being sent to the backend. But once I included that code, it no longer was able to monitor the SolArk serial cable, which is its main job. I tried various things, but nothing worked. By then it was nearly 9:00pm and I wanted to get back to Hurley tonight, so I disabled the INA219 and decided to worry about it some other day.
I then cleaned up the cabin and re-winterized the downstairs toilet and kitchen sink (which I'd mostly been using to dispose of snow from my boots and the firewood). I carried the few things I needed to take with me out to the Forester, dusted off the snow, and began driving back homeward. Temperatures at the time were around 14 degrees Fahrenheit and there were a couple inches of fresh snow on Woodworth Lake Road, but it wasn't anything a Subaru can't handle. I actually had to drive somewhat conservatively all the way to Middleburgh, as I kept encountering patches of snow on the ground (particularly north of the Mohawk and in the Charleston highlands). I also encountered two Amish buggies on the road heading northward through the hamlet of Glen. South of Middleburgh, though temperatures were up in the 20s and there was no snow visible on the road or the landscape.
Something about the drive tonight in the comfort of the Subaru Forester, which really gives one confidence to drive in just about any conditions, had me wondering why anyone would need something bigger and more imposing to get the safety and security they need. Even the sound system was sounding great (despite the horrid user interface on the stock Subaru entertainment console). It helped that I kept hearing songs that I liked from unusual sources. This started when WEXT played a Big Head Todd & the Monsters song called "Glorious Full Moon," followed by "Gravedigger" by the Dave Matthews Band. Later in the drive the pop station 104.7 was playing a couple good songs I'd never heard before, such as Chapelle Roan's "Pink Pony Club" and country crossover "Love Somebody" by Morgan Wallen.
As I drove homeward on Route 32, I was sipping my road beer as usual and was following a fast-moving car maybe a quarter mile ahead of me. I was going about as fast as he was, which was 65 to 70 mph. But I never got very close. At some point the car signaled and pulled off the road, and I could see why he'd been going so fast: he was state trooper. He should've been suspicious that I'd been following him so consistently for so long, but perhaps he couldn't tell from that distance that I was the same car that whole time. In any case he didn't seem to be interested in me, so I kept drinking my road beer in peace.
Back home in Hurley, it was about midnight and Gretchen was in bed with the dogs. She had some news for me too: our tenants at the Brewster Street rental had apparently reported the asbestos situation to the Kingston building department, and they'd issued us a violation for having asbestos in the basement. We hadn't even had to time to deal with it yet, and now this! It seemed like an unpardonable betrayal by the tenant; in all our years of being landlords, we'd never been reported by one even in cases where they fucking hated us. I said that was it, we were done being nice landlords to those assholes and we'd surely not be renewing their lease.
A ridge of drifted snow just north of the cabin with almost no snow south of it, making a convenient path to and from the generator.
Click to enlarge.
Trees painted white by snow blasting from constantly from the northwest.
Click to enlarge.
Snow patterns atop some six by sixes leaned up on the rail of the upstairs deck.
Click to enlarge.
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