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brief respite from the cold
Wednesday, January 29 2025
We've had a consistently cold January, but today temperatures rose into the 40s, which felt almost like spring, particularly with the sun shining. But the moment strong winds started blowing, I knew we hadn't entered a warm spell and that a cold front wasn't far away.
It's been so unusually cold that somehow our other rain barrel, the one at the northwest corner of the house, froze up so badly that it couldn't drain. (As I'd mentioned weeks ago, the one collecting water off the roof of the woodshed got so swollen from the expansion of ice within it that it toppled from its tower.) It's bowing a little at the bottom, though it doesn't yet seem in danger of exploding or toppling So today I used a long drill bit to try to drill hole up through its tap into its core, where liquid water might be trapped. I managed to drill through at least a foot of ice and sludgy semi-decomposed plant matter at its bottom, but I never reached water, so perhaps it gradually filled with ice in a way that won't cause it to rupture.
Neville came with Charlotte and me when I took the dogs for their afternoon walk, and we walked the whole length of the Chamomile Headwaters Trail and then back homeward on the Stick Trail. By then, the winds from the nearby cold front were blowing so strongly that I was a little concerned about the possibility of being hit by a falling tree or branch.
Back at the house, I boiled up a pot of brown rice & quinoa noodles that Gretchen wanted me to prepare. (I'm not sure why she likes them, as they're gluten-free and seem a little off to me.) I also cooked up some kale in the manner that both of us like, which basically means boiling the hell out of them in broth with lemon juice and garlic. When Gretchen got home, she combined the kale with some peanut sauce and various leftovers to make some sort of Asian pasta dish that was pretty good.
Later I made good progress on getting my new ESP8266 FRAM code to be able to log doubles as well as floats. For now, the idea is to store the data different ways depending on what range the "ordinal" of the data falls in. ("Ordinal" is the position in the delimited querystring variable sent to the backend by the ESP8266 when it polls.)
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