|
|
|
first good thaw of 2025
Monday, March 10 2025
Today was a gorgeous sunny day with temperatures climbing into the 60s for the first time this year (at least for us; I suppose it's possible we missed a warm spell while we were in Florida). Charlotte went to find a nice place to lie in the sun and ended up in a tussock of grass just across Dug Hill Road. I saw her over there and gently (but insistently) called her home. Later I saw her wander out into the road to investigate a rare pedestrian walking past. She wasn't barking or being obnoxious, but I'd rather she consider the road to be the equivalent of a flowing lava. (She must have some sense of the danger of roads, given that she was found walking along the side of a fairly busy one after getting lost back in late November.) The dogs ended up spending much of the day lying in the sun in the driveway. Not too far from them, some ice remained. I lifted up large pieces of translucent ice and leaned them against a stone wall to (making a little north-facing greenhouse lean-to) to expose as much of the asphalt as possible.
Later the dogs came with me on a walk up the Stick Trail. I got distracted at the Chamomile Wall, where I completed the fixing of collapse that had happened some weeks ago. The ground had thawed enough in recent days for me to be able to pick up rocks that had been frozen to the ground the last time I'd tried to move them. I also brought in more stone from the steep talus slope to the southwest and used it to beef up the wall at the collapse, making it wider and creating additional voids in it for wildlife to exploit. Then I walked with the dogs up the Gullies Trail, cutting back to the Stick Trail about a half mile from home and returning on that.
After about sixty days of no communication from the cabin, today it came back online, giving me access to the things I can remotely control and data from its weather sensors. Temperatures in the cabin basement were just below 37 degrees Fahrenheit, which means it's possible the basement never froze even during the brutally cold spell in February. (I should've left a temperature logger there; without one it's impossible to say how cold it actually got.)
Before Gretchen got back from her bookstore shift, I made a conventional spaghetti dinner using tempeh, mushrooms, and onions as a chunkifier for the Rao's marinara sauce. Since Gretchen always wants some sort of vegetable and I didn't have any that cooked well with pasta, I also fried up a pan of kale prepared with lemon juice and garlic. It ended up being good enough for Gretchen to go back for thirds.
This evening Gretchen drove to Saugerties to see a documentary about Bill Withers, which would be followed by a Q&A by the people behind the documentary. Meanwhile, I took advantage of the additional daylight hours at the end of the day to do a little more work on the Chamomile Wall.
This evening, I followed a tip from one of the commenters on a Hackaday thread and tried again (using a new method) to install Linux on an old Thinkpad X131e Chromebook, which, because it is no longer updated, is becoming increasingly useless. All earlier attempts to install Linux on this machine had failed, but this one promised that if I could replace the laptop's BIOS-like firmware (technically its UEFI), then I could install any OS I wanted to. First, though, I had to dig into the machine to flip a tiny write-protection switch (it had to be flipped rightward, contradicting the only web page I found about it). After that, I typed some an incantation in console window that loaded a sophisticated script written and hosted by a MrChromeBox, and that did everything I needed. I then tried to install Tiny Core Linux, which failed because of a UEFI incompatibility, but I was most of the way there.
The Chamomile Wall from the south. Click to enlarge.
The Chamomile Wall from the north up close, centering on where I made repairs today. Click to enlarge.
The Chamomile Wall from the north, further away. Click to enlarge.
The Chamomile Wall from the north, even further away. Click to enlarge.
The Chamomile Wall from the north, yet further away. Click to enlarge.
The Chamomile Wall from the northeast, with a view of the sun. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250310 feedback
previous | next |
