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unpleasant tasks I didn't have to do
Tuesday, March 10 2026
Outside the laboratory, I heard a phoebe loudly and repeatedly announcing his species name (in English, no less). Based on my long experience in this climate, it is a full 13 days before phoebes are supposed to be arriving. Presumably the unusually early arrival of warm weather in the south sent this one north. Unfortunately, though, in a week we'll be back in conditions that are cold even by the standards of the coldest part of winter, at which point I don't know what the phoebe will be eating. There are plenty of moths and other insects flying around now, but when the daily high temperature is the freezing point of water, insects disappear. (I read somewhere that phoebes will eat seeds in a pinch, so maybe this particular bird will do okay.)
Temperatures reached up into the 70s today, which had me wearing shorts and flipflops much sooner than expected (having put them away on our return from the Caribbean).
This morning Gretchen, who has overextended herself as a volunteer and fundraiser for various political and reproductive-health-access causes, asked if she could put a few things on my plate that normally she would handle. One was to call up Central Hudson and ask about a mysterious $2000 energy bill and the other was to investigate Sandra, the tenant in our Downs Street property who is back to not paying her rent (after dutifully paying it for months). One would require a phone call and the other would require driving out to Downs Street and entering the apartment to see if Sandra experienced some misfortune. But then in the process of giving me access credentials to our Central Hudson account, Gretchen discovered that some payment glitch had meant that we were two months in arrears, which fully accounted for the $2000 bill. This meant the only thing on my plate was investigating Sandra.
Sandra hadn't been responding to Gretchen's messages (this is normal for her when she is delaying the payment of rent), but later today after Gretchen said I would be going over to Downs Street to poke around in her apartment, she suddenly came back to life and said that she'd been out of the country attending a funeral (likely in Haiti, where her family is from). She also agreed to pay her rent soon, with the customary late fee. This meant I no longer had either task to do, which was great, since neither draw on my set of skills.
Nevertheless, I did go over to the brick mansion on Downs Street to retrieve the "owner mail" and finally replace a handrail that had been accidentally broken last fall by a largely-proportioned building inspector for the City of Kingston. While I was out, I also retrieved a book from the Kingston library for Gretchen (the librarian noted that Gretchen chooses "interesting books"), got some landscape adhesive and a stick of 3/8 inch copper pipe from Home Depot, and groceries (mostly vegan milks and pre-packaged meals as impulse purchases) from the 9W Hannaford.
Back home atop Hurley Mountain, Gretchen was out on the east deck for the first time this season. There were still two piles of snow on the deck leftover from winter, and I managed to shove both of these over the edge using just my bare feet (though this wasn't without pain).
I took a little break from ongoing failed experiments to implement a state-machine-based I2C bootloader controller (the code that runs on the master, the device that is performing the flashing of a slave) to fix some minor collapses among my stone walls. This is a good time to salvage bits of bluestone from nature, as it's not yet covered with vegetation and frost heave has weakened soil matrix into which rocks are embedded.
I've been loving my asparagus stir fry so much that I made another pot of rice to eat with it (I'd made a lot). But Gretchen wanted something else for dinner, so she cooked up ravioli with kale.
The early-arriving phoebe. There are a lot of some new exotic moth flying around, so perhaps he'll be fine through the coming cold snap. Click to enlarge.
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