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snow cracks
Wednesday, April 15 2026
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I got a bit of a slow start on my day. At around 10:00am, I made myself a french press of coffee, though it wasn't easy. The little plastic finger that reaches from the top of the coffee grinder into its body to make it grind was not reaching far enough. I made the mistake of trying to trigger the grinding by poking something small into where the finger goes, and the blades of the grinder immediately flung all the coffee beans (yes, all of them) all over the kitchen, and I then went around picking them up from as far as ten feet away. I tried to melt a little copper extender into the end of the finger, but that plastic didn't want to melt. Freakishly, though, the grinder came to life briefly while I was tring to carve away another plastic from the trigger to make the finger go lower, and that was enough to make myself coffee. I didn't have any butter, though, so I ended up having to dip my toast into a little bowl of olive oil, which is a suboptimal breakfast experience.
Eventually I searched the cabin for the little hand winch I'd looked for yesterday and couldn't find it. Either it was down at the dock in that big plastic box that we store stuff in or someone had stolen it. I took the small Ryobi chainsaw with me on the walk down the Mossy Rock Trail, cutting a small fallen tree out of the way as I went. The winch turned out to be under some things in the box at the dock, so I could begin the task of deploying the various pieces. As I was winching the half-floating part of the dock back into the lake, Neville was underfoot with me, and we rode that descent together. Then when I used the big farm jack to push the big floating section back into the water, I found the task was made somewhat easier by the unusually high level of the lake. I ended up spending most of my time down there drying out things in my toolbox that had somehow gotten wet (I suspect a strong wind had lifted the lid over the winter when it wasn't weighed down by snow).
Back at the cabin, I turned my attention to the mess that my ESP8266 Remote Control archipelago had become. The problem wasn't just with the ESP8266 devices in the cabin; there was also a problem with the latest version of the code that I'd hoped to install in them. Something in my code was producing memory leaks that would cause the microcontrollers to, over the course of an hour or so, gradually bog down, start sending garbage to the backend, and then crash. I asked ChatGPT how best to debug a memory leak issue, and it suggested I make a function that produces a dump of the available memory and its level of fragmentation and then run it before and after suspicious function calls. I did this with the function that responds to commands (sent via serial or http), and saw that every time it ran, 56 bytes were lost from available memory. That was pretty bad, but it only happened when I ran a command. Something else was eating into memory a well, and I soon determined that it was in the code that handles delimited data received from the backend. This leak was also 56 bytes in size and happened after every poll of the backend. Since polling at the cabin typically happens every 25 seconds or so, the roughly thirty thousand bytes available after a reboot would only last three hours, which was the behavior that I was seeing. I'm a little too trusting of ChatGPT, and that was why I had it rewrite the polling data parser. ChatGPT managed to fix the memory leak, but it left out an important set of steps necessary to confirm that a valid communication happened with the backend. Once that was fixed, and once the command handler's leak was fixed, the code was reliable enough to deploy. I started with the hotspot watchdog, catching a few bugs along the way. But it's occasionally tricky doing such deployments, as the WiFi from the laptop I use to do these deployments seems to degrade the ability of the ESP8266s to communicate over WiFi themselves.
Once I'd gotten to a good stopping place with all of that, I noticed that Charlotte was restless, so I thought I'd take her on a walk some distance down the Lake Edward Trail. To my surprise, Neville decided to come a long as well. I hiked about as far as Quarterway Brook and then more or less followed it upstream to a long narrow wetland that it drains. This took me through a region I'd passed near but never explored. The most interesting thing I found on this particular hike was some deep fissures into rocks along a cliff face that still had visible snow in them (mind you, the day was feeling positively summery at the time). My hike eventually got me to the big fern-crested rock near the place along our parcel's boundary with state land at the bottom of the cliffs northeast of our cabin, a rock I call "Ramona Rock," since I was with Ramona the first time I saw it and have a picture of her with it. From there, I continued to Woodworth Lake, walked to the dock, and headed home via the Mossy Rock Trail.
This evening I needed to eat something more substantial than bread and peanut butter (the latter of which I was running out of). I had some leftover Ethiopian food Gretchen had either made or doctored but had no injera. So I decided to use it as the contents for a burrito using a piece of flat bread. The result was amazing, but now I was out of flatbread (as I'd only brought one piece). This had me thinking I could use the pizza dough from Mother Earth's Storehouse (which hadn't produce a great pizza) to make my own flatbread. But I didn't end up doing that this evening.
A pair of male mallards on Woodworth Lake; queue the "YMCA." Click to enlarge.
Bufflehead ducks on Woodworth Lake near Ibrahim's dock. Click to enlarge.
The dock after I'd deployed it. Click to enlarge.
Quarterway Brook. Click to enlarge.
Neville in Quarterway Brook. Click to enlarge.
Zooming in on Neville in Quarterway Brook. Click to enlarge.
Snow persisting in a crack in the rock. Click to enlarge.
The same snow viewed via an intersecting crack in the rock. Click to enlarge.
A spruce grove near Ramona Rock. Click to enlarge.
Woodpecker holes in a line on a still-living white ash tree near the dock along the Mossy Rock Trail. Click to enlarge.
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