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gothic firewood
Monday, May 4 2026
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
I'd been trying to log data remotely on an off from the SolArk inverter in the cabin, switching on such logging for awhile and then switching it off again so it wouldn't swamp the meagre bandwidth available. In so doing, I saw that I was missing a lot of data that should've been there. Clearly this system wasn't going to work for my needs; I needed a better way to capture and obtain serial data. Later this evening while I was in the bathtub, the perfect solution occurred to me: I would create a switch in the ESP8266 command system that, when thrown, would start logging data to a file in the LittleFS file system. That system is completely accessible remotely, so I could then, at my leisure, download such logs (which, when done from the perspective of a device, actually uses a command called "upload").
Once I got going on my day early this afternoon, I went out to the big woodpile on the edge of the driveway and processed more of that nasty semi-rotten wood. Some of it was surprisingly dry, but other pieces were slimy with fungus and covered with creepy-crawlies like centipedes and pillbugs. The resulting processed wood looks like a gothic take on firewood as I pile it up in the woodshed. It's drying out rapidly, though, and will be perfectly good for burning (if not quite as dense as the usual wood I burn, solid oak or white ash) when I go to burn it next heating season.
Next I turned my attention to our garden beds, for which Gretchen got a bunch of plants from the Hudson Valley Seed Company over the weekend. Gretchen seems convinced that the tomatoes we grow do not produce as well as they should, which I do not actually think is the case. But once she has an idea in her mind, there's nothing I can do to dislodge it. She wants me to take a soil sample to the Cornell University Extension in Uptown to have it tested, and our neighbor Andrea (whom she talked to about this) wondered if maybe our soil has insufficient nitrogen. So, as part of a test I did in preparing the east-most raised bed, I buried the collected urine from my laboratory urinal (which comes with a mass of pine needles) near the north end and put one of the new tomato seedlings very near it. Perhaps there will be too much salt in the soil as a result, but my hope is that there will be plenty of nitrogen and that tomato plant will either do amazing or will at least do as well as they always do. I planted other plants in that raised bed and the next one west, though not too many as Gretchen insisted that I space them all far apart. I also planted a line of sunflower seeds along the north edge of both planters. Hopefully a deer won't eat them off, as happened last year.
I then set up the hose for the season, dealing with the aggravation of several unexpected leaks along the way.
At around 3:00pm, I took Charlotte for her afternoon walk (Neville seemed to be coming at first but quickly bailed). We walked the length of the newly-cleared part of the Gullies Trail and then descended the mostly-intact (but sketchy) remains of its mountain-goat section. Then I quickly scaled the extremely steep (but stepped) escarpment to the west, atop which runs the Stick Trail, which I took home.
My meal planning for tonight took into account the open bag of injera. I wanted to make a wat containing beans and potatoes, and I'd even started pressure-cooking a bag of dry white beans in the InstantPot. But those beans kept being hard every time I tried them, so I kept pressure-cooking them for yet another fifteen or twenty minutes. So I ended up making my stew (which ended up being more of an Indian-style chickpea-potato-kale curry) using canned chick peas. I didn't have Ethiopian spices, so I used curry powder, mustard powder, lemon juice, faux chicken stock, and crushed tomatoes as my base. It was a bit too thin, so I boiled the hell out of it for awhile to drive off water. It ended up being pretty good, though the kale survived all that cooking in a surprisingly tough state.
The state of the pile of salvaged wood on the edge of the driveway after the work I did today. Those vines belong to a species called bittersweet. Click to enlarge.
Here in the woodshed you can see more traditional firewood high up in the back tranche, while the newer funky silver maple is lower in the picture. Click to enlarge.
The part of the Chamomile Wall west of the Stick Trail today. Click to enlarge.
Fringed polygala (Chamaebuxus paucifolia) along the Gullies Trail. Click to enlarge.
A root mass on a fallen tree at the bottom of the Valley of the Beasts. Click to enlarge.
A blue violet along the Stick Trail. Click to enlarge.
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