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mock orange on the lower Chamomile
Thursday, June 11 2026
It was an even hotter, muggier day, and eventually, after Lester the Cat came in from where he'd been lounging on the laboratory deck, I closed the laboratory window and fired up the minisplit in air-conditioning mode. But by then it was evening.
This morning, I took a recreational 120mg of pseudoephedrine to better focus my brain for some software tasks.
Gretchen spent most of the day in Zoom meetings about the march on a research dog facility she is organizing. I looked at her computer and saw 12 people in the conference, looking like a Mormon Brady Bunch. That's a lot of people for the middle of a Thursday workday. Later Gretchen drove down to Manhattan to spend the night; she was organizating a reproductive rights fundraiser to be held in some fancy penthouse apartment somewhere on the west side.
Using a "pseudodevice" in my ESP8266 system, I'd been updating device_log records for the outdoor ESP8266 at the cabin with energy_percentage value coming from the new AmeriGas API. But I'd been doing it every time I looked up the tank percentage value from the API. Meanwhile, the satellite telemetry system attached to the tank had sent its last value yesterday morning at around 6:00am, suggesting that it sent updates less than once per day, which is probably the way it can communicate via satellite using a battery that must eventually be replaced. I only wanted to record propane tank levels when that device sent its updates, attaching the measurement to the first outdoor device_log whose "recorded" column falls after the AmeriGas "TMReadDate" value. I also decided to record the last fuel delivery date and last fuel delivery gallons in two of the four "reserved" columns so I can easily reconstruct fuel consumption in the future.
This afternoon, despite the heat, I took Charlotte on a walk down the Chamomile Gorge Trail to down near the bus turnaround and then returned by hiking up the creek bed. There was still flowing water on the lower half of my creekbed walk, but further up it must've all been subterranean. Along the way, I encountered a small flowering tree that looked like some sort of dogwood (not a tree I usually see in this climate). Later when I did a Google Image search of the photo I took, it claimed it was a mock orange, a shrub in the hydrangea family. (Hydrangeas are in the Cornales order, which does include dogwoods.) Despite sunny skies, it began to rain while I was walking back home, though not enough for me to want to shelter my electronic devices.
Later this evening, I implemented code to close the web socket connection on one of my ESP8266s if no command has been sent that way in an hour. This might help fix some unreliability issues I've noted after opening such connections and then forgetting about them.
A bluestone cliff along the lower Chamomile. Click to enlarge.
The mock orange. Click to enlarge.
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