another day, another Red Oak Monday, February 1 2016
This morning while Gretchen was walking the dogs in the forest, I decided to take my larger drone for a flight. I'd arranged its camera to point downward, meaning it was no longer near the center of the drone's mass. Somewhat surprisingly, though, the drone compensated automatically for this imbalance and handled pretty much the same as it did with the camera in its normal place. Unfortunately, though, my ability to spot where it was in three dimensions was imperfect enough for me to drop it into the canopy of the largish Northern Red Oak just north of the house. This tree had grown up in the open and was much easier to climb than the one I'd dropped the drone into south of the house, but even so, I was unable to dislodge the drone using the fiberglass chimney-scraping pole (though I was able to poke it a few times). Eventually I gave up and used a rope saw to saw off the limb the drone was lodged in. (I was able to climb high enough in the tree to get the rope saw to the right place by tossing a bean bag.) This was a much smaller limb than the one I'd had to saw off the other day, and only supported about 5% of this tree's canopy. Still, I don't like the idea that I'm excising a chunk of material from the biosphere at every third or fourth landing site of my drone. Here's the video from this flight:
(That cat at the end there is Celeste, aka "the Kitten".)
I returned to the nearby helically-coiled piece of skeletonized Chestnut Oak I'd salvaged from yesterday and managed to bring home 114.55 pound of it, mostly of which came in two large chunks.
This evening we hosted a small dinner party attended by Ray, Nancy, Sarah the Vegan, and Ray's friend Jeremy, who is now dating Sarah the Vegan. Jeremy is an underachieving 45 year old gentleman who works mostly as a handyman, and his rates tend to be affordable. The downside is that he's a bit hard to reach, what with the lack of a fixed address and no cellphone. In our conversations tonight, he demonstrated a wide range of knowledge without ever seeming anything but unassuming. He also made references to things like public radio, so his cultural fit seems initially plausible.
Gretchen had toiled in the kitchen making tamales and tempeh and some sort of salad. I managed to eat four of those tamales, and I think Jeremy did too. That guy can eat, though he has less of a gut than I do.
I gave two different tours during the evening: one to the basement to show Ray and Nancy the faux-wood vinyl tile and one to the laboratory so Sarah could show Jeremy my wacky workspace.
Our guests stayed until 11:30pm, and by the end there I'd snuck off to the laboratory. Ray eventually joined me up there, and I took the opportunity to demonstrate my Hackintosh technology. He told me that older Microsoft software doesn't seem to work on his new Windows-10-based laptop. Evidently Microsoft has made it so users are forced to "upgrade" their copies of programs like Microsoft Office, ultimately forcing them into subscriptions for word-processing software that hasn't improved since the early 1990s. It's possible he just needs to change some setting, but the upshot is that if it isn't easy to do, it will shake more sales out of the user base.
The runny nose that had been bothering me yesterday seemed to vanish this evening once I'd started drinking alcohol. I wonder if "decongestant" is one of ethyl alcohol's known medical uses.
