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geologic time in a bottle
Tuesday, September 23 2025
On the drive home at the end of my day, I had to stop to get some blades for a new (to me) cordless Ryobi jigsaw that will be coming in handy soon. (My two old Black & Decker jigsaws take the older U-shank, whereas the new jigsaw takes T-shank blades, something I'd quickly discovered when trying to add a blade to my new jigsaw.) I also had to stop for gas at a nearby gas station, as Gretchen had drained the tank down to the point where the "add gas" light was glowing on the dashboard.
Back at the house, I immediately climbed up on the solar deck to add fluid to the hot water collection system. (This time I just added water, not antifreeze.) It was cloudy afternoon, and the fluid was not circulating at the time. But it accepted a whole gallon of water all the same, something I hadn't been sure would happen in the absence of circulation.
Both cats took advantage of the open laboratory window to go out and climb around on the roof. Lester in particular likes to go up to the solar deck, which requires climbing a section of roof sloped at 45 degrees. He's still good at that, but he is now so plump that he had trouble wriggling between the pickets in the railing of the laboratory deck.
Next I turned my attention to the south deck, the one whose south railing recently started falling away. I used some rope to secure the railing in place and then did what I could to remove the old deck screws that had once secured the rim joist to the joists. They were rusted too badly to back out, so I ended up having to cut them off with an angle grinder and a pair of bolt cutters, and I will probably have to do something about some of the remaining screw stumps before attempting to reattach the rim joist. As for the 30 year old treated lumber, it looked to still mostly be in good shape, though parts of the top rail had peach-sized voids caused by rot.
The thing that really astounded me while I was working on this was the condition of the ground under the deck, particularly along the south wall. This was where, back in 2005, I'd had to excavate a trench all the way down to the footings in order to facilitate proper drainage. I'd buried two different drainage pipes in rocky rubble and soil and then rarely gone back under that deck again. (The last time I did was back in 2019 when I'd needed to wire up a minisplit.) Now, though, the topmost buried drainage pipe was completely exposed, surrounded by angular shards of not-very-flagstone-friendly bluestone. This rubble had all been covered by soil, and it looked like six or eight inches of that had completely vanished, evidently eroded away over the last twenty years. The slope here is fairly steep, but I'd thought the protection of the deck overhead would limit the rate of erosion. Seeing that so much soil had simply disappeared was shocking, sort of like Rip Van Winkle waking up after a 20 year nap. Real visible changes in the landscape, the kind that we assume are happening too slowly to ever notice (that is, on a geological time scale) had taken place during my lifetime, and I was only just noticing it.
While Gretchen was off at pilates, I tried to take Charlotte for a walk down the Stick Trail, but she was more interested in barking at Bridget (Crazy Dave's dog), so she quickly abandoned the walk and circled home to do that.
Later I began the work of trying to set up a Meshtastic network for tracking dogs at the cabin. After chatting with ChatGPT about this, it seemed easiest to just leave the stock firmware on the devices and have them connect to the internet using a Raspberry Pi Zero as a gateway. Back five or six years ago, I was really into making internet devices with Raspberry Pis, but in recent years they've seemed like overkill, and it became more my style to work with microcontrollers that do not have whole operating systems installed on them. I might eventually be able to make a microcontroller-based Meshtastic gateway using something like an ESP32, but if I want to get going quickly, using a Raspberry Pi Zero will probably work best. Tonight I started setting one up using the old Disturbatron SD card image. Unfortunately, Windows is very easily confused when inserting and writing images to SD cards, and had to reboot my computer twice to get it to do the modest things I was asking of it.
Later Gretchen and I made ourselves sandwiches for dinner. I made mine in a bagel, and it was a bit bigger than I had an appetite for and there was a plant flavor in it that I didn't much like (maybe from a tomato that supposedly was ripe when green?). But I ate it anyway.
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