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antibiotics on the end of a six foot ruler
Friday, July 3 2026
For some reason the ES8266s at the cabin were behaving weirdly this morning, working fine for a half hour or an hour and then not sending data for twenty minutes or an hour. The "hotspot watchdog" had been out since yesterday, so it was either not able to reach the web and kept resetting the Moxee hotspot or the Moxee hotspot was misbehaving on its own. I'm always a little unnerved by such unwanted behavior, but there was nothing I could do about it but wait to see if it spontaneously fixed itself, something this equipment does more than I would expect.
So I turned my attention to a problem whose solution I've been procrastinating: putting air back into the pressure tank for our well. That pressure tank is supposed to contain a volume of air in it that is compressed as the well pump runs to build up pressure in the system and allow it to provide water without having to run the well pump every time. In modern systems, that air is behind a rubber membrane so that it is not in contact with the water. In systems that lack such a membrane or where that membrane has failed (our tank!), the air in the tank gradually dissolves into the water and is carried way. Eventually there is little or no air and the pump must run every time there is a request for water. That has been going on for months and the last time I'd pumped air into the tank was more than four years ago. (When I was a kid, our non-potable creek water plumbing system had this same issue, though the pressure tank never had any sort of membrane to begin with. And because we lived so primatively, we didn't have an air compressor, so instead we just drained the pressure tank so it would be full of air at one atmosphere.) Today when I went to add air, the tank had more pressure initially than my air compressor and so water went into my air compressor tank, which is probably not a good thing. But once I'd run the compressor for a bit, I was able to overcome the household plumbing pressure and put enough air into the pressure tank to make it so that I could run water a good long time without the well pump every coming on.
Another little chore I handled was a brief outdoor one. I took the little GreenWorks battery-powered chainsaw that I hate to the place where the Stick Trail crosses the Chamomile and cut up the fallen basswood tree I'd noted yesterday. I then took the branches and placed them just downslope of the Stick Trail north of the Chamomile, in a place where erosion could be a problem. Tree branches are great for stabilizing soil.
This afternoon, I was in the laboratory when I heard Charlotte screaming outside in a way that suggested she'd encountered a wild animal. So I ran around the north side of the house down to where a shallow gulch separates the natural east-facing slope of the terrain below the house from the artificial west-facing slope of the mound built for our septic field. There I saw Neville struggling to kill a very large woodchuck, though the woodchuck was fighting back when possible. I grabbed Neville by the scruff of the neck and he releasted the woodchuck, which was all beat up but at least didn't have a broken neck. I expected Charlotte to then attack the poor little guy, but all she cared about was Neville. The woodchuck was not running away, perhaps due to injuries, exhaustion, of some awareness that it was better to stand and fight. But when I carried Neville away, Charlotte came with me, and I was able to get them both inside. At that point I barricaded the pet door.
Later I did some yard work with the weed wacker and the hedge trimmer (our other GreenWorks device, which uses a 21v lithium battery that is for some reason incompatible with the 21 volt lithium battery that powers the GreenWorks chainsaw, precisely kind of crap that drove me into the arms of Ryobi). Because some of the mugwort and chickory was too tough for the weed wacker, I also had to use a human-powered hedge trimmer, the kind that is functionally identical to an enormous pair of scissors. After I'd done what I could of that, I went on something of a weeding jihad in the garden. Two of our three tomato plants have died of some mysterious wilt that suddenly attacked them, but there are now numerous volunteer tomatoes as well, and some of these were big enough to put in tomato cages. One even had started developing small green cherry tomatoes.
At around dusk, we saw Neville lying on the ground under the pines where the woodchuck incident had happened. Had the little guy succumbed to his injuries and died and now Neville was guarding his corpse? Later tonight he was still down there when we wanted to give him his evening antibiotic pills (part of his heartworm therapy regime). I went to offer him a matzah sandwich containing peanut butter embedded with 250mg of doxycycline. But he was growling and wouldn't let me approach. That was when I saw the bloated corpse of the woodchuck. After conferring with Gretchen, I returned with the pill sandwich taped to the end of a six foot measuring rule. But when I tried to get close enough to offer the sandwich at the end of the rule, he came charging at me and I had to fend him off with the ruler, which he bit a few times. But eventually he smelled the peanut butter, and that led him to the sandwich, which he immediately ate. It was interesting that he was hungry enough for that sandwich but not hungry enough to eat the woodchuck; it was largely still intact.
Later Neville came into the house acting like his usual sweet self. So I sealed the pet door, grabbed a snow shovel, and used that to transfer the woodchuck corpse from where Neville had left it to the top of a five-foot-high camouflaged wooden tower in the nearby pines. (That was one of the places where I used to grow my marijuana back when doing that was still illegal.) Usually woodchucks seem fat to me, and this one was no exception and he weighed significantly more than a big house cat.
Today marked day four of my ongoing caffeine fast, though I have been eating a few scoops of Ben & Jerry's vegan version of Cherry Garcia, which contains small chunks of dark chocolate.
Rusty lag bolts from the deck project. Click to enlarge.
The deck after my repairs. I don't have the balusters in yet in the south rail, but I was able to leave the balusters in place on the east rail. Click to enlarge.
The geometry looks good in this photo, but it's full of little errors and compromises. Click to enlarge.
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