|
|
|
dock deployed, 2025
Saturday, April 19 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
It was mostly cloudy today with periods of especially dark skies followed by occasionally-intense showers. One such shower came after we'd been drinking our coffee and playing collaborative Spelling Bee with the help of a small whiteboard our friend Gilley had bought us just for this purpose. Noting that the south gutter on the house was overflowing, I got an umbrella and went out in the rain, climbed up on a railing, and cleaned the gutter as water washed the leaves towards me. I also unplugged the pipe in the ground that the downspout emptied to, producing a satisfying torrent of pent-up water.
Gradually temperatures rose to nearly 70 degrees, and during one pause in the showers, Gretchen and I decided to walk down to the dock and deploy it for summer use. This required both a small hand-cranked winch and a big far jack, both of which we carried down there while Charlotte ran around doing whatever (though Neville did not come). At the lake, Gretchen could see I didn't much need her help for refloating the half-floating part of the dock, so she went off with Charlotte to the old Boy Scout camp near the lake's outflow. It didn't take me long to jack up the hinged section of dock and release it from the chains that had suspended it from a special metal pole I use to keep it out of the water during the winter. Then I turned my attention to getting the huge fully-floating part of the dock (a massive ten by twelve foot structure that I estimate to weigh about 1200 pounds) into the lake. The technique to do this is pretty simple: I jack up the uphill side of the dock and hope that it slides on its own downhill somewhat towards the lake. If it doesn't, I wiggle it back and forth from atop the jack. I did this numerous times without much progress. Then Gretchen joined me and she helped by doing things like doing the jacking or helping me rock the dock or give it the final glorious shove that places it entirely in the lake. I then paddled it over to the half-floating part of the dock, where Gretchen helped me install a section of pipe that acts as something of a hinge pin (a pin that is itself held in place with cotter pins).
During another lull in the showers, I filled the bird feeder southeast of the cabin with bird seed for the first time this year. Within hours, a nuthatch had discovered the seed and was making frequent visits to the feeder, though no other birds figured it out.
Later returned to the lake with a beer and went for a nice kayak paddle out in the main body of the lake, going as far as the lake's main tributary on its east shore. There were a number of small ducks (they looked like buffleheads) that did their best to keep far away from me as I paddled.
This evening Gretchen made a stew around kale, mushrooms, and chickpeas, and as we ate it, she again brought up the topic of the Telepathy Tapes, that pseudoscience podcasts for which she has apparently decided to suspend her critical thinking skills. She said she wanted me to give it a listen before passing judgment on it. But I was already so convinced from the buzz about it that it was nonsense that I told Gretchen that it may not be worth my time to listen. This really seemed to irritate Gretchen.
Later, down in the basement, I debugged an issue that was causing additional sensors specified by a delimited configuration string not to work. I'd built a little board that connected a thermistor to the east cabin switcher's one analog input pin in a way that would allow the thermistor to produce a varying voltage (that is, as part of a voltage divider) and I wanted to place that thermistor inside the nipple where the hot water pipe comes out of the cladding on the heat-pump-based hot water heater tank. The idea was to be able to monitor the temperature in that tank from the east cabin switcher to better decide when to power up that water heater (or, when I implement a solar hot water heating system, to help control the necessary plumbing). Once I solved a bug related to the extra sensor configuration string, I suddenly had valid numbers with some linear relationship to the temperature of water in that tank. (Just what that relationship is is someting I can determine later.)
I ended the evening in a similar manner to the way I'd ended yesterday evening: by watching an episode of the latest season of Black Mirror in the beanbag in the loft while listening on headphones and sipping and adult beverage. (I also watched the ending of the episode I'd watched last night, since I had no memory of it.) Tonight's episode, "Plaything," was up there among the best Black Mirror episodes. It showed us a computer program that was initially developed under the ruse that it was a game (in order to secure funding) and the backstory of an awkward (and initially young) man who came to love and nurture that program even after all other copies of it were destroyed. The program is actually a simulated collective intelligence that evolves and grows over time in response to acquired knowledge and ever-improving hardware (supplied by the man). By the end of the episode, it had nearly arrived at an AI singularity and needed just one little assist to take over the planet. It's mind blowing, if a little absurd in the usual Black Mirror way.
The woodpeckers have continued to work on the remains of this maple along the north edge of our cabin's building site. Look at all the new woodchips! Click to enlarge.
The dock after Gretchen and I deployed it. Click to enlarge.
A view of our dock from distance out in the lake. Click to enlarge.
The main tributary of Woodworth Lake on its east shore. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250419 feedback
previous | the future |
