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lost a second time
Tuesday, April 9 2013
Temperatures rose into the 80s today, the first day of such temperatures yet this year, which has been characterized mostly by a long lingering winter. I took the dogs for another walk through the woods parallel to Dug Hill Road up to Reichel Road. The terrain in that region is mostly flat, punctuated here and there by car-sized bluestone boulders. The forest tends to be scrubby, with lots of knee-high undergrowth and not many large trees. I'd made the mistake of wearing shorts, and the dense woody undergrowth tore at my exposed skin (though it didn't inflict as much damage as it felt like it was inflicting). Due to the monotonous nature of the landscape, it's difficult to maintain a good sense of direction, and one must rely on the sun. But it was around noon and the sun was high in the sky, so even it wasn't giving a strong directional signal. As I tried to leave Reichel Road, I somehow made a great clockwise circle through the woods, returning to Reichel Road some distance to the southwest. When I finally was able to make it homeward (southeastward), I came out on a part of the farm road considerably west of where I expected to. With its low escarpments and terraces, the terrain near the farm road is more varied than the kind near Reichel Road, so my bewilderment at ending up in a strange part of that landscape was my first clue that I'd managed to make myself lost a second time in a single hike.
Ticks had been repressed by the slow retreat of winter, but with today's summery conditions they were out in force. Three of them managed to embed themselves into my ventral abdomen before I even knew they were there.
A new high-powered CPU fan came in the mail today, and I soon had it installed on my Athlon64 processor. But even with that fan, the CPU had a tendency to overheat. Eventually I discovered that the only way to configure the Athlon64 so processing tasks would not cause it to overheat was by setting the core voltage to 1.4 volts (it had been 1.5 volts).
In esophageal news, my upper GI tract seemed to be healthy for most of the day and it was only in the evening that it started "clenching" (or feeling like it was uncomfortably clenched). Today I did some research on the marvelously onomatopoeic condition known as GERD and learned that a "lump in the throat" feeling is a common symptom of GERD, and results from tissue swelling caused by acid insult. This makes sense given the chain of events that led to this particular bout of "esophageal clenching." I'd been suffering from especially bad episodes of heart burn in the days and hours prior to the "clenching," and in one episode of heart burn (in Williamstown, Massachusetts), I'd been unable to treat it with baking soda because I didn't have any.
Hickory trees damaged by loggers in the monotonous landscape southeast of Reichel Road.
Bluestone boulders in the monotonous landscape southeast of Reichel Road.
Eleanor in the monotonous landscape southeast of Reichel Road.
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