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medieval city of fractal complexity
Wednesday, December 11 2013
Work continues on the Lightroom plugin, and today I had a meeting with the client for whom I am building it. He wrote the original application in Filemaker (to the extent that Filemaker is an application development environment) and over time it has grown into a medieval city of fractal complexity. I hadn't known at the outset how complex the program is, but now that I'm in it neck-deep, I'm seeing (and having to implement) details I had never imagined. After learning of the tenth or 20th such detail in today's meeting, I sighed, "You must have worked on this thing for years." "Decades," he corrected.
The weather continued with its recent run of unseasonably-cold weather, putting this December on track for being perhaps the coldest I've ever experienced in New York State (though there may have been an equally-cold December in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in the late 1970s). It's psychologically difficult to draw down the stockpiles of firewood without replenishing them in such weather, when the rate of consumption seems on track to consume all stockpiled firewood in a matter of weeks. So I dragged home a long and unwieldy piece of dry oak I'd been able to topple without tools in the forest west of the farm road. Getting it home was complicated by a rudder-like root that was included in the fallen tree; the root kept digging into the ground and catching on fallen logs as I dragged it home, though it proved to be just another part of the tree that I could burn. Cutting that tree into pieces resulted in about the amount of wood I need to burn each 36 hours in weather such as what we're experiencing now. But it was perfectly dry, which was heartening and, once cleared of snow, ready to burn. It's good to be assured that I can fall back to a just-in-time firewood gathering model should the stockpile be used up completely.
Objectively, though, I'm worrying too much. The woodshed is more than a third full (it has a complete tranche of stacked wood in the back, and the annex behind it is completely full), and I've calculated that a completely full woodshed is usually enough to provide fuel for two years of heating.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?131211 feedback
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