About a quarter mile down the Stick Trail, I gathered some dry oak from the steep slope just above the trail, and though I had difficulty getting to my feet with the resulting load, walking it home wasn't especially difficult. Nevertheless, the load came in on the heavy side, weighing in at 130.5 pounds.
Later in the afternoon, I went to the staging area west of the Farm Road to recover a piece of unbucked firewood and maybe to further articulate the trails I've been discovering in that area. But to my dismay, someone had sundered all my articulation sticks, once again more or less returning the trails to the obscurity they'd once had. Since there isn't a great deal of difference between the entropy of an articulated trail and one that has been disarticulated, the effort required for such an obvious disarticulation must have been considerable (this is a confusing point thermodynamically, but I don't feel like going off on that tangent). The only person who would have done this would have been Tommy the mountain-biking neighbor. In the past he's demonstrated grudging acceptance of my articulations (and has even used the new trails I have created from scratch — and articulated), but perhaps in this case he was hoping to keep his trails on the downlow, maybe because they cross the property of a notoriously-grumpy absentee landowner. In any case, fair enough, this set of trails won't be articulated.
Back at the house, I brought out my big 120 volt chainsaw and proceeded to buck into pieces all the unbucked lengths of oak I'd been bringing home in recent days. Unfortunately, I neglected to weigh any of it before stashing it in the woodshed, but I'd would estimate that all this recently-gathered unbucked oak (not all of which I bucked today) comes to somewhere between 300 and 400 pounds. Some small pieces of this wood went into completing the woodshed's third tranche. There's been a fourth tranche since I added last year's White Ash stash, and I expanded that further today.
For much of this evening, I tinkered with my nascent Ahmed Mohamed memorial clock project. I managed to hook up a DS3231 Real Time Clock module to a micro Arduino board (these RTC modules are super-cheap on eBay and are also much more accurate than DS1307 modules; indeed, DS1307s are so inaccurate that I wouldn't attempt this project if I had to use one). Getting that to work was impossible at first, but only because I'd neglected to include the line "Wire.begin();" in the Arduino's setup function. Once I had that working, it wasn't hard to write the code to display the text of the time on the display, though I still hadn't figured out how to display messages statically (that is, in one place on the pixel array as opposed to scrolling in from the side). I included a bunch of serial parsing code from my weather station client; this would allow me to accurately set the time over the serial link (and provide a basis for adding other features to this terminal "server" in the future). Here's the source code for now: arduinoclock1.ino. And here's a video of it in action:
