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now I have a smart phone
Saturday, April 9 2016
On the dog walk this morning, I cut west into the woods from the first curve in the Farm Road, climbing a steep escarpment up to the plateau. I continued several hundred feet west until I encountered a down skeletonized tree, which I cut up and loaded onto my backpack. By this point, Ramona and Neville and gone off on their own adventure and only Eleanor was waiting around for me to choose our next destination. In the past I've been known to leave my pack and saw somewhere and continue with the walk, but this time I carried my it all straight home. I never got around to weighing today's salvage, but when I eventually did, I found it had come to 64.3 pounds.
Back at the house, I waited around anxiously for Ramona and Neville to return. Though it's common for me to lose dogs in the forest, they know their way home, or they do if they're familiar with the landscape. But I wasn't entirely sure about Neville's navigational abilities and this was the first time I'd lost him.
After about a half hour, I went along the Farm Road and called for him and Ramona and listened to hear if they might be getting into some sort of trouble off in the distance. But I couldn't see or hear anything.
Still later, I fished my bicycle out of the garage, pumped up its tires, and rode it up Dug Hill Road to Tommy's house (about a quarter of a mile away). Across the street from there is the beginning of one of Tommy's many mountain bike trails, which forms a network reaching into the part of the forest where I'd last seen Ramona and Neville. As an indication of how poor of a mountain biker I am, I was forced to walk my bike on the great majority of the leg of bike trail I explored. As I did so, I called for Neville and Ramona, but I didn't see them until I got home, where they were waiting for me. Neville seemed especially delighted at my return; he's not used to being at the house with no humans there.
For lunch, I made myself a huge pot of chili. I even went through the trouble of boiling tempeh in water and then frying it in oil before adding it to the stew.
Because I was officially on "staycation," I'd allotted myself an extra day of recreational Adderall, so after allowing the chili in my gut to be processed for an hour or two, I ground up 25 milligrams of extended release, mixed it with hot water, and drank it directly from the mortar. I could feel it starting to kick in about fifteen minutes later. Interestingly, during the initial onset of a dose of amphetamine, there is no jaw clenching or any of that other stuff; it's a pure stimulation, a single-minded rush of confident motivation to do whatever you were doing when it kicked in. Unfortunately, all I was doing at the time was writing my online journal entry for yesterday.
I loaded up the dogs and drove out to 9W to get provisions: a cheap 100-watt equivalent LED lightbulb for the laboratory to replace one that had started blinking annoyingly, bunjee cords, and hydronic antifreeze (all from the Home Depot), Zanzibar coffee (from Mother Fucking Storehouse), and, eventually, a bag of vegan dogfood from Petsmart. On the way to that last place, I stopped at the Target in the Hudson Valley Mall to see what the options for plan-free cellphones were. The last time I went looking for such a phone was a year and a half ago, when I spent a lot of time away from home fixing up the Wall Street house. Back then, I'd found the options hopelessly (and seemingly deliberately) confusing. That's a great business model when all the service providers are equally confusing and can benefit from the knowledge differential between themselves and their customers. But at some point there is bound to arise providers whose play is straightforwardness (or the appearance of such). But it could just be that Target's cellphone section is better organized than the one I visited at a Walgreens a year and a half ago. In any case, the prices for the pay-as-you-go phones were all clearly marked and the only real mystery was the specs of the phones themselves, although a sense of those could be determined by their prices (it would've helped to have had a working phone to research this information on the spot). After some comparison of the different plans from different companies, I settled on a $65 smartphone from Cricket Cellular. Their no-contract monthly service fee is $40 for unlimited data and voice (though if more than 2.5 gigabytes of data is requested in a month, the connection gets throttled). It turned out that the phone itself has reasonably-good specs; it's a Galaxy Core Prime built around a quad-core 1.2 GHz Cortex A53, the exact same processor that is at the heart of the new Raspberry Pi 3 (I recently got one of those too, using up almost all of that Adafruit gift certificate from Eva & Sandor). This means my new phone is the computing equivalent of a laptop computer with a Passmark score of about 550 (say, a Compaq 2510p, which would've been current in 2007). It's smaller than the phablets that are now fashionable (even Gretchen's phone is something of a phablet, at least in comparison to the original iPhone), but I don't intend to use this phone to do much more than basic communication when I have no other options. I'll be traveling to Los Angeles soon, and the prospect of being there (or, at least, in transit to and from there) without communication technology is what has finally forced me into the 21st century. In the past (with the exception of a brief period in 2004, when I had a primitive flip phone), I've always been able to get by without a cellphone, usually by borrowing Gretchen's or using a laptop, but Gretchen's phone is now such an important part of how she functions that it would be an imposition to borrow it for a week (as I last did in the summer of 2013).
On the drive back home, I took the little farm road from Wynkoop to the forested bank of the Esopus and took the dogs for a stroll along the big body of water the creek forms there (41.926921N, 74.072258W). In addition to the big bag of spent Keystone Ice cans and other human debris, I saw fresh evidence of beaver activity. To the northeast, a short distance from the creek, I found some structures built low in the trees. If they'd been higher and better-concealed, I would've thought them hunting platforms. But these might've been constructed as forts for or by children. In any case, these days they seem to be platforms for teenage decadence; the surroundings are strewn with party debris. This is the problem with secluded locations easily reached by foot (there are no such teenage hangouts in the forests near our house, with the possible exception of the abandoned go-cart track).
This evening near sundown, I took the dogs on their third hike of the day, this time along the east edge of the plateau just west of the Farm Road. I've walked on parts of the edge in the past, but, oddly I've never walked along it systematically before. The views from there of the wetlands and Farm Road below are surprisingly invigorating. As I walked, I drank from a small glass I'd brought of that cheap single-malt scotch I'd bought the other day.
Back at the house, I found Sarah the Vegan's new boyfriend Jeremy painting the frame of the living room's east window. Though I'm perfectly content with the job he did, he's not, and so the job never seems to end. I offered him some beer and chili, though he made the mistake of overspicing his with the Dave's Insanity Sauce. People familiar with most hot sauces are unprepared for how sparingly that stuff needs to be added.
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