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picture in a power outage
Sunday, July 17 2016
Yesterday's storm was evidently very powerful in narrow swaths, because it knocked over a fair number of big old trees, wreaking havoc on the local power grid. Our power outage continued for much of the day, though now that I have a smartphone, I didn't feel too cut off from the world. The dogs had failed to go on much of a walk with Gretchen this morning, so, after Gretchen headed off for her bookstore shift in Woodstock, I took them on a second walk. They happily disappeared into the forest for hours of self-guided canine adventure. Meanwhile back at the house, I managed to charge my phone with a solar-powered battery pack that I was also able to replenish in the blazing sun of midday. Had we had power, I might've mowed the lawn or sat in front of my computer ands some some work for one of my side web clients. But instead I painted a tiny painting of Celeste on cardboard. Lacking sufficient light for such work in the house, I did the painting out on the east deck (though under a translucent umbrella).
Later in the afternoon, Ramona and Neville returned after what turned out to have been a four hour adventure. Soon thereafter, I drove us all to Woodstock and dropped off Neville with Gretchen at the bookstore. Gretchen had been missing him terribly and been wondering why it had taken me so long to deliver him.
On the drive from Woodstock to Kingston, I stopped at the Tibetan Center and bought three things: a tiny Creative webcam (that later proved impossible to find a driver for), a plug-in carbon monoxide detector (always a good thing for a landlord to have extras of), and a crappy telescope (just because none of my telescopes seem to work, and it would be worth the $8 price for the scrap lenses and tripod alone).
My main need while I was out was black tea, preferably the kind that doesn't come individually-packaged in envelopes. As you'll recall, my brand loyalty in Red Rose was recently damaged when 40-count boxes of that proved to now come in those cursed envelopes. At the Uptown Hannaford, I nonetheless bought two hundred-count boxes of Red Rose, but I hedged my bets by also buying a hundred-count box of Tetley (which I knew to not be so-packaged). Back at the house, I was delighted to find the Red Rose was as it had always been, just loose in the box.
The power had come on while I was in town, and so when Gretchen came home with a mind to convert fresh produce into a Thai meal, she didn't have to worry about opening the refrigerator too many times (the main concern during a moderately-long summertime power outage). We ate that meal out on the east deck, and later I trained my new telescope at the moon, which at the time was in the east in a still-blue sky. The image in the telescope was kind of smudgy and small, not anywhere near as good as I'd remembered it being in a Galileoscope. So I fetched my original Galileoscope (I'd since gotten a second one at the Tibetan Center) and trained it at the moon. Galileoscopes have great optics, and the picture was much better, but the main problem with a Galieoscope is that there is no easy way for someone using one to make fine adjustments. There are no knobs; you have to pull and push on the tubes in hopes they will stop near where the focus or direction is best. But the old joints on my scope didn't really want to cooperate.
Later this evening, on the recommendation of my old housemate John from when I lived in Los Angeles (remember him?), I watched Zero Days, a documentary about the Stuxnet virus. As you might recall, Stuxnet was developed as a joint cyberwar weapon by Isræl and the United States to cripple Iran's uranium enrichment program. What I didn't know was that the program was working perfectly fine and centrifuges were being destroyed in ways that Iran's engineers couldn't explain. But then apparently Isræl wasn't satisfied with the progress, and they hacked a new version of the Stuxnet virus containing four "zero days" (previously-unknown exploits) and a stolen cryptographic key, at which point it began to spread widely and attract the attention of anti-virus companies. They'd overplayed their hand, and soon everyone knew about Stuxnet.
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