|
|
|
naked bikeride
Tuesday, July 26 2016
In my remote workplace, the people who use the tools I maintain occasionally feel the need to run multiple reports in hopes of coaxing out information they hope or wish lies hidden in the data. It was such behavior that made the chief database I maintain crap-out repeatedly yesterday, leading ultimately to my plan to fix the problem. I implemented that plan this morning before the beginning of the workday on the west coast (generally the hours I keep) because I knew it had to be in place before the flurry of reporting began anew. It took me relatively little time to implement the code, which amount to a second nested layer of file locking around the existing one (which prevents multiple cron jobs from running at the same time). This new one would keep cron jobs (which are not that time-sensitive) from running during the generation of reports. When it went into place at around noon, a promising sign was that nothing immediately crashed. Better still, there were no crashes later in the day as the reportstorm gathered momentum with the heat of the California day.
While the Esopus Valley is only a mile away from our home on Hurley Mountain, ecologically, it's a very different place. There are trees (such as Black Walnut, Black Locust, Cottonwood, and Sycamore) growing down there which cannot be found up here (with the exception of a Sycamore I planted in a swampy area at the north end of the yard). There are also a great many animals down there were I've never seen up here (such as Red-wing Blackbirds, Oppossums, Skunks, and Horned Owls). In general, the species found up here on the mountain are a subset of the species found in the valley, although there are some species that prefer it up here (particularly Porcupines). The ecological differences are a consequence of a big difference in soil and water quantity and quality. Up here, there is very little soil, what little there is isn't very good, and water is often far from the surface. I often refer to our rocky hilltop environment (with its Chestnut Oaks and White Pines) as an "ecological desert." Most of the animals who live up here do so not because they love it up here, but because human impacts are not as severe. Humans, like most other creatures, prefer fertile valleys to hard-scrabble mountaintops.
I mention Skunks as one of the creatures that doesn't live on the mountains mostly because our dogs have never encountered any here during the nearly 14 years we've lived here. As with Porcupines, dogs tend to bring home evidence of any encounters with Skunks. (Eleanor was skunked once at Lake Edward in the Adirondacks, but that's a completely different environment.)
Today all that changed when Ramona and Neville returned from one of their self-guided forest adventures. Both had been skunked, although Neville got it the worst. (It's possible Ramona had learned from Eleanor's skunk incident at Lake Edward.) Both Gretchen and I like the smell of skunk, and so it wasn't too bad to have it in the house. It was nice, though, that for some reason Neville elected not to sleep with us tonight. (Normally he's an enthusiastic participant in bedtime.) This all begs the question: where did the dogs encounter a skunk? Did they range far to the west, where the moutain turns into a poorly-drained plateau with more soil (and more complex wildlife)? Or did they go down into a gorge and enter the ecological zone of the Esopus Valley? Without GPS loggers on their collars, it's impossible to say.
This evening after sunset, Gretchen and I went with the dogs on a naked bikeride to the pool at the end of the Farm Road. This was, I suspect, the first time I (or, certainly, Gretchen) had ever ridden a bike naked. The mosquitoes were punishingly bad at the pool, forcing us to repeatedly dunk ourselves beneath the surface to get them off of our heads. At some point, some mysterious creature began making a weird whistling call from the treetops south of the pool. It was soon joined by another of the same species. I have never heard this call before and do not know what it could've been. I suspect it was a mammal of some sort, but which one?
Another call we heard for the first time this season was the ominous cha-cha-cha-cha of a Katydid foretelling the end of summer.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160726 feedback
previous | next |
