|
|
|
Throckmorton's return
Friday, August 12 2016
location: Twenty Ninth Pond, Essex County, New York
Today I was desperate enough about the lack of a proper USB cord for Arduino work that I decided to drive out into society to see if I could obtain one somewhere nearby. USB-B cables are common pieces of equipment, but the central Adirondacks is remote, with very little in the way of major retail chains. In the absence of a big box store such as Staples, Walmart, or Home Depot, I was going to have to try my luck at mom & pop hardware and drug stores. I'd already determined that the nearest hardware store was in the village of North Creek, some 13 miles to the south. So that was where I decided to go. Leaving Gretchen back at the cabin, I took the dogs (who are always eager to ride in the car).
North Creek is where 28N crosses the modest headwaters incarnation of the Hudson River. I found it bigger and more bustling than expected, with a large number of people spilling out of its Catholic church and a fair number of pedestrians. The hardware store was called Braley & Noxon, and it seemed pretty typical for a small independent purveryor of paints, tools, and plumbing pieces. The young woman at the counter asked if I needed help, and I said I was looking for electronics, particularly a USB printer cable. She took me to the place where that would've been had they had one, but of course it wasn't there. They did, however, stock micro USB cables, ethernet cables, HDMI cables, and chargers for two different generations of iPhones.
In the absence of the cable I sought, I had a backup plan: I would improvise a connection by sacrificing a micro USB cable and soldering it to the Arduino board (the plan was actually more complicated, because it would involve soldering in wires terminated with male and female Dupont connectors, which I'd brought plenty of). In Braley & Noxon, it took awhile to find the electronic solder; it and all the expensive electrical test equipment was hanging from a normal retail pegs well out of reach (presumably to prevent shoplifting). I used a coathanger to knock one off its peg, and nobody seemed to care because I'm a middle-aged white guy. A small coil of solder cost more than $6, which seemed like a lot. It was also true solder, that is, an alloy of lead and tin (and not that hippie lead-free shit they sell these days). I would've also bought a soldering iron had they had something cheaper than a $28 butane-powered model. (A soldering iron is something I can improvise from the detritus available in any habitable building.)
While in North Creek, I decided to check the other retail establishments just in case they had USB-B cables. There was a full-sized supermarket belonging to the hitherto-unknown franchise name of Tops, and the place seemed promising when it proved to stock LightLife SmartBacon, LightLife SmartDogs, Naked-brand Mighty Mango smoothie, and plastic containers of organic baby spinach (all of which I bought). They also had something I knew Gretchen wanted, decaf tea, which I added to the chaos of things in my arms. (I selected the Red Rose brand.) While they did have a variety of USB gear, it was all targeted at smartphones. There were no USB-B cables. The USB situation was similar at the world's smallest RiteAid across the street, though the plump web-necked cashier tried her best to be helpful.
On the drive home, I made a detour down to Olmstedville to see if the Sullivan Grocery store had any sort of electronics for sale (who knew, they might; they'd unexpectedly stocked Sierra Nevada Torpedo). I found a variety of batteries and even chainsaw blades, but there weren't even supplies for cellphones. After that experience, I didn't bother stopping at Mammy & Pap's as I drove through Minerva.
As I drove, I listened to a radio station broadcasting out of Rutland, Vermont. They were playing a strangely-eclectic mix of music, ranging from Van Halen's "Jump" to the song where Taylor Swift rhymes "nice dress" with "sunset." The advertising seemed targeted towards the elderly or the people whose parents are elderly. I learned, for example, about a service that would come to my home and help me with everything from cleaning up my house to cooking me meals to making sure I took my medication. The weather forecast was for thunderstorms all afternoon, which seemed like the only way to break the oppressive tropical heat I'd encountered in North Creek (good thing there were some shaded parking spaces in the Tops parking lot for the dogs). But back at Twenty Ninth Pond, the weather was noticeably cooler, probably a result of the greater elevation (1900 feet) and the proximity of a body of water.
At the cabin, I launched immediately into my plan-B USB project. I fashioned a soldering iron of tightly-coiled 10-gauge copper wire and a short nub of 14-gauge wire for a soldering tip. To hold it, I had a couple flyaway wires coming from the dense coil. That coil would be the heat reservoir. After holding it for awhile in the blue flames of the gas stove, I could solder for maybe ten seconds at a time. This was all good in theory, though there were a few problems along the way, the worst being my poor near-vision. I wore a pair of Gretchen's reading spectacles, but they weren't quite powerful, especially in the murky light of the cabin's kitchen. It helped to hold a flashlight in my teeth, but even then I couldn't really see what I was doing. When I was done, I took it all out into the sunlight to inspect it. I also tested it with a multimeter (I may not always carry solder, a soldering iron, or a USB-B cable, but the Subaru always has a multimeter somewhere in it.) I'm pleased to say that after all that effort, I was able to connect my weather station to my laptop and communicate with it. But it seemed the joy with getting that to work was mostly in the journey, of me being Mark Watney and the central Adirondacks being the surface of Mars. Because once I had that working, I turned my attention back to working on the reporting system for The Organization. I wanted to implement a report logging system that remembered the parameters used in every report so that they could be picked from a list and re-run.
Meanwhile Gretchen had loaded up both dogs in the kayak, paddled to the north end of the pond, and hiked up to Stony Pond. Yesterday I'd shown it was possible to take both dogs in the kayak, but that had been a very short paddle back from the south end of the pond. That Gretchen had managed to load both dogs into that kayak from the dock and paddle them 600 feet to the north end of the pond without capsizing was impressive indeed.
I'd begun celebrating my Mark Watneyesque victory with a hot cup of kratom tea, and it had me feeling semi-euphoric, social, and thus (due to Gretchen's absence) perhaps a little but lonely. So I walked down to the dock and looked off toward the place where Gretchen had beached the kayak. I was only there for a minute before I saw Gretchen come out of the woods and begin loading up the dogs. As I sat there watching that in the distance, I happened to notice a loon sitting on the water somewhere directly between me and Gretchen. It was perhaps only a hundred feet from Gretchen and directly in her path as she pushed out. She didn't notice it until it stood up in the water and flapped its wings (something they seem to do when they're a little nervous, much like a yawning dog). Last year we referred to the one loon we saw on Twenty Ninth Pond as "Throckmorton," and there was no reason not to assume this was Throckmorton's return.
We had pizza and salad for dinner down on the dock, and Throckmorton was initially not too far from us. Indeed, he was so close that when Ramona noticed him, she started barking at him. Evidently for her he was an eerie apparation as the only visible lifeform out on the waves. I'd never seen her make such a fuss about ducks who were much closer. Gretchen told Ramona to stop barking, and eventually she did. But by then Throckmorton had disappeared beneath the surface. He reappeared somewhat closer, and this time Ramona was a good girl and didn't bark, not even when the loon stood up in the water and nervously flapped his wings. Throckmorton kept disappearing into the water and popping up at random locations until we didn't see him at all, at least not for a time. Then I saw he'd somehow made it to near the south end of the pond. He must've swum underwater for a couple hundred feet to get down there. Soon after noticing him there, Throckmorton started flapping his wings, stood up on the water, and began to run across its surface northward. After more than a hundred feet of still being in contact with the water, he slowly began to rise above its surface. But he was rising too slowly to make it above the treeline on the pond's north end, so he had to turn just before arriving at the pond's north shore to follow the shoreline around and around as he gradually spiralled higher and highter. He was at least twice as high as the tallest tree before he quit climbing and headed off, this time towards the northwest. Last time we'd seen him do something like this, he'd let out a mournful loon call just before heading off, but this time he said nothing.
The kratom had me feeling a little weak in the stomach to the point where I wanted to just lie down and not drink much in the way of alcohol. This was a perfect state to be in while watching episodes of Orange is the New Black.
The makeshift soldering iron I made today.
Gretchen with Neville (front) and Ramona returning from their hike to Stony Pond this afternoon.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160812 feedback
previous | next |
