|
|
|
not too cold to gather firewood
Friday, November 23 2018
I'd had an entry for this day that I accidentally overwrote, so this is a reconstruction written on Novemeber 27th:
Today was sunny, though temperatures were unseasonably cold, ranging from the single digits Fahrenheit up to (but not reaching) freezing. This made it colder than the average day on the statistical coldest day of the year (which ranges from 14 to 35 degrees Fahrenheit). Conditions were so brutal that the best walk Gretchen could provide our dogs was a to the end of the Farm Road and back. On her return, she noted that she had seen no vehicles, indicating there were no hunters in the forest. Even though surely many of them had the day off, they'd sooner sit on couches watching... (what do such people watch? Gold Rush Alsaka?) than stand around waiting for an unlucky deer in the woods in such cold.
Despite all that, over the course of the day I ventured into the forest to gather three backpack loads of firewood from the dry fallen oaks below where the Stick Trail crosses the Chamomile. Wearing a tee shirt, a light jacket, a scarf, gloves, sweatpants, socks, rubber military-surplus galoshes, a blaze-orange baseball cap, and headphones (for podcasts, ear protection, and, on this day, warmth), I was perfectly comfortable, particularly during the most arduous part of every salvage run: walking the load back home, particularly the end of that walk, when I have to climb up either the steep "mountain goat" path behind the wood shed or the stone steps near the house's south deck (which I've been using more lately). Even in today's cold, I managed to work up a sweat. I also worked up an appetite, so it was handy that we had so much leftover food from the Thanksgiving feast. As I told Gretchen today, eating leftovers is a much better eating experience than eating it at a sit-down dinner. By the time the food is leftover, you already know what you like, and also you are no longer obliged to "perform" the eating of food, some of which you do out of a sense (however vague it might be) of polite humility.
There had been vague plans to maybe go out to see a movie tonight, but in the end we both decided it was more one of those days to just hibernate in front of a fire. I don't think I took advantage of even a single Black Friday sale.
Occasionally I'd venture into the laboratory, where my main project of the day was to figure out why my old (2013-era) Dazzle Hackintosh is so unreliable. Sometimes I start it and it boots up to a Macintosh desktop that can be used for hours (or even days) with no problem. Other times it will boot most of the way and then die in a white screen kernel panic. That's usually not too terrible of a problem; a reboot will then bring it back to life. Sometimes, though, it will hang at stage very early into the boot process, the one that happens even before data is pulled from the hard drive. When this happens, a reboot often won't help, and it will remain in this vexing state for many reboots. Often the only cure that works is to pull the power cord and wait for all the stored power in all the capacitors to drain down to nothing. Some testing suggested this problem might be caused by the Nvidia Geforce 9400 GT video card, though it's hard to say for sure. Diagnosing reliability issues is much harder than diagnosing complete absences of functionality.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?181123 feedback
previous | next |
