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fuck you, honeybees of Red Hook
Tuesday, May 7 2019
At noon today, I was walking to my car with the intention to drive to Hannaford to buy this week's supplies when I had a sudden change of mind (free will!) and decided to walk into the center of Red Hook instead. I ended up ordering a burrito at Bubby's from the slightly-flirty cashier who works on Tuesdays. Today she noted that I wear a lot of rings, whereupon I told her about the two identical rings on my right ring finger. They're actually stainless steel platter spacers from a 2.5 inch hard drive.
On the walk back to work south down Elizabeth Street, I was passing the two big mansions to the east when I noticed that every so often there was a small yellow sign warning about a recent application of pesticide. I wondered what could possibly be the threat so severe that it required chemical warfare, especially given the many blooming dandylions and the honeybees trying to collect pollen on them. The bees had probably flown from the beehives less than two hundred feet away (41.991229N, 73.874935W)
at the southwest corner of the intersection of Elizabeth and Fisk (in Red Hook there are actually two such intersection for some reason, but the one I'm referring to is the westernmost of these intersections).
Back at home this evening, I was just finishing figuring out how to get the MaxMatrix character editor to repetitively apply effects to every character in a character set (the key was storing the patterns somewhere other than in the hash of the URL) when I heard the slightly-uptight cackle of a pileated woodpecker. I hadn't seen the woodpeckers in their new nest in the dead white pine in days, and was hopeful one or more of them had returned. I looked out the laboratory window and could see someone was definitely in the three-inch hole in that tree. So I ran and got the good camera and managed to take a photograph. Some internet research revealed that this was a female, since she lacked a splash of red feathers on her cheek.
By my bedtime (which is around 9:30pm these days), I'd made it so that all the MaxMatrix tools could be applied to a whole set of characters at once (try the tool here). I'd also nearly gotten the pan/tilt camera movement system working for the Raspberry Pi Zero surveillance robot in the laboratory.
Poisoned dandylions along Elizabeth Street in Red Hook at 41.991756N, 73.874606W.
Today's pileated woodpecker sighting. This dead pine tree is about 16 inches in diameter at breast height.
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