|
|
|
Sunday gunday not such a funday
Sunday, June 9 2019
When I went to the brownhouse this morning, some extremely hot (in a peppery way) material passed somewhat prematurely out of my body. It was the remnants of Friday night's noodle dish. I'd had to stop eating it then because it had been too fiery. Last night I'd added some unspiced noodles and such in an effort to dilute it, but it had still been at the limits of edibility. Now, finally, it was out of my body, leaving a lingering burn as it departed.
While Gretchen was off working at the bookstore for a second day in a row, I thought I'd do some gardening chores. After some light weeding, I planted a row of sunflowers along the north edge of the garden. The breed of sunflowers were "Mammoth," and hopefully this means they grow big. In case they do, that's why I planted them north of the rest of the garden. It's kind of a bummer that none of my old sunflower seeds are viable; it's been nice using the previous years' seeds to grow the sunflowers every summer.
My various Raspberry-Pi-based surveillance systems are fully-capable Linux computers that allow me to do a lot more than just watch woodpeckers from anywhere in the world. One thing I'd like to be able to do is use one of the Raspberry Pis to monitor the Arduino-based solar controller, which is its own, much simpler robot. That controller has a serial connection attached to a cable that already runs up to the laboratory. Why not just attach it to the serial connection on the laboratory's surveillance robot? With that in mind, the other day I'd taken delivery of several little Max3232 boards, which adapt the conventional RS-232 levels coming from the solar controller to the 3.3 volt logic of the Raspberry Pi. I set all this up, but it wasn't working. I soon determined that the Max232 on the solar controller (which adapts RS-232 levels to 5 volt logic) must've gone bad, probably from a lightning strike one or more years ago. It's an easy replacement, but not one I want to make when the sun is out. In the course of my tinkering today, I accidentally put the solar controller into winter mode, causing the circulation pump to turn off for some algorithmic reason that I can't explain. It was only off for about fifteen minutes, but that was long enough for the hydronic fluid to start boiling and being ejected in clouds of water vapor from the air-release valve at the top of the panel. Happily, once I'd gotten the fluid circulating again, the boiling stopped.
In the mid afternoon, while waiting for a load of laundry to dry on the clothesline, I took a nice nap with Ramona and Neville. It was the sound of gunfire down at the bus turn around that definitely brought that to an end. It had been less than two hours, but the laundry was already mostly dry. As I reeled it in, the gunfire continued. But then something amazing happened. At the time, Crazy Dave must've been walking his dogs in the forest, and he started doing the thing he sometimes does, screaming at the top of his lungs. It's a familiar thing to me, but I could imagine it being absolutely terrifying for someone who doesn't live around here. I couldn't really make out what Dave was going on about, though it was very repetitive and could've been just him calling for one or more of his three dogs. This brought the gunfire to an immediate end, and it stayed silent for at least ten minutes. Then there was the sudden roar of what sounded like a fully-automatic machine gun (it must've been someone using a bump stock) and then the woods fell silent for good. Evidently that had been the gunman's final fuck you before leaving in disgust. Being auditory witness to how this unfolded increases my interest in concealing loud solar-powered "audiobots" in the forest near the bus turnaround (where the shooting happens). Such audiobots would passively monitor the soundscape and then, when hearing loud noises such as gunfire, execute a function that, if a rare numeric outcome resulted, would trigger the very loud playing of an MP3. The MP3 wouldn't play for long before falling silent. If several such audiobots were hidden high in trees, they would respond randomly at different distances and directions, evading discovery and making Sunday gunday not such a funday.
Yesterday with the new camera setup, I'd been able to get good images of what the woodpeckers where doing after landing on the tree near their nesting hole. I saw one of the parents carrying what looked to be insect grubs in its beak. This morning for the first time, I saw some other creature in the hole reaching up to interact with a parent. This had to be a baby woodpecker. I'd been concerned that the nest was too deep for the babies to ever be visible, but perhaps not. And them later today I got a very good look at a baby as it raised up as high as the center of the hole. This represents a huge increase in capabilities over this morning (and all the days that preceded). I know woodpeckers grow up fast, but this seemed almost supernatural. Unfortunately, in my excitement I pushed the wrong button on the web page I was watching this on, and I did not record any video or take any pictures.
This evening I began the process of redoing the stairs to the basement in a manner similar to how I'd redone the steps up to the second floor. The idea is to remove all the old carpet, repaint the steps, and then stick down little carpet pads with double-sided tape. Today, though, all I could do was begin with the removal of the old carpet and the pad underneath. The next phase (which will take hours of work) is to remove all the staples. When Gretchen saw how much work that would involve, she (predictably) suggested that I just hammer all the staples down. But most of the staples have tiny bits of padding trapped underneath them, and the easiest way to get rid of that part is to pull out the staple. I have a good pair of pliers (the kind with geared jaws designed to close parallel to each other instead of from a pivot), but some of the staples will require a small screwdriver (used as a pry bar) to extract.
As I worked, I listened to a surprisingly interesting (and unsurprisingly profanity-laced) history of Black Sabbath on YouTube by Rageaholic, whose piece on Stryper had also been interesting. It included the story of how Ozzy hired a dwarf to go on tour with him as a way to make fun of Ronnie James Dio, who (I learned later) was only 64 inches tall.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?190609 feedback
previous | next |
