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so are too are gas stations
Saturday, June 15 2019
Our friend Chrissy came over during Saturday morning coffee mostly so she could photograph the pileated woodpecker nest. I remember several years ago Chrissy got a cheap digital camera at a yard sale that happened to have an unusually large zoom. She quickly graduated to various Nikon Coolpix cameras and filled her Facebook stream with increasingly-impressive birds, particularly members of a family of semi-tame crows living near her house in Uptown Kingston. (Sadly, those crows all left permanently about a year and a half ago.)
Today Chrissy brought her lastest Nikon CoolPix camera, a long-zoom monster that was probably the Coolpix P1000. It looks a considerably larger than the P900 (with a zoom of 83X) she had not all that long ago. My Coolpix P510 (with a zoom of 42X) looks especially scrawny next to it. We were out on the east deck at the time, and it wasn't long before the mother woodpecker had shown up to feed her baby. Chrissy initially tried to get some photographs through a narrow tunnel in the vegetation, but that wasn't working too well. So I showed her to where I have my telescopes and Raspberry Pis set up in the east end of the shop area of the garage, which is at the north end of the house. The window my equipment points out of is at the same elevation as the hole in the dead white pine tree where the woodpeckers are nesting, and the hole points directly at that window. The tree itself is about 25 feet away, which is well within the range of even a low-end Nikon Coolpix camera. So Chrissy set up there among my equipment and took pictures until the woodpeckers disappeared.
It's hard to predict when the woodpeckers will do something; I know from watching the live feed at work that a couple hours can pass in the middle of the day without any woodpecker activity at all. So Chrissy and Gretchen decided to take the dogs (which today included Chongo, the spunky and affable Welsh corgi). While they were out, they missed some woodpecker activity. But once back, Chrissy had barely started on her vegan cheese & crackers before we heard the woodpeckers were at it again (the baby makes a harsh and repetive "ahhhhhhk!" sound whenever the parents might be carrying food (wherever it is exactly that they carry it; the chick is fed via a violent-looking act of parental regurgitation). This time Chrissy was able to get a bunch of good picture of both the chick and the father (she'd been unable to get a good shot of the female earlier). I hadn't really thought about it until Chrissy said it, but we really are lucky to have such an easily-observed nest so close to the house. In the past, she knew about a flicker nest, but it was way up in a tree and hard to see through the vegetation, and even then all one could really see was the bottoms of the fronts of the woodpeckers when they leaned out of their hole. And when you consider that a pair of pileated woodpeckers has a territory of 1000 acres (which they police to keep out other pileated woodpeckers), we're lucky that, of the 100,000 or so trees in that area, they chose one right next to our house.
Chrissy runs her beautiful Victorian house as an AirBnB, and occasionally this means renting the whole thing out as a unit. When she does this, she lives out of her van (some sort of Ford). Today I got a look in that van, and it makes brilliant use of space. The bathroom has a waterproof floor with a drain and can serve as a shower, and there's a fairly big bed and a built-in flatscreen teevee. I don't know about Gretchen, but I could live out of such a van indefinitely.
This afternoon, I went back to tinkering with the serial port of a Raspberry Pi. After much experimentation, I'd had no indication that one could get this serial port working. But then I found somewhere on the web that the port I wanted was /dev/ttyS0 instead of /dev/AMA0 (those both end with zero, not "O" as in "Omar"). This is because internally on the Raspberry Pi Zero W, /dev/AMA0 is used for bluetooth, and so a second serial port was kludged together somehow. Using this information, I was able to read serial information from the Raspberry Pi. But then when I tried to read serial data from the cable connected to the solar controller in the basement, I got nothing. After lots of testing and frustration, it soon became clear that the Max3232 I'd been using to translate RS-232 signals off that cable to the 3v TTL levels required by the Raspberry Pi was somehow destroying the Max232 chip in the solar controller (that's the chip that turns 5v TTL levels into RS-232 levels). This explained why I'd thought I'd replaced a bad Max232 chip with another bad Max232 chips; evidently both had been good until connecting them to the Max3232. It's possible that the problem is the cheap Chinese source Max3232s, and that if I had genuine chips they would be less robocidal. In any case, the solution to my problem was to attach a USB-to-RS-232 adapter to the Raspberry Pi Zero (I had to use an adapter to connect to the micro-USB port on the Raspberry Pi, since that is the only kind of USB port it has.) With that in place, I was finally able to monitor solar controller data from a Raspberry Pi. This means I can now monitor it from anywhere there is an internet connection.
This evening Gretchen and I went to Namaste, that Indian restaurant on 9W south of Saugerties. Before going there, though, we went by our Wall Street rental to confer with one of the tenants about the nasty Japanese barberry bushes in the front yard. These bushes are most unwelcome, though they'd been pruned into little rectangular solids as if someone actively wanted these thorny monstrosities there. My guess is that they either date to a time when barberries were actually deliberately planted or else some other bush had been growing there, and it was gradually replaced by the barberry, which is both tenacious and opportunistic. I said I'd come by with my chainsaw to cut them all down, and the tenant agreed to dig up their roots. Meanwhile, there's a pair of raised-beds now taking up most of the front yard, and there's even a complex system of trellises. Crops include cucumbers, tomatoes, melons, and raddishes.
There were no other customers when we arrived at Namaste, which should be worrying for a restaurant on a Satuday night. Gretchen ordered us both kinds of soups, the chana masala and the aloo gobi, all with roti bread. While that was being prepared, we went to the gas station next door to buy alcoholic drinks. The beer selection was pretty sad, so we went next door to a wine store, but that place was closed (as in, permanently). When we returned to the gas station and made a second, more tolerant appraisal of the beers, some creepy old guy came up behind us and suggested that, if a drink was as imporant to us as it was to him, we should go to a wine store across the street somewhere. Then he told us that this gas station (and all the adjacent stores) were owned by the people who operate Namaste. Indian restaurants are usually operated by Indians, but so are too are gas stations. Gretchen and I settled on a large (22 oz?) bottle of Modelo, which was season-appropriate and wussy enough of a beer for Gretchen to help me drink.
Back at Namaste, our soup came out, and both were disappointingly bland. With lots of salt, pepper, and that red-sauce onion condiment that is served with papadum, it would be made pretty good. But the portions were small and there was no excuse for it to cost $7/serving.
Buy then, there were a couple women at the bar waiting for an order to go and another couple dining in like us. But that was it. The thing is, these days, there aren't many Indian restaurants on the west side of the Hudson. There's Mountain Gate in Woodstock, and that's it. On the east side, there's Cinnamon in Rhinebeck and the Red Hook Curry house, but that requires crossing the river. The atmosphere in Namaste is not great, but I do like the fact that the big screen plays nothing but Punjabi Bollywood content.
Celeste the Cat looking down at Chongo the Dog with unease while Gretchen looks at the sky as a tiny trickle of caffeine enters her bloodstream from her Saturday morning decaf. Click to see more.
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