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catching the tail end of the Adirondack vacation
Friday, August 23 2019
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
I had a kind of a bad day at work because I spent the whole thing trying to make my Electron app do the import it had been failing to do yesterday. I'd tweak a setting and try the import, and an hour later it would crash, so then I'd try something else. In an eight hour day, you don't get more than seven experiments at that pace. And meanwhile Alex was cranking up the pressure. My strategy is to under promise and over deliver, so I had to keep things grimly pessimistic. When 4:00pm came, it was time to head to the Adirondacks. Not wanting to backtrack to the Kingston Thruway exit, I drove north out of Red Hook and crossed the Hudson at the bridge connecting the town of Hudson to the town of Catskill (you'd think they could be a little more creative with the names of these places). There'd been an accident earlier on the bridge, so I was stuck in slow-moving traffic for miles. Heading north up I-87, I got stuck in another long stretch of slow-moving traffic starting at the Albany airport and lasting to that spectacular pair of bowed iron bridges across the Hudson. My plan was to drive all the way to Twenty Ninth Pond without using Google Maps, but when I reached Exit 24 on I-87 (some 70 miles north of Albany), I thought maybe that was the exit for Minerva. But there was no mention of Minerva at the exit. I took the Exit 25, but when there still was no mention of Minerva, I fired up Google Earth. It turned out that the exit I was seeking was 26.
Since I was driving the Prius (which is not a good car for rough roads), I drove it very gently to the top of the Twenty Ninth Pond access road and parked it in a place that works as a parking lot along the road. When I got out of the car, I heard the jangling of dog tags, suggesting Ramona and Neville might be near (even though I was still over a quarter mile from the cabin). So I called out to the dogs, and they immediately appeared, very surprised and delighted that I had finally showed up. I was little curious why Gretchen wasn't also there; usually she'd be with them if they were so far from the house. Perhaps she'd recently been there to check her phone, since this is also the spot nearest the house where her phone (which uses Verizon) gets a good signal (my phone uses the AT&T network and gets a usable signal much closer to the cabin).
At the cabin, I found Gretchen under some blankets on the couch reading a novel, her third or fourth since getting to the cabin on Monday. Earlier in the week, she'd entertained Dina and her kids for a day. Sometime during that (on Tuesday at lunch), she'd fed a larger army that included Dina's parents and possibly her husband Gilaud as well, who'd stopped at the cabin briefly during what was otherwise an uninterrupted drive from Toronto to Boston. (Amusingly, Dina hadn't brought any food, claiming she hadn't encountered a single fruit stand on her separate drive from wherever she'd come from.) All of this is to say that, after Dina's family's visit, Gretchen had been alone at the lake with the dogs since some time Tuesday. She said she'd seen very few animals. This year there haven't been any beavers, loons, blue herons, leeches, or even frogs. And she'd only seen one pitcher plant.
I poured myself a glass of Two Gingers Irish Whiskey (which I'd brought) and decided to keep running tests of the problematic import I'd been attempting all day. I added some minor debugging code to see what would happen if I was the one who, on my schedule, triggered a huge data post from frontend to backend. The answer to that question was still unknown when I put my computer aside for the night, crawled into bed, and put a pillow on my head. It was a bit colder in the cabin than either Gretchen and I would've preferred, but neither of us are in the habit of turning on the heat in the cabin on Twenty Ninth Pond.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?190823 feedback
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