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rainy day ring ring
Tuesday, August 4 2020
location: southeast shore, Twenty Ninth Pond, remote Minerva Township, Essex County, New York
I'd gone out last night at about 10:00pm in hopes of seeing the Comet Neowise as it recedes towards invisible in the extra-dark skies of the Adirondacks. But by then a thin layer of altostratus had blown in, obscuring every heavenly body except Jupiter. By this morning, rain was falling. Yesterday I'd assembled a Raspberry-Zero-based Raspberry Pi feedercam on a conventional bird feeder (filled, in this case, with cracked corn) and eventually hung it from a spruce a couple dozen feet above the pond. I'd used masking tape to make it a little weather-resistant, so it was no big deal that I'd left it out in the rain. But I was glad I brought it in when I did. Eventually I'd also have to pull the kayak out of the pond and put it upside-down on the dock, since it was too rainy to comfortably paddle it to the boathouse.
During a lull in the rain late in the morning, Gretchen tried to get the dogs to accompany her on a walk up to the cellphone spot at the high point on the access road, but they wouldn't venture out into the faint trickle until I decided to go too. So there we were, hunched over our phones in the access road (to keep the rain off them) while the dogs stood around wondering when the fun was going to start. One of the messages I had was from Rich, the new guy running the tax department, wanting to know if I could debug some issue with an Electron-based app that I heroically modified nearly two years ago and have hardly had to touch since. I gave him the number of our cabin's landline, which we've been told never to call out on, and decided I was on vacation at least until it rang.
While Gretchen and I were having a rousing rainy-day game of ping pong in the cabin's basement game room, I heard the rumble I knew could only be coming from that ancient rotary-dial phone's electromagnetic ringing mechanism. By the time Gretchen got to it, though, the caller had given up on trying to call us. I assumed the call was from someone at work, but later when the caller tried again, it turned out to be Powerful wondering what if anything he needed to do in the case of a power outage. I told him it was best to just wait it out, but that if he needed anything specific, it was likely that Ray and Nancy would be having power back on (if they lost it at all) before he did.
It seemed that a tropical storm was tearing through southern New York and New England, and all the rain we were having today was probably related to that. By this evening, the rain was coming down in sheets. Normally the front porch is immune to rain, but throughout the day I gradually brought more and more things in front the porch. At first this included the electronics I'd placed on the table I like to work from. But later I also had to bring in a small mattress we'd dragged out there for use as a dog bed. By then there were a number of puddles forming near the porch's center.
For dinner tonight, Gretchen cooked up a single Amy's "Vegan Supreme" frozen pizza. Such pizzas are small, and it wasn't much food. But we hadn't done much today to require much in the way of sustenance.
At some point I took a bath in the newly-rennovated bathroom, where I made mental notes about the antiquated hot and cold water hardware. The continuous rain during the bath reminded me of my childhood, when I could only bathe when it rained due to the fact that all our potable water in those days was collected in a cistern from precipitation on the roof.
This evening as I launched the last episode of the last season of Silicon Valley, Gretchen wanted to watch something with me. So we watched the first two episodes of the Black Lady Sketch Show. It's sort of Key-and-Peelesque, but even weirder, and with even more unapologetic, esoteric references to Black culture. We found it sufficiently entertaining for our needs.
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