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inhaling moth eggmass hairs
Wednesday, March 13 2024
It was another beautiful sunny spring day ideal for outdoor activities, so I gathered up a bucket and a flat-tipped screwdriver with the specific plan to gather gypsy moth (aka spongy moth) egg masses down near the greenhouse. But the dogs saw me doing this and decided they wanted to go on a walk. So we went down the Farm Road instead, and there were still plenty of eggmasses to gather there. As I was doing this, a big pickup truck rolled up. It was driven by someone I didn't know who seemed friendly enough. He said he was just looking to see if there were any trees blocking access for Georges to his house at the end of the Farm Road, so I figured maybe he was the guy who does Georges' snow plowing. I said I was destroying gypsy moth egg masses even though there were too many to possibly have much of an effect, though I added that I hoped that the rest could be taken care of by increased predation (though I didn't get into how the cycles of predation and prey influence each other). The guy in the pickup truck said that gypsy moth were also terrible at his place, which he said was just up Dug Hill Road. He also said pine borers were killing all his pines, something I haven't seen around here at all.
I ended up gathering at least a cup's worth of eggmass material from just trees along the nearby Farm Road and then down the first temporary stream to the Stick Trail and back. At some point, though, I knocked off some eggmass material from high on the trunk of a large white oak and the little beige fibers from the outside of the eggmass came raining down. I must've inhaled some of these, because my upper respiratory tract was irritated for awhile after that.
The cleaning lady would be coming today, and I wanted to interact with her as little as possible. Since it was such a nice day, I thought maybe I'd take advantage of the conditions by decamping to the upstairs of the greenhouse, which I sort of forget about in the colder weather. So I took the Japanese tea pot and a Chromebook down there and relaxed a little on the couch. I had the door wide open and could see Neville and Charlotte in a sunny spot near the northeast corner of the house, but for whatever reason they didn't want to join me no matter how much I called to them.
But there wasn't much I could really do that I wanted to get done in the greenhouse, so I soon went back to the laboratory, which was where I spent most of the afternoon while the cleaning ladies (a second one showed up to help!) did their thing. I ended up painting a small painting of an octopus. And then I worked more on my merged-code version of my Moxee Hotspot Watchdog, which was now successfully sending universal epoch time stamps of connection problems to a backend. I still had to figure out how to make the storage of those time stamps form a first-in-last-out array. But I'm getting ever closer to my ultimate goal of implementing a system that can not just log data to a server but can also pick up data from that server to turn on relays, giving me the ability to control the cabin remotely.
Before Gretchen returned from her bookstore shift, I boiled up a box of spaghetti with broccoli and fried up a pan of chonks consisting of mushrooms, tempeh, and onions.
Today's painting of an octopoid. Click to enlarge.
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