|
|
disposing of many gallons of sand Sunday, September 22 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
This morning after I drank my coffee, I did some work altering the code on in three different code repositories related to remote contorl and monitoring at the cabin so that the logging of remote control activities would better reflect who or what had initiated the changes. When that was done, I took the dogs for a walk. We started by going down the Lake Edward Trail, but then after I'd crossed Quarterway Brook (the first year-round moving body of water, which Charlotte and I typically cross on a fallen tree), I took a turn southward, ending up at a marsh that I made the mistake of trying to cross. It was like quicksand, and I soon had to step out of my Crocs, which had been sucked into the mire, in order to proceed. (I was able to pull them out of the muck, something that required a fair amount of force.) Also in that area, I found a boulder or piece of exposed bedrock that was delmainating into nice flagstones, a rare resource in this part of the Adirondacks. It would be impractical to gather flagstones from such a remote outcrop, but perhaps I can find similar outcrops in more accessible locations.
At some point today I noticed that the surveillance camera I'd installed ten or twelve feet up in a sugar maple tree at the west edge of the building site had fallen from its attachment and was now just hanging by the power cable that connects it to a small solar panel (its only source of power). When I fetched a ladder to see what had happened and to reinstall it, I saw that the tree I'd attached it to had grown enough (over the course of three growing seasons) to break the plastic of its mounting piece from around the screws securing it to the tree. So when I reinstalled it, I left a half-inch clearance between the plastic mounting piece and tree. The installed camera initially didn't work, though, but eventually I was able to reboot it and get it working again. I then reinstalled the solar panel attachment, which was well on its way to falling, putting actual springs between the tree bark and the mounting piece. I knew trees grew and imagined the bark would eventually start to surround the mounting hardware. But I hadn't expected it to happen so quickly and for the forces to break the plastic (I only have experience with metal attached to trees).
Late this afternoon, I carried more than twenty five-gallon buckets of sand from beneath the cabin's screened-in porch to various low places along the near part of the new Mossy Rock Trail, filling those low spots in (and occasionally making causeways) to create a trail that, instead of undulating up and down, gradually rises in something approaching a straight line as it approaches the cabin. This further refinement of the Mossy Rock Trail is completely unnecessary, but I needed to find some place to dispose of all the extra sand under the porch, and this was a convenient place to do that nearby.
At around sunset, I took the dogs for another walk, this time out to Woodworth Lake Road and then up to the base of a radio tower atop the next hill to the south.
The boulder I found with delaminating flagstones, with a beer for scale.
Click to enlarge.
Woodworth Lake Road, looking west, at around 7:00pm this evening near our driveway.
Click to enlarge.
The antenna tower atop the next hill south across Woodworth Lake Road.
Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is: http://asecular.com/blog.php?240922 feedback previous | next |