Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Like my brownhouse:
   able to remotely turn on the generator
Sunday, November 17 2024

location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY

This morning while both dogs were in bed together doing what they'd done yesterday, I was down in the basement reworking the systems that can turn the generator on and off. My first method for doing this (dating to 2021, before we even had the solar panels and inverter) was to have a mercury tilt thermostat in the first floor bathroom turn on the generator when conditions got "cold" (it was hard to tell what temperature that was), and when the generator came up, so did the boiler, which would heat the cabin until the thermostat turned everything off. This served to keep temperatures above freezing automatically (unless the generator developed a fault that required a human interaction, which it did once). Later, I figured out how to have the SolArk inverter turn on the generator, but that was a crude mechanism; all I could do was set some lower battery percentage threshold, and once it was triggered, the generator would stay on until the battery was full, which isn't really what I wanted. So today I made it to the only thing that can turn on the generator remotely is a signal from the SolArk Co-pilot. This would allow me to remotely tweak the algorithm, allowing the generator to be turned on or off for a wide range of reasons. I then tried it out experimentally, and it worked great. I left it charging both the Bolt and the cabin battery (which had gotten pretty low after my minisplit experiments) while I took the dogs on a similar walk to the one I'd taken yesterday. This time, though, Neville decided to join us.
Back at the cabin, I turned off the generator and became the work of cleaning up and shutting down the cabin. Fortunately for me, I'd been careful to clean as I'd worked on the minisplit, putting tools away when I was finished with them and dealing with trash and burnables, so there wasn't too much to do. Since I was all done installing the minisplit, I could take home all the esoteric tools necessary to do that work (flaring tools, crappy hole saws, gauges, my Ryobi battery-powered hammer drill, and the vacuum pump). I loaded up the dogs a little before noon and began the two hour drive home. Temperatures where in the upper 40s when I left, and they were in the lower 60s when I arrived in Hurley.

When I arrived in the parking area, Gretchen was several hours into a melt down about her inability to find the Forester's keys since getting home from the Poughkeepsie train station on Friday. This meant she hadn't been able to drive anywhere or move the Forester, which was occupying the parking area in a really stupid, expansive manner. Gretchen had thoroughly cleaned the front part of the Forester and then moved on to the closet in the house's front entranceway. But the keys could not be found. I said I'd look with a fresh set of eyes and a flashlight, and it wasn't long before I found the keys down in the that moronic gap that most vehicles have between there front seats and that hump between them. It was barely visible even with a bright flashlight, but it hadn't vanished from the universe. I managed to grab it with my fingertips (part of what makes that space so moronic is that things cannot be seen in it and they often can't be reached in it either) and pull it out. I sang "Happy Birthday" as I revealed the keys in my hand. Gretchen was enormously relieved; she'd already priced out getting fresh new keys, and with the fancy way they work on modern cars, it would've cost $3000.

As I ate some leftover chili that Gretchen had made for her and Lisa P the other evening (it needed ghost pepper, but otherwise was pretty good), Gretchen told me all about her various adventures in Chelsea with Fern and Basenji was dog sitting.
Our tenant in the 1L apartment at the Downs Street brick mansion hadn't paid her rent this month and wasn't responding to numerous attempts to communicate, so we decided to go over there and see what the problem was. Perhaps she had died! We got there and her car wasn't there (it hadn't been for some time), and when we used our key to get into her apartment, we found it was very messy, but neither she nor her little dog were there. The state of the kitchen suggested she'd only intended to be gone briefly, not for weeks. Perhaps she had somehow ended up in a Turkish prison. Gretchen later called the local police to open something of a missing persons report. It was only then that she realized she knew very little about this tenant. She didn't know where she worked or who any of her contacts were. We'll be rectifying this on future rental agreements.
While we were at Downs Street, we saw the woman from the second floor apartment whose husband had died last week after a years-long battle with cancer. She was with a few friends and seemed very sad. Gretchen gave her a hug and she showed us photos on her phone of their wedding, which had happened only a couple weeks ago on a sunny late October day. Her groom looked to be on death's door, of course, being extremely thin and requiring constant oxygen from a plastic hose draped beneath his nose.

While we were in Kingston, we stopped at the Ghettoford Hannaford to buy a bunch of groceries, particularly various plant-based milks, beans, cereal, and corn chips. But we had trouble finding things, since the store has been completely reorganized. We talked to a manager about it, and she theorized that the placing of similiar items part apart on the store was part of an effort to get customers to move around more in the store, to perhaps spend more money.


Neville from a distance across the mostly-dry East Bifurcation Falls late this morning. Click to enlarge.


Zooming in on Neville. Click to enlarge.


He's thinking about how to navigate the steep terrain. Click to enlarge.


A hen bufflehead duck near our dock near the end of our morning walk. Click to enlarge.


She didn't seem to concerned about me or Charlotte. Click to enlarge.


Or Neville, for that matter. Click to enlarge.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?241117

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