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feeling especially festive
Friday, December 20 2024
This morning before I'd had any caffeine or food, I went a short distance down the Stick Trail not quite to the Chamomile where the remains of that dead white ash I'd felled the other day was on the ground. I bucked the rest of it into pieces and brought it all home in two trips. It came to seven large rounds of wood, each of which could be split into as many as six nice pieces of firewood.
After I'd cut the wood up, but before I'd brought it home, I took a little break to work on the Chamomile Stone Wall. Yesterday I'd described two nascent "tears" in the wall, one of which I'd fixed. So today I wanted to fix that other one, which was not far from its eastern end. The wall in that area is perched on a low ledge, meaning the wall is noticeably higher when viewed from the north than it is when viewed from the south. I wanted to build more structure coming up from the lower terrain in the north to keep the wall from moving in that direction any further. I didn't want to do an elaborate rebuild of the wall like I'd done yesterday if I could avoid it, though I would've had it collapsed (and not killed me in the process). Fortunately for me, today the wall survived me building a strong buttress from big stones that I had to go down and pull from the Chamomile (since the land near the wall is pretty well picked clean of nice big stones). I've mentioned before my fondness for river rocks, which tend to be stronger than other rocks given all the banging around that they've survived.
After I'd got all the white ash pieces home and processed, eaten some food, and drunk some tea, I was eager to go out and work on the wall some more. By this point a little snow had accumulated on the ground and Gretchen and gone to meet her friend Paula for lunch at the Garden Café. At the Chamomile Stone Wall, I wanted to add a second buttress a couple feet east of the one I'd just added to provide solid lateral support for that whole section of wall. So I built up another buttress tower, gradually getting it to lean slightly against a point high on the wall. To help keep it stable as I did so (since leaning stacks of stone are not stable), I fetched some thin, narrow, but rather long pieces of bluestone from the endless supply of big pieces on the steep escarpment just west of the wall's western terminus on the Stick Trail. I used these pieces like arms to reach out and attach to the wall in two places separated by as much as four feet. With them in place, I could stack the buttress to a height about equal to the top of the wall. As I worked, I'd put little stones in the various gaps to keep the bigger rocks (as in chunks of geology) from being able to rock (as one might a baby) or slide. Some of the forces acting on the buttress are powerful, and I didn't want rocks to have easy means of escape when subject to them.
While doing all this work, I listened to more of the audio from the Bushradical YouTube channel. I was particularly interested in Dave's (he's the Bushradical) take on why he does what he does as well as his responses to critics. Once you understand his motivations, everything makes sense. His main motiviation appears to be to get by on the cheap to avoid debt and working unpleasant jobs. This leads him (and his wife) to do a lot of things himself (or herself) so as to avoid paying people to do things. He's also happy to spend his time doing those things or enjoying the simple, inexpensive pleasures, thereby saving even more money. What he's striving for is freedom, not an idealistic primitive existence. But if primitive is what's required, he's perfectly happy to do that. This explains why he's happy using electricity, computers, vehicles, and eating food from the grocery store (all things people have criticized him for). But he does it on his terms. The computer he's using to edit his video, for example, is a MacBook Pro from 2011, since it gets the job done and he's not trying to impress anyone with his gear. Similarly, he drives old pickup trucks and is perfectly happy using a chainsaw his wife bought at a yardsale. Dave went on to make a great point about the Amish, that they're perfectly willing to use all sorts of technology, particularly the system of roads, and only reject the tech that they feel will result in harm to their lifestyle. Dave also spent a fair amount of time talking about building permits, inspections, and all that other beaurocratic bullshit that can get in the way of living the way you want to out in the wilderness. He said that in some states that sort of thing isn't enforced nearly as much as in others, though he also feels that unenforced laws shouldn't be exist, since they exist as a cudgel over the heads of disfavored individuals. Dave's motivations and outlook are similar to mine, which is probably why I've been finding his content so compelling. The biggest difference is that he has a wife who is also happy living on nothing, though Gretchen sharing my views on the subject of conspicuous consumption (like me, she thinks of flashy cars, a manicured lawn and such as a waste of money) is probably more important.
Back at the house, Gretchen returned from lunch with eggplant rolatini, one of my favorite dishes made by the Garden, but one that's rarely on the menu.
I had a few things I wanted to get in town, so this afternoon while a light snow was still falling, I drove off in the Bolt. (I'd asked the dogs if they'd wanted to come, and initially they seemed excited. But once out the door, Neville decided he didn't want to go, so neither did Charlotte.) After picking up a book for Gretchen at the library (they love her there), I drove to Home Depot and bought a few things for the cabin. I might not go there for another month, but when I do, the plan is to have everything I need. I also bought some new chainsaw chains for my Kobalt. (I have lots of chains that only need to be sharpened, but I never get around to it.) Then I went to Mother Earth next door and bought several different herbal teas and decaf coffee to give to Gretchen on Baby Jesus day. In the past, I'd get her bottles of booze, since that seems festive. But she's more of an herbal tea kind of lady, so such gifts will seem more thoughtful. The last thing I got while I was out was a 96 pack of pseudoephedrine pills, since that's the thing I like to take 150 mg of when I'm feeling especially festive.
This evening I decided to mount all my laboratory's test ESP8266 Remote Control boards on a larger board to keep the chaos involved to a minimum. When I just have a NodeMCU board with an I2C weather sensor hanging off it, I don't need any sort of housing. But once you add another I2C device, which in turn requires some sort of I2C hub board, then things get chaotic and you need to impose some order. Once I had that order imposed, I could then work on the code necessary to read voltage data from a INA219 board to include it in the data being sent to the backend. As diphenhydramine kicked in, I couldn't my integration of the code to work, though an example ran just fine. I was conversing with ChatGPT about my issues, and it was being supportive if not particuarly helpful.
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