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safer with our dogs running
Sunday, April 6 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I hadn't seen it last night, but Gretchen had sent me a message saying that yet again there had been a complaint about our dogs straying on Ibrahim's parcel. Evidently this happened while I was walking the dogs out to Woodworth Lake Road and back, and must've happened on the walk home, when Charlotte disappeared for a time and evidently appeared on Ibrahim's front stoop. Ever since an incident back in the late Spring last year where Neville was supposedly witnessed killing a deer fawn, Ibrahim and his wife have been spooked by our dogs, erroneously thinking that just because a dog will kill a wild animal that that same dog will gladly kill a child. Compounding everything is the fact that their A-frame cabin is bristling with cameras, so it's impossible for our dogs to go through their yard without being photographed. Anyone who understood anything about dogs (or had, say, grown up in the country) wouldn't have such fears and certainly wouldn't be willing to kindle a feud with a neighbor over a zero-tolerance policy with respect to dogs that have never done them any harm. But they're from the suburbs and panic about anything they think could be a danger to their children, no matter how remote. Initially I was so preoccupied thinking about this latest eruption of this issue that had trouble focusing on other things. But then I came up with a strategy I would use to provide some perspective into Ibrahim and his family should I ever talk to them about this. It would go like this: I would ask them what they think a wild coyote would do to a deer fawn if the coyote were to find one. Clearly, no coyotes would pass up such an opportunity for tender meat. I would then say that coyotes are common in the area, and, unlike our dogs, they have an unknown predator/prey relationship with the local human children. It's possible some coyotes would see a small child as an opportunity for fresh meat. But it's a lot harder for coyotes to stalk their prey in and around Woodworth Lake when our dogs are running around off-leash. Why? Because our dogs have a proven history of chasing coyotes off. The upshot of all this is that kids are, on balance, safer with our dogs running around than they would be if we kept them bottled up in our cabin.
After drinking my usual morning coffee and then switching to kratom tea, I decided to see if I could get the INA219 voltage sensor device working on my SolArk Copilot, which runs a somewhat modified ESP8266 firmware that allows it to parse data from a serial stream coming from the SolArk inverter. It had never worked, but perhaps that was an effect of the ESP8266 using its serial port, which I now knew could have the side effect of disabling random I2C devices. To test if this was indeed the case, I reflashed the SolArk Copilot board with my normal ES8266 firmware, and, wouldn't you know, data from the INA219 started flowing. I couldn't get the INA219 to work with the SolArk Copilot firmware after a few basic attempts. So I gave up on that and decided to instead try to monitor that same 12 volt signal from the East Basement Switcher, the ESP8266 that handles most of my remote control actions. But as I was wiring it up, I mistook a ground wire for a 12v line (it was black, so I should've known better) and ended up destroying two different INA219 boards. Fortunately, they only cost a few dollars a piece. (And it's surprising I haven't destroyed more electronics with all the work I've done.)
After cleaning up the cabin, I was ready to load up the car and go. But then Charlotte went running off down the Lake Edward Trail, with an excited Neville following some distance behind. I thought maybe they'd be gone for hour or something, but they were back within only about ten minutes and we could finally begin our drive back to Hurley. It was a rainy drive and we started with only 118 miles of range (it hadn't been sunny, and some of that was from running the generator). But the car still had 31 miles of range when I rolled up to the Hurley house. I'd begun the drive at noon, so I got home a little aftr 2:00pm.
This evening Gretchen made a surprisingly delicious meal of polenta (which I don't usually much like), asparagus, mushrooms, and tempeh. We watched a Jeopardy! and the third episode of Hello Tomorrow!. (We'd originally had plans to have dinner with A, one of its stars, and her boyfriend, but she ended up canceling on us.)
My brother Don called this evening, and the main news he had from the Shenandoah Valley was that our friend Josh had hooked him up with a junk removal job at some old woman's house. Surprisingly, Don had managed to stay focused enough to work for hours and ended up earning $70. He also got to keep some of the junk, including a Time-Life book and a bunch of porno mags. I asked Don if he ever watches porn on his phone, and he said he did, but then mostly talked about seeing convincingly humanoid robots resembling attractive women. He seems to understand that the most realistic expectation he has for a girlfriend would be with such a robot, perhaps one that falls off the back of a truck in a dystopian Elon-Musk-manufactured future.
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