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lumber hauling in a downpour
Thursday, September 4 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
At this time of year, every day starts noticeably later than the one before. At this point my 6:00am alarm is going off when the hazy light of the sun has only just begun to illuminate the easter sky. It's also a time of year when society has returned back to normal activity after the ambitional siesta of August. Congress is back in session, and, to the disappointment of many, people haven't been distracted away from Donald Trump's Epstein scandal by his many outrages.
Meanwhile on my morning drive, I'm seeing sights that had disappeared back in June. The one little boy waiting for a school bus on Hurley Mountain has presumably advanced a grade and is back waiting for his bus. Over the summer his hair has grown into a mid-60s mop. (The thing I find unusual about him is that he waits for his bus by himself; these days most parents are too helicoptery to let their kids wait alone alone for a bus until they are old enough to drive to school.) And in the field along Milldam, I'm seeing a single cow again waiting in the field. Is this the same cow I saw back in the spring? Or was that cow eaten and this is the replacement, none the wiser of his or her fate? (I have my doubts; that earlier cow looked too old to be raw material for any industry other than glue.)
For me, there's something depressing about seeing history repeat on this scale, as it seems to highlight the pointlessness of life. But that might just be because of my generally-negative feelings about fall. By contrast, whenever I see the signifiers of spring (such as the arrival of phoebes or hummingbirds or the flowering of catalpas), for some reason that doesn't suggest life's pointlessness.
At the end of the workday, I stopped at that gas station in Accord to buy a six pack of Golden Monkey, that strong Belgian-style beer that is difficult to find elsewhere. Normally I only stop at gas stations to buy road beer, but (at least according to the present form of my personal drinking rules) I was not yet allowed to drink. I could only do that after Gretchen left for pilates, and then only on a Thursday that we would be driving to the cabin.
I took a cocktail comprised of vodka and unsweetened cold SPORTea with me on a walk with Charlotte down the Stick Trail and then quickly over to the Farm Road. But I didn't make a big walk out of it; after losing Charlotte in the forest, I headed over to a place on the escarpment west of the Farm Road to where I'd cached a nice piece of bluestone. I didn't end up finding it, but I found lots of other nice pieces, which I cached along the Farm Road to pick up a few minutes later in the Forester.
I had to take the Forester on this weekend's drive to the Adirondack cabin because I needed to pick up some big pieces of lumber at the Lowes in Amsterdam. This also meant I took the Thruway route, as driving to Amsterdam from Schoharie would've been more out of the way.
While I was back in Lowes tracking down some hardware, rubber flashing sealant, a 12 foot six by six, and a 16 foot two by eight, Gretchen was letting the dogs run around in the parking lot. They inevitably went into the Lowes, where a manager type found them delightful. A young woman working as a cashier admitted at first that she is sort of afraid of dogs, but Neville and Charlotte proved themselves so charming that soon she was petting them and happy to have overcome her fears. She later checked me out and even found me a strong (if surprisingly old-looking) co-worker to help me hoist the big pieces of lumber onto the Subaru's roof rack.
From Amsterdam, the rest of the drive was through occasionally torrential showers, which made visibility bad (particularly given my old scratched-up eyeglasses with their increasingly-unhelpful old prescription). But I got us to the cabin okay and the lumber on the roof rack didn't wriggle loose.
After we brought everything into the cabin in the rain, I went down to the basement to investigate another issue with my SolArk Copilot, the version of ESP8266 Remote Controller I've adapted to monitor data available via a serial connection to the SolArk inverter. The SolArk Copilot had fallen silent, and I'd been forced to rely on, as an alternative (but slower and less granular) source of that same data, the SolArk cloud, whose API I'd managed to figure out over a year ago. (It gets its data from a dongle that the SolArk Copilot is attached to.) But then that data had flatlined, making me wonder if there was something wrong with the inverter itself. But then I'd found that other sources of that same data in the same API had not flatlined, so the whole thing was a mystery until I could see what was happening.
But I never did figure out what was happening. When I pulled the USB cable from the SolArk Copilot to plug it into a laptop, it rebooted and came up happily transmitting good data once more. This confirmed my feelings that I really need to implement some sort of hardware watchdog or a way to reboot the SolArk Copilot from another ESP8266 Remote.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250904 feedback
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