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downrange meadow
Tuesday, September 16 2025
Throughout the day, I finally brought a feature to my three labor-of-love web apps that I initially thought was unnecessary: the display of normal human names for users. Back when I created my first login system for this series of apps (I believe it was for my original web clipboard), I was trying to make the new user registration process as quick and painless as possible. So I only made it collect an email (to be used as a username) and a password (to be entered twice). That worked great, but over time, especially as other users started creating accounts, I began to see the value in displaying actual names instead of email addresses. This is particularly true now that the latest version of my web clipboard is also a simple communications app. It also makes sense to show real names in the networked spelling bee app, where one sees the progress of other players. It's less crucial to show human names in the ESP8266 Remote Control System (the crown jewel of my recent web apps), but after implementing this functionality, the visual indication of who exactly is logged in is somewhat improved.
At lunch today the company did something unusual: it ordered pizza for everyone. Nobody thought to get vegan pizza, of course, so I didn't even bother to go down to where people were gathered. And, since nobody was in the room where the Lunchroom Court is held, I didn't bother to go there either. I just ate my lunch (leftover soup from last week) at my desk. I was jacked up on pseudoephedrine at the time and so didn't have much of an appetite.
When I got home after work, I took Charlotte for an unusual walk down the lower Chamomile gorge (or, perhaps, hollow) to the old school bus turn around, the place where people used to gather to endlessly shoot their guns back before Gretchen managed to muster the political resources to shut it down. The turn-around used to be littered with spent shell casings and other trash (typical tragedy-of-the-commons stuff), but the only obvious artifacts now are a line of large boulders to keep people from pulling off the road and orange signs high on the trees advising that target shooting there is forbidden. Nature seems to be recovering after all the years of overweight people tromping back and forth to targets and flinging small metal projectiles. Japanese stiltgrass seems to be the biggest initial beneficiary of the absence of gun-obsessed humans. Interestingly, there are a fair number of fallen and standing dead trees down range, so many that their absence in the canopy has opened up a swath of meadow. I suspect the thing that killed these trees was the enormous number of bullets they were hit with, often at a consistent height above the ground. I was able to find a fair number of bullets embedded in or falling out of the wood of the fallen trees. Some of the bullets were completely intact and others (particularly copper hollow-point bullets) were crushed or otherwise deformed. I hiked down to the end of the down-range meadow and then began my ascent of the escarpment to get back to the part of the forest I frequent (defined on the lowest contour by the Gullies Trail). Initially my progress was hampered by dense thickets of saplings along the side of the downrange meadow. But above that, the slope became the biggest impediment.
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Further up the slope, I encountered a set of previously-unknown cliffs composed mostly of shale. They had vertical and even overhanging faces and rose at least ten feet in an impenetrable line at least 50 feet in length. Getting around them and up the extremely steep slope wasn't easy, and I still had a ways to go before getting to the Gullies Trail. But once I was there, it was easy to get to the Stick Trail and walk back home.
Tonight I made rice and a big pan of kale and collard greens from the garden. There were a great many caterpillars on the greens that had to be eliminated, and some of the smaller ones weren't easy to brush off.
The Chamomile Wall, viewed from below to the north across a patch of Japanese stiltgrass. Click to enlarge.
A sign to deter target practice. Click to enlarge.
The big rocks along Dug Hill Road to deter people trying to park. Click to enlarge.
The downrange meadow, looking from where the guns used to shoot. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte beneath the cliffs I discovered today. Click to enlarge.
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