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terrifying lake creature
Sunday, September 21 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I woke up in the wee hours of the morning and decided to have some more booze before sleeping through the rest of the night. But I was careful not to drink too much.
This morning I looked at the recent rebooting behavior of the I2C slave attached to the SolArk Copilot and saw that it had yet again triggered a reboot after the "seconds since last watchdog pet" reached some number just below two to the fifteenth power, suggesting I still had issues with two's complement values being interpreted as large integers. I had ChatGPT suggest a fix and left it to run on its own again to see if there were more unwanted slave-initiated reboots.
Meanwhile the dogs, who had been in bed well after I'd gotten up, had gone outside and gone on some mysterious adventure. I walked down to the lake to see if I could find them but I could not, so I walked south along the lakeshore and headed back towards the cabin via the Backwards Cliffs Gorge (which sits partially on our boundary with Shane's parcel).
I then wired up a switch and a light to illuminate the little space beneath the basement's bulkhead exit. This went fairly well, though for some reason I couldn't get the flange of the double-sized old-work box I installed to lie flush against the wall. While I was down there doing these things, I continued adding bits of old CDs to the part of the wall I am tiling with those. I'm at the point where all the pieces required are small, and I've gone from cutting rough approximations of tiny pieces needed to carefully cutting out perfect shapes. I hadn't thought this was possible (and had been using crude cutting methods such as a hatchet hit with a hammer). But recently I discovered that it is possible to cut complex shapes from a CD using tin snips, which, to my surprise, do not usually cause the CD to shatter as it is being cut.
Eventually the dogs turned up again, and later I decided to take Charlotte on a walk. But after losing her in the woods on the way to the lake, I decided not to go on much of a walk. Instead I sat on the dock drinking a beer and watching a loon swimming far out on the lake. At some I had to piss, so I got up and walked back to the lakeshore. As I was crossing over the part of the lake between the floating dock and the shore, I saw what looked like a huge fish swim beneath me. It was so outside the realm of what I believed was possible in the lake, that I startled and made an audible sound. I then noticed that what I'd seen was not a fish but was instead a loon, who popped up out of the water only about eight feet away. He looked me over bemusedly with his bright red eyes but didn't seem alarmed. And then he dove beneath the surface and vanished. I sat there for some time hoping to see him again but he must've swum far away. I do not think it possible that the loon I'd been watching across the lake and this one were the same loon, and if not, this would be the first time I'd ever seen two different loons in the lake at once. If so, which loon was Throckmorton?
At a time that I initially thought was a little before leaving the cabin for the long drive back to Hurley, I made the mistake of adding features to both the I2C slave and the SolArk Copilot master. These features allow me to do a few more useful things, particularly providing a way for the master to tell the slave to initiate a hardware reboot. But when I tried that master-instructed-slave reboot functionality, the I2C bus locked up so bad that the ESP8266 could no longer find weather sensors on that bus even after it rebooted. Evidently the slave (which was not rebooting) was failing in an unrecoverable way when the master rebooted. Initially the symptoms seemed so severe that I assumed that must be a hardware problem. Perhaps, for example, the times when I'd been letting the Arduino Nano Slave function at 5v instead of 3.3v on the I2C bus had destroyed the sensors. (Supposedly ESP8266s can handle those voltages.) But after resetting the slave, the I2C bus started working again, as did my sensors. I didn't have time to fix the code on what is essentially a certain-to-crash command before leaving the cabin for the week. I just have to remember not to use it.
After cleaning up the cabin and loading up the car, I had a fairly uneventful drive back to the Catskills starting a little after 5:00pm. Most of it took place in daylight, though it was pretty dark by the time I was climbing Dug Hill Road. Usually I crack open a road beer in Cairo, but today I decided not to so there wouldn't be beer on my breath when Gretchen inevitably kissed my lips.
Woodworth Lake this morning. Click to enlarge.
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