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fraught times and risky driving
Thursday, September 25 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
It was intermittently rainy today at work, and I like the sound of heavy rain on the flat roof overhead (the room I work in with the other developers is on the second floor of a two-story building. I would characterize the sound of heavy rain as apocalyptic, but in a good way. There are plenty other less-good kinds of apocalypse these days, and it's nice to hear nature getting to make a statement uninterrupted.
Meanwhile I was working mostly on a Crystal Reports report. I'd been avoiding having to use its GUI in my previous work, but with this latest task, that was no longer possible, and I was finding it an extremely unpleasant environment to work in. It's cluttered, ugly, and everything must be done with GUI actions, since the underlying data is locked away in a proprietary binary format.
At lunch today, the guys were talking about one of their co-workers, a guy who works out in the factory and is not part of the Lunchroom Court. It turns out that he's something of a genius when it comes to electronic components. He's so good, in fact, that he managed to get a whole bunch of abandoned equipment working for a non-client that was so impressed with his work that they became a client. I was intrigued and asked what kind of hobbies the guy has, and the project manager guy said that he likes to rebuild engines and that sort of thing. "What are you gonna do when he retires?" I asked. "He can't retire!" the project manager exclaimed.
At the end of the workday, I drove home to Hurley and immediately packed up the Bolt for another weekend at the cabin, starting with the pieces of bluestone I'd cached along the Farm Road. Gretchen wouldn't be coming because she had to drive out to Rochester this weekend as part of moving a new tenant into our rental house there.
As I often do, I stopped at the Cairo Hannaford on my drive north to get groceries. I had a lot of lettuce and other vegetables and greens from the Hurley refrigerator, so I was mostly interested in things like bread (I bought three loaves of sourdough), nuts, tempeh, and tofu. I didn't feel the need to buy any beer.
Something about the Germany-in-1939 state of America right now has me feeling a little less cautious about risks, particularly when driving. This was something I definitely noticed today, though the specific risks I took tended to be the kind that involved other drivers, not the road itself and static objects along it. For example, south of Cairo I got sick of being in a long line of slow-moving cars behind some idiot who wanted to drive 45 mph. So at the first opportunity, I busted a move despite the sight of someone off in the distance in the oncoming lane, a lane I had to drive in to pass. I only had a few seconds before I was going to collide with that car before I hit my brakes to cram myself in the narrow space between two cars near the front of that line of cars I'd been following. After doing that, I realized I'd taken an unnecessary risk with my (and my dogs') life.
Later though, when I drove through torrential rains between East Durham and Middleburgh, I kept feeling the car lose traction from hydroplaning, and this made me very cautious about my speed when going around bends. Even so, though, I nearly lost control of the car when driving through "downtown" Livingstonville. This made me that much more cautious as I climbed over the subcontinental divide between the Catskill and Schoharie Creek watersheds.
My final act of unnecessary daring came at the corner of Junction Road and Route 30A. I saw a big tanker truck coming up 30A from the south and figured he was far enough away that I could jump out in front of him and have time to accelerate to highway speeds. Boy was I wrong! A second or two after I was out on 30A, I heard the tanker truck's horn, and then I saw that truck passing me quickly in the oncoming lane. Good thing there were no cars in it! I felt like an idiot; clearly I'd misjudged the position and speeds of all the moving objects involved. Fortunately I only had to follow that tanker truck to US20, where he turned left and I headed straight.
Later on, as I drove through Glen township, I saw three different Amish buggies, which were particularly hard to see in the low-angle sunlight of a late September late afternoon. I was so chastened by the incident with the tanker truck that I slowed way down and gave each of them lots of room. But I also wondered if it really risks their eternal souls to paint their matte black buggies hot pink so they can be seen.
As the sun began to set, it filled the sky with an unusually saturated orange light. Some idiot backed slowly out of their driveway along Maple Street Extended and I had to slow down dramatically. But then they drove incredibly slowly, forcing me to pass them on the double yellow line the moment I had sufficient visibility.
I climbed up through a bank of fog at the bottom of the Adirondack escarpment near the intersection of West Bush and Route 309, something I'd seen earlier when driving through the Charleston highlands. Happily, I got to Woodworth Lake Road while there was still some light in the sky. At paddleboard bought for us by Gretchen's parents had arrived, though the delivery had placed at the entrance gate (which is back to mostly being closed in the last month or so).
After moving most of the stuff I'd brought into the cabin, I went down to the basement and implemented some code to allow the SolArk Copilot master to be rebooted successfully from the Slave when it sends the slave an appropriate instruction.
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