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Throckmorton still on the lake in late October
Friday, October 17 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I had a day of modest efforts in the remote workplace, which I did (as usual) mostly from the loft area of the cabin. At lunch I took Charlotte for a modest walk to the lake and back. This time I saw Throckmorton the Loon was still out there on the lake, and I was so concerned about him that I asked ChatGPT if it was normal for loons to stay so late at lakes in the Adirondacks. It said that it wasn't uncommon for loons to stay until ice begins to form (which is at least a month away). It also said that Throckmorton would've replaced his flight feathers in the middle of the summer, when, for a period of about three weeks, he wouldn't've been able to fly. But it took the info that Throckmorton regularly flaps his wings as a good sign that indicates he probably can fly if he needs to. And, on the remote chance he's lost a flight feather or two, he can grow them back in the space of three weeks, which gives him plenty of time before ice arrives.
After work, I went down to the lake with Charlotte and kayaked while she walked along the lakeshore in parallel, eventually finding something to do near Ibrahim's dock.
One of these times while she was doing whatever she does and I was hanging out on the dock, she suddenly came running up and ran past me to look in the other chair on the dock (which hadn't been folded and collapsed at the end of last weekend). Evidently Charlotte was looking to see if Gretchen had miraculously shown up, something she has been known to do in other situations. Charlotte doesn't know how humans get to where they end up, so anything is possible and a girl can dream.
This evening in the cabin, I spent a long time trying to get one fairly minor new feature enabled in the Meshtastic chat integration in my ESP8266 Remote Control system: the ability to target specific Meshtastic devices from the web form in my tool. How this should work is that the message is sent out with that destination attached to it, and the system will keep sending the message every minute or so until it gets an acknowledgement from that device. There is support for all of this in various versions of Meshtastic. But then, after much consulting with ChatGPT, it revealed suddenly that what I was doing was impossible from within Python alone. I would have to have Python call Meshtastic as a simulated command line operation. But then it turned out that this couldn't be made to work either. This whole experience with Meshtastic leaves me feeling intensely negative about the folks behind Meshtastic, who keep changing their API without any regard for how that affects the installed base of users or what those users are told to do by the instructions they (or ChatGPT) finds on the web. This seems unnecessarily arrogant, reminding me of the assholes behind the FileZilla project (who think we should be very interested in every new version of a product that hasn't noticeably changed in 20 years while never implementing obvious improvements). As I told ChatGPT at some point, I also write open source software. And while I don't even have any users of my code besides myself, I have been careful to maximize compatibility between earlier and later versions of the code.
A big rock just below where the trail winds up through the cliffs from near Woodworth Lake's outflow. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte on the dock today. Click to enlarge.
The two beaver dams in the Woodwoth Lake outflow creek. Click to enlarge.
This dark splotch is all that remains of yesterday's diarrhea. Click to enlarge.
View from the kayak late this afternoon. Click to enlarge.
Throckmorton today. My working Nikon superzoom camera cannot focus when its zoom is at maximum, so I couldn't zoom in as close as usual. Click to enlarge.
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