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firewood salvage procrastination
Saturday, May 2 2026
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I was up fairly early and took a recreational 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine in hopes of gdetting some shit done today.
In amongst continual work on my ESP8266 firmware, I took occasional breaks to process firewood from some downed trees (a smallish beech and a mid-sized white ash) northwest of the driveway near the cabin. I processed some of the wood down to stove-ready pieces that just need to dry over the summer, though I left some long sections of trunk to process when I bring a better chainsaw to the cabin. (I was using my 18v Ryobi, which is about as good as an 18v chainsaw can be.) I also set aside some beech branches and branches with a bit of trunk left on them so I can maybe make my own shillelagh, which will be more true to the archetype than my father's club was (even if he referred to it as a shillelagh).
When I took the dogs for a walk this afternoon, I grabbed a big 16 oz Belgian-style beer (9.5% alcohol) and headed west on the Lake Edward Trail, but soon followed Charlotte northward off-trail through a series of hemlock groves and wetlands set on a jumbled series of elevations. Eventually this led to a long linear wetland (which, at this time of year, is a continuous body of water) at the base of the escarpment that our cabin sits near the top of). I'd lost the dogs by then, so I looked around for where the red spruces grew and took note of various porcupine dens. I've noticed that red spruce seedlings tend to be scattered throughout the forest in a wide range of microclimates, but the places they survive tend to be swamps. There's actually a fairly big red spruce sapling looking almost like an artificial Christmas tree at the northwest corner of our cabin's clearing.
Back at the cabin, I could tell I was using firewood salvaging as a form of procrastination to avoid starting the big project I'd wanted to do at the cabin this weekend: begin capture live data directly from the SolArk inverter again instead of using a makeshift API to get stale data from the cloud. I'd once gathered local data from the inverter, but after a firmware update back in October, the algorithm I'd been using no longer worked. Over the winter, I'd built a flexibly configurable serial parser into the firmware for my I2C slaves, and the hope was to use that. But I knew it would be a pain in the ass, full of trapdoors and pitfalls, so I was happier gathering firewood for the time being. I even began cutting up a mid-sized red maple that had fallen along the edge of the clearing behind the cabin over a year ago. (That wood was still very water-logged, and the bucked pieces were a bitch to carry to the place in front of the cabin where I did the splitting using a maul.)
Later Charlotte seemed to need another walk, so I took her down to the lake and then went kayaking while she had her own adventures in the forest. I encountered her later running along the south shore of the outflow bay. While I was out on the water, I took advantage of the high lake levels to paddle as far as I could into our neighbor Joel's wetland, which is basically an arm of the lake that has filled in and turned to marshland. There are channels in this marshland that are kept open by beavers, and with the high lake level, I could paddle into the big one. Eventually, though, I was stopped by the timbers of a crude, mostly-submerged footbridge across the marsh. I had a little gin-based beverage between my legs as I paddled around. I'd bought a 4 oz bottle of aromatic bitters at the Cairo Hannaford and was liking what they did to straight gin on the rocks.
On the walk back from the lake to the cabin, I walked first southward along the shoreline into Shane's parcel, snapping a picture of a small brown bird I thought was a wren but which Google Image Search later identified as a hermit thrush. I then headed back homeward up the Backwards Cliffs Gorge, which cuts like a diagonal slash through the lower half of Shane's parcel into our parcel near the center of the Mossy Rocks Trail.
Soon my drinking and YouTube watching totally subsumed my ambitions. I took a large dose of diphenhydramine at some point to keep myself from drinking too much, but it didn't really work that way.
More false hellebore in the wetlands at the bottom of the escarpment north of the cabin. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte on the south shoreline of the outflow bay, photographed from my kayak. Click to enlarge.
The makeshift footbridge across the marsh in Joel's parcel. Click to enlarge.
A hermit thrush. Click to enlarge.
A sunset viewed through a screen through a west-facing window in the cabin. Click to enlarge.
At this time of year, the sunset shines down the hallway and illuminates a rectangle on the east wall of the cabin's great room. Click to enlarge.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?260502 feedback
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