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firewood along the north retaining wall
Friday, May 8 2026
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
After eating my toast, drinking my usual coffee, playing Spelling Bee, and doing other cabin rituals (though this time joined by Gretchen), I eventually switched to kratom tea and then then tried to take advantage of the day. It wasn't very warm and it wasn't very sunny, but it wasn't raining and I wanted to process a bunch of firewood this weekend before the rains Gretchen had seen in the forecast arrived. To help me with that, I'd brought the big Kobalt battery-powered chainsaw with its 18 inch chain. I started cutting up some mid-sized fallen white ashes and that fairly big fallen red maple I'd worked on last weekend, all of this along the big boulder retaining wall at the north edge of our cabin's building site. Meanwhile Gretchen was taking Charlotte on a big walk down to the Six Acre Bog and back (she didn't know the name I'd used for it, but she knew we'd hiked to it from Lake Edward with Eleanor and Ramona way back in 2013). It ended up being a fairly large amount of wood. As I cut the pieces, I tossed them up out of the woods into the scrubby field behind the cabin so I wouldn't have to carry the pieces up the steps. Once up there near the same elevation as where I would be splitting them just south of the cabin, I could pile them on a handtruck and wheel them there. I did this work in several waves, and before long I'd rebuilt the pile of firewood just north (and obscuring the view of) the propane tank. That pile hadn't been added to in about two years and had been drawn down to about half its greatest size such that it no longer had been concealing the propane tank.
This evening Gretchen boiled up a box of the kind of Barilla bow-tie noodles that also contain protein. I don't really like whatever protein does to the flavor, but it was okay with Rao's marinara sauce (I found a jar in deep storage in the basement, the only jar we had).
News had just come that the Virginia Supreme Court had struck down the aggressive gerrymander the very-Democratic Virginia voters had just approved, which was a real bummer. It suggested that in conservative states, such gerrymanders would be allowed, since conservatives don't care about "good government," whereas in blue states, the left would have to fight with a serious handicap. This was a depressing thought, and Gretchen kept moaning and complaining about it. I got it, it sucked, but didn't want to dwell on it during dinner. The world is full of shit Gretchen is trying to fight: laboratory experiments on animals, the lack of availability of abortion services, and now this. All she wants to talk about of late is bad news and what she is doing about it. Couldn't we talk about something lighter now and then? I said I didn't want to dwell on this subject during dinner, and she shut up about it. But I could tell, based on a later comment, that she was slightly resentful about it.
Having done a good amount of wood processing, I grabbed a beer and headed down to the lake. Unsually, Charlotte decided to come with me (something she wouldn't normally do when Gretchen is around). But she left before I even got to the lake once a cold rain started falling. That rain then turned to little balls of ice, which wasn't very pleasant. But while I was at the dock I saw (for the first time this year) Throckmorton the Loon. Madysyn the Beaver was there as well. The only other thing I noticed while at the dock was that it looked like Ibrahim might've been doing a little brush clearing on the lakeshore near his dock.
By the time I left, the rain and sleet had stopped.
This evening I did some work down in the basement preparing to get serial parsing to actually work on an ESP8266 directly. I had most of the stuff I needed in place, but it still wasn't working, so I needed better debugging capability. Ideally I would be able to log not only the serial data, but logged info from specific sections of the seria parser as parsing happened. So I added detailed logging to the serial parser. I also discovered a problem with the "upload" function in my firmware, functionality I needed to be able to see the logs. Upload was only uploading the first 512 or so bytes of a file because ChatGPT had used a greater than or equal test when it should've used a less than or equal test when I'd told it to write a packet-based upload function (which uploaded only 512 bytes of base-64-encoded data per poll). Once I had that working, though, I realized it was unbearably slow. So I had ChatGPT write me a function to stream all the data for a file in a single post operation without holding much of it in memory at any one time. Once I had that working, I found that getting files off a remote ESP8266 was very easy.
Intermingled amongst all this, I've been continuing to read the Andy Weir book Artemis. But I'm finding the female main character, who also acts as narrator, to be unconvincing as a rebelious twenty-something Saudi woman. The main distraction is how much she dwells on sexuality, finding ways to slip sexual references into non-sexual topics. This is not how any woman I've ever known has talked, even the most sex-obsessed of them. The book reads like it was written by a male teenager somewhat titillated to find himself the puppeteer for a hot young woman. In talking about this to Gretchen, I didn't go into exactly what I found off about the book other than to say the woman's voice is not convincingly female. The truth of the matter is that I've found the voices of all the characters in Andy Weir's books somewhat off-putting, sometimes to the point of cringe. But the books are nevertheless compelling and I've had no trouble reading them all the way through.
Throckmorton the Loon with his fresh new summer plumage. Click to enlarge.
Not a great photo of Madysyn the Beaver. Click to enlarge.
Apparently brush removal near Ibrahim's dock. Click to enlarge.
A jack-in-the-pulpit growing in the Mossy Rock Trail. Click to enlarge.
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