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updating from 100 miles away
Monday, May 11 2026
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
Early this afternoon, I decided I should get a jump on the cooking I would need to be doing by starting a pound of dry black beans in the InstantPot. Last time I'd tried to cook dry beans it had taken something like an hour and a half and they weren't ready for dinner time. So I started them early, when there was still lots of time to do more rounds of pressure cooking. I set them up to cook under pressure for something like 55 minutes, which later seemed perfect but which Gretchen would tell me were perhaps somewhat overcooked.
While the beans were cooking, I brought out the lawn mower and quickly mowed the grass for the first time this season. It was fairly long, but grass at this time of year is soft and doesn't put up much of a fight. I was a little concerned about how cool the weather was (it was sunny, but temperatures were down in the 50s), since it meant that ectothermic creatures would be slow-moving and have difficulty getting out of my way. I saw a large spider managing to get out of my path, having been warned by my having cut an adjacent swath. But I think I ran over a garter snake near the fire pit we bought back during covid. I saw the snake after I passed through waving its tail slowly and wondered if I'd somehow chopped it in half. I didn't want to know for sure, so I just backed away and mowed elsewhere. I hate killing anything by mistake, especially vertebrates.
Then I took Charlotte for a walk down the Gullies Trail. I wanted to get a good view of the biggest gully of all, one that exists almost entirely on our narrow finger of a parcel near where the Gullies Trail begins its mountain-goat descent into the Valley of the Beasts. I left the Gullies Trail a little north of that particular gully and gradually descended the steep slope to enter it some distance east of a wall of moss that marks its uphill beginning adjacent to the Gullies Trail, a place where a temporary brook collecting water from a highland valley plunges to form a brief waterfall on rare occasions. The gully was full of fallen trees and branches and wasn't easy to get around in, but it was full of lush plant growth, particularly mosses and ferns, here and there accented with bursts of pink from columbine. Charlotte followed me into the gully, but there wasn't much to do there but admire the plant life.
I finished making my "low effort" (that is, in a frying pan, not in a pot) chili, a side of broccoli, and an InstantPot of rice well before Gretchen was to get home. But then she ended up being an hour later even than that so she could meet Lynn & Gregg's son, a guy who works in the solar industry giving birds cancer or whatever. When it finally came time to eat, it turned out we had only two taco shells in the entire house. We also lacked flat bread, corn chips, and tostadas, so Gretche began thawing out another bag of injera (which is always great with chili).
Earlier today, I'd added more commands to my ESP8266 Remote Control code allowing it to report back on fun data like its WiFi signal strength and why exactly it rebooted last, all ideas that I had ChatGPT come up with. I then deployed the code to nearly all my operational ESP8266s both in my laboratory and 100 miles away at the cabin. This was the first time I'd done such a deployment so remotely, and they all were completely successfull. The method I used was to first command the devices to download a suitable firmware from a web server. I then checked to make sure the right number of bytes downloaded. Then I told each ESP8266 to do a local update firmware, and about 20 seconds later they were running the code I'd created earlier today. It felt enormously empowering to do all this remotely using systems I'd built entirely from scratch.
There aren't great places for me to read books (that is, dead trees) in the house, as I think of most of the obvious places as belonging to Gretchen, the only person who normally reads printed paper in our house. So this evening when I wanted to read more of Artemis, I climbed in bed and read with the help of my copper pipe reading lamp.
Columbine in that biggest gulley. Click to enlarge.
The wall of fern and moss at the head of that biggest gulley. Click to enlarge.
Bluets along the Stick Trail. Click to enlarge.
Inerrupted fern along the Stick Trail. Click to enlarge.
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