In hopes of making more progress on the nascent websocket-based communication system for my ESP8266 Remote Control devices, I took a recreational 120mg dose of pseudoephedrine. I avoided the more normal 150mg because of memories of how that had gone last week.
The weather was decidedly cooler today, with temperatures in the mid-70s, ideal for working outdoors. So early this afternoon, I loaded the mid-sized ladder atop the Subaru Forester and drove to the Wall Street rental unit to do a little landlording. The goal was to see if I could remove some metal trim pieces from under the street-facing eaves. They'd gradually come loose over the past several years and one chunk seemed to have vanished entirely. They were only there for cosmetics, though the wood underneath was sound and would look perfectly fine with a fresh coat of paint. In the past when all the trim was there and some had come loose, I'd considered somehow getting up there under the eaves and nailing the trim pieces back tight against the house, but I was thwarted by the ladder-unfriendly design of the front of the house. The front porch has a low peaked roof jutting out in a way that prevents simply leaning a ladder up against any of the wall near its middle, the place where one would have to be to fix the trim. But the remaining piece of trim that I wanted to remove was hanging loosely from its bottom near the northwest corner of the house, and there was just enough room on the side of the front porch to lean a ladder against the wall in a place where I might be able to reach what I needed to reach. So I deployed the ladder and climbed up the wall with two tools: a two-foot prybar and a pair of needle-nosed pliers with an extra scissor-jack articulation allowing it to reach a little over twelve inches. Using the prybar, I soon discovered that one piece of the trim was entirely loose and was held in place by having slid down inside its smaller neighbor. I was able push it out enough that I could then use the extendo-pliers to grab it and pull it free. This was good, because you don't want to let large pieces of sharp-edged metal fall from a great height; a freak air current could carry it to a parked car, where it could leave the kind of gash one can't simply buff away. Once I had that out of the way, I was able to remove the smaller piece without too much effort, as the tiny nail heads didn't take much convincing to pass through the nailholes around their nails. And there were only two small nails securing it.
After I was down with my landlording, I took note of a tiny makeshift park some group had established on the yellow-striped asphalt of this part of Wall Street. Barriers had been erected, lawn furniture put in place, and there were also planters and even games. A sign declared it L.Y.E Parklet, and there were even rules posted in both English and Spanish. It looked more aspirational than functional, like something a guerilla walkable cities reform group might establish without getting anyone's permission. It was cute, and I liked its moxie.
Before returning home, I visited Herzog's in Uptown mostly to buy sunflower seeds (none of the ones I'd planted from old seeds had germinated). While there, though, I also got some supplies for a fabricating a better-looking propane fuel level sensor device, as I don't want to have something too janky stuck to that tank when the guys come by next to refill it. Things I got included fresh new epoxy and the little plastic cups designed to support a closet's hanging rod. I also got some waterproofing gunk to make another stab at fixing the rubber boots I wear at the cabin. (I'd sewn a tear in the rubber last weekend, and while the stitches held, the rubbery adhesive I gunked around it quickly delaminated from the boots and failed to provide a leak-proof seal.)
Back home in Hurley, I took Charlotte for a walk down the Stick Trail and then up the escarpment and over to the Chamomile Headwaters Trail. On the way, I marveled at the thousands of black caterpillar hunter beetles patrolling the leaf litter. In one place with apparently good soil for the laying of their eggs (it was dry and crumbly), I found numerous pairs engaged in what looked like copulation. I had my camera, so I shot some video. One of the beetles, though, looked to be trying to have sex with an irridescent green june beetle, which belongs to an entirely different family (Scarabaeidae) in the beetle order (Coleoptera).
Later, as I was walking towards the Farm Road on the Chamomile Headwaters Trail, I saw a very long black snake crossing the trail ahead of me. She might've been seven feet long. I shot some video of that too.
For dinner tonight, I made one of my potato-heavy Indian-style curries. It also featured broccoli, finely-divided broccoli stems, onions, canned tomato, mushrooms, lemon juice, and even some sliced raddish. Instead of using chickpeas, though, I used kidney beans. (Indians have kidney-bean curries, and they are among my favorites.)
Gretchen hasn't been super excited about my curries of late, and today we figured out why. It seems the curry powder I've been using, the only one we have, contains "sweet" spices like cinamon, and she doesn't like those in her savory food. The curry powder came in a collection from Penzey's Spices, so they're high quality. And I don't know where you'd go to get a curry powder that agreed perfectly with Gretchen's
.
Throughout the day, I'd made good progress with my websocket-based ESP8266 communication system, which will one day provide an extremely responsive means of communication with my ESP8266-based remotes from anywhere on the internet. By this evening, though, I was having trouble figuring out the next step, which was how to make a Javascript front end talk directly to a specific ESP8266 via the websocket-based backend. I'd decided that the progess I was making with this new communication method, combined with the successful landlording, had meant that I'd earned the ability (under my drining rules) to drink. This was sort of a cheat on my part, but not a terrible one. Still, drinking soon made it so I couldn't do any more work with the code, so I settled into the laboratory bean bag watching YouTube videos, including a very good one about what exactly we're learning from sequencing so many different people's genomes.
The street-side boundary of L.Y.E Parklet. Click to enlarge.
A look inside L.Y.E Parklet. Click to enlarge.
The rules of L.Y.E Parklet. Click to enlarge.
A caterpillar-hunter getting it on with an apparent green june beetle. Click to enlarge.
