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pillows and cradles
Monday, May 25 2026
Today was warmer and sunnier than yesterday, and this meant that I was outside more doing things like working on my stone wall snd further processing semi-rotten firewood in the bittersweet-covered pile on the side of the driveway. Most of my stone wall work recently has been concentrated about fifty feet from the woodshed in the place where the wall transitions from a wall about 12 to 18 inches wide along an relatively gentle slope to a wall of only four to six inches in width along a section of steep slope. A wider wall is more stable, particularly along a steep slope, so most of my work now involves building buttresses downslope and using those to widen the top of the wall. I usually do this as a series of towers along the wall. (I mean that in the castle-building sense.) Then, over time, I fill in the voids between the towers. There is plenty of rock to work with, since I am working on the side of a vegetated talus slope, though I still have to range widely to find convenient pieces that are exposed. And sometimes these pieces turn out to be the roofs of ant colonies, and I usually abandon them when that's the case.
When I took the dogs for their usual afternoon hike, both of them came and we went on a relatively brief loop down the Gullies Trail and then back on the Stick Trail. I was noticing heart palpitations again, coming every fifth to tenth heartbeat. I'd thought maybe the secret to fixing that problem was taking special supplements for vegans (something called "Essential for Vegans" containing vitamin D3, vitamin B12, and algal omega-3), but I've been taking those religiously. So I'm back to wondering if perhaps this is a side effect of my frequent recreational use of pseudoephedrine.
A new channel that the YouTube algorithm placed in my feed today was something called New England Forests. It's narrated by a wise old man named Tom Wessels who looks like a forest gnome and is full of facts I'd never learned despite growing up with something of a wise old forest gnome for a father. My father knew a lot about trees, plants, and the uses for different tree species, but he didn't seem to know much about the human history of interacting with the forest. Wessels is full of knowledge not only about the human history of New England forests, but also things about plants my father apparently didn't. For example, birch trees are especially good at doing photosynthesis using only their branches. This allows them to do it throughout the winter when it's not too cold, and this gives them a jump on other species in the spring (or, as is the case now, when caterpillars are eating away all the leaves). I also learned about pillow-and-cradle landforms that are the result of large trees falling over and how evidence of this can tell you a lot about past land use. Any land with pillow-and-cradle formations was never ploughed, meaning it has always either been forest or grazing land, as even hay fields must have their surface evened-out to allow for the workable use of a scythe. Wessels also had much to say about stone walls, 19th Century sheep fever (when New England farmers all suddenly wanted to raise sheep, particularly smuggled-in merinos), and even modern research regarding how trees communicate and collaborate with their root systems. It's great stuff to listen to while processing firewood or hiking in the forest. Interestingly, I saw little evidence of pillows and cradles in our forest (which has never been farmland), perhaps because the rocky soil and steep slopes aren't conducive to their formation or persistence.
Gretchen had specifically asked for me to cook pasta tonight, so I made a pot of fettuccine cooked with broccoli and a side of mushrooms, onions, and tofu. I would later eat mine "Asian-style," that is, with just soy sauce and hot sauce. As for Gretchen, she was suffering from some sort of lower intestinal issues and kept heading off to the bathroom, and all she could really eat was plain pasta.
This evening, I decided to try my luck with remotely installing the latest version of my ESP8266 Firmware on the least-important ESP8266 at the Adirondack cabin, the one under the bulkhead steps down to the basement. The installation went great, but then the device became very erratic and difficult to communicate with. This caused me to run some tests with my local laboratory test ESP8266, and in so doing, I discovered some issues that only reveal themselves when trying to control the device with a combination of websocket and polling-based commands. This led me down a rabbit hole that kept me occupied until midnight, well after the diphenhydramine I'd taken kicked in.
[REDACTED]
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