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not a great phone call from a Hurley landowning scion
Sunday, May 31 2026
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Gretchen has been busy this weekend on animal rights activism, mostly related to ending experiments on charismatic animals like dogs. There's a huge facility in western New York and she has been involved in planning a trans-New-York march on it in September. She will probably end up having to get arrested at that one, something that brings me no joy. But she has to do what feels right to her.
Later this morning, after we'd been doing our usual morning routines for awhile, Gretchen was alarmed to see an incoming call from Karen (that's her real name), the scion of one of the Esopus Valley's bigger landowning families, a woman who owns a 75 acre tract of forest adjacent to the farm at the end of the Farm Road. That property has been on the market for months and we've been dreading what will happen to it. I personally don't go onto it all that often, but the Stick Trail crosses through it and Gretchen frequently walks that trail's entire length. Gretchen said she was nervous to answer the call but I thought she should just answer it and get the pain, whatever it was, over with. After some initial chit chat, Karen said that she'd called Gretchen to tell her that she'd sold the property. Then she tried to spin it as a good thing. It had been sold as a unit to three brothers who want to live near each other. This means that they will be building three houses back there, which is not what we wanted to hear. Those houses would all be driving on the Farm Road, which goes right past our house (we're essentially on the corner where the Farm Road meets Dug Hill Road). It could've been worse, I suppose; it could've been divided into smaller parcels somehow, though the property has very little frontage on the Farm Road, which isn't even a real road. To build three houses back there will require a brand new road making a left near the southern end of the Farm Road and going up a series of low escarpments. The impacted forest back there is a scrubby secondary or tertiary growth and soil is shallow. Building septic fields will be very expensive, as will running electrical lines and building an access road. The property had sold for a little less than $700,000. But to develop it enough to place three houses back there take much more than that. Hopefully the plans will fall apart, but we have to mentally prepare for those houses eventually being built, probably in the middle of oversized forest clearings to be maintained as lawns. We've been lucky in that encroaching development has been a relatively infrequent concern over the past 23 years of living in rural Hurley township. Part of that is a function of New York State, which is better at controlling suburban sprawl than a southern state like Virginia, a place where (for me at last) development and the destruction of nature was a constant menace and source of psychic trauma. But it seems if you live anywhere long enough, the bulldozers eventually arrive to destroy anything you don't personally own (and sometimes things you do own; my parents had over an acre of land seized by the county government as part of a project to "improve" Stingy Hollow Road back in the early 1990s).
Though they're not friends, Gretchen and Karen were in a chatty mood, and their conversation ranged wildy over such subjects as Donald Trump (whom they both hate) and the Garden Café, Gretchen's favorite vegan restaurant in Woodstock. Perhaps in an effort to open Gretchen's eyes to the many additional tragedies of our present world (so as to blunt the impact of the sale of her land), Karen let Gretchen in on some juicy gossip: Leah, the woman who runs the Garden Café, is a big Trump supporter. This was hard to believe given what we know about this woman's beliefs. She is, after all, an ethical vegan who has also shown support for immigrant communities. We know that she is a Christian, but we assumed she is the liberal kind, the people who view Jesus as an uplifter of the oppressed. True, Leah had kooky beliefs during covid and had resisted the vaccine. But we knew other witchy and woo-woo types who had been this way. How could she be a Trump supporter knowing what we know about her? In its own way, this was a tragedy nearly as big as three houses popping up in the forest at the end of the Farm Road. Still, as Gretchen told Karen in their conversation, she will continue eating at the Garden Café. Even if it's run by a Trumpy, it provides a valuable service. And it's not like Leah is getting rich running it.
While all this was being discussed, I was finding it a little too traumatic to eavesdrop. So I busied myself repotting the sunflower and basil plants I'd bought yesterday and then spreading new garden soil over the two plants in the makeshift front-yard garden. (That's a tomato and a cucumber plant, for those who forgot.)
When Gretchen was finally done with her call with Karen, I expected her to want to discuss it with me, something I wasn't exactly looking forward to doing. But, unusually, she seemed to be feeling the same way as I was and didn't want to wallow in bad news she couldn't do anything to fix.
[REDACTED]
Later Gretchen got sucked into a multi-hour Zoom meeting about advocating for dogs used in medical experiments. About an hour into that, someone at one of the nearby parcels began to repeatedly discharge a gun because their overwhelming need to do so outweighed any impact that unpleasant monotonous sound had on any one else (human or otherwise). [REDACTED]
We began our drive back to the Catskills at around 5:00pm, just as Gretchen's Zoom meeting was ending. As usual when Gretchen drives us home, we took the Thruway route past Albany. But, since Gretchen needed some things from Trader Joe's, we stopped there on the way to do some grocery shopping. Among the things we bought were ten jars of the tart cherry juice that Gretchen considers an essential ingredient in her smoothies. We also got cashews (which go into her vegan yoghurt, another essential smoothie ingredient), other nuts, crackers, giant beans in red sauce, and all our other favorites. We only used one shopping cart, but it could barely hold all the things we were buying, and it came to over $400.
Back home in Hurley, a packet of five tiny surface-mount TMAG5273 three-axis magnetometers had arrived in the mail from DigiKey in a ridiculously oversized cardboard box. (The five magnetometers could all easily be crammed together on the tip of my smallest finger, while the box was large enough to hold a pair of shoes.) I immediately began the process of soldering one of the magnetometers to a tiny breakout board that I'd modified so that it would fit in the hollow of an empty RemoteReady tab, the kind that snaps over the center of a propane fuel gauge. The modified breakout board left three of the magnetometer's six pins un-broken-out. But I only needed to run two wires to those three pins, and I figured I could do that using a modified "dead bug" technique. (Where wires are attached directly to pins that may or may not be attached to an underlying board.) I also salvaged a tiny surface-mount capacitor from an old satellite teevee controller to serve as a decoupling capacitor adjacent to the magnetometer itself. I effort to see if it would work across a long cable, I hooked up to the end of a telephone cable about 25 feet long. But when I tried to test this, none of the I2C devices on the ESP8266 running my firmware could be detected. Evidently 25 feet is too long for I2C, even when running it at only 10MHz (something ChatGPT had suggested), and cable that long even screws up I2C signals not running directly through it. (These are all things I'd experienced in the past when trying to attach an I2C device to a fuel-reading capacitor at the end of a ten foot cable, a problem I solved at the time with a quad bilateral switch.) Happily, though, my tiny magnetometer worked great when I cut the telephone cable short and hooked up the I2C connections with jumper clips, meaning the functionality really could be crammed down to that tiny size.
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