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Neville's heuristics never fail
Tuesday, June 16 2026
I had another day of surprising lethargy, perhaps the result of an idea I've been bouncing off ChatGPT to build a weather forecasting API into my ESP8266 Remote Control system so that it can anticipate sunny days. This would allow me to burn through more energy earlier in the day (mostly to heat the basement or hot water) so that the big cabin battery just barely fills by the end of the day. The idea here is to minimize solar power I never collect simply because I have no place to put it. If I can use it to heat the basement, that's not the highest use of electricity, but it's better than wasting it. The warmer I can make the basement in summer, the warmer the soil and bedrock underneath it get, which helps the basement get through the winter without freezing (something it comes close to doing and might occasionally do during an especially cold winter). Building such a system will be complicated and fussy, and the results might be a lot less predictable than my simple real-time algorithmic power allocation system. So that is probably the reason thinking about implementing it makes me sleepy.
Early this afternoon, though, I took Charlotte and Neville (both came!) on a walk down the Gullies Trail. This time I continued onto the remains of the old mountain goat part of it that descends slowly into the bottom of the Valley of the Beasts, and this marked the first time Neville had been in that valley in years. Strangely, Neville separated from me and Charlotte after we got to the valley and pursued a track along a contour somewhat up the hill on its east slope, while I was moving along the bottom of the west slope, and he continued that way even after I'd found and followed the trail up out of the Valley to the Stick Trail. By then I'd lost both Charlotte and Neville, so after sitting there in the trail waiting for Neville to appear, I gave up and went down into the valley to look for him. What I found instead was Charlotte with a dirty face near a hole she'd been digging trying to get to a chipmunk. She joined me as I headed south from there in a broad flat expanse of forest looking for Neville. But he'd vanished. I started worrying that maybe something had snapped in his brain (he's not the young and he's not bright, and now he has heart worms always threatening to break free and cause a stroke) and he'd decided to just keep marching south to the end of the world, since he'd been oblivious to me calling or waving at him the last time I'd seen him. So I climbed out of the Valley of the Beasts and started heading back homeward (north) on the Stick Trail. Not long after that, I saw Neville up ahead of me, marching in his usual slow, determined way. Somehow he'd cut across the forest (which, in this area, has a great long-distance visibility) unseen and made it to the Stick Trail ahead of me. This is in keeping with a pattern I've noticed before about his cunning set of inborn navigational heuristics. They have never failed him yet, and it's foolish to bet that he'll ever get lost.
Neville and I arrived back home at about the same time (I'd been delayed making improvements to the eastern section of the Chamomile Wall), though Charlotte didn't get home for another hour. Evidently she'd found other chipmunks to mine.
Meanwhile Gretchen was busy all day going into and out of Zoom meetings, meeting up for lunch with Falafel Cathy (who no longer owns the falafel place in Rhinebeck), and going to pilates. She also somehow managed to make a dinner around fettuccine and tempeh crumble, though I had to handle the turning off of burners and straining of pasta when she had to dive back into a meeting. As I told her later, I've never seen her this busy ever.
This evening I took another bath for my insect bites, reading some Flannery O'Connor short stories in the tub. One was about a squirrelly young man who steals a gorilla suit from a faux gorilla, though I expected worse, as O'Connor had developed the thief's character as through he might be a school shooter (from a time, though, when that form of self-expression had yet to be pioneered).
Neville coming down the steep part of the Woodshed Path at the beginning of today's walk. Click to enlarge.
A male indigo bunting along the Gullies Path near the big blowdown from some years ago, complaining (along with his much drabber wife somewhere) because I was near his nest. Indigo buntings don't like the deep forest, but the blowdown had evidently opened up the forest enough to make it suitable. Click to enlarge.
A chipmunk. Click to enlarge.
That same chipmunk. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte in the Valley of the Beasts. Click to enlarge.
A hole dug by Charlotte as an effort to mine chipmunks. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte dirty after mining chipmunks. Click to enlarge.
A close-up of the north side of the east part of the Chamomile Wall. Click to enlarge.
Another close-up of the north side of the east part of the Chamomile Wall. Click to enlarge.
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