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a cool July drive
Thursday, July 23 2026
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
I took a little break from catching up on the entries of this online journal by walking out to the Chamomile Wall and adding some more stones, starting with solid pieced plucked from the bed of the Chamomile itself and then adding some surprisingly big pieces I found near the wall that I'd somehow overlooked. (You can imagine how thoroughly scoured the landscape near a wall ends up being.) The weather was cooler than normal and, oddly, the humidity also seemed low, giving the air a clearness it almost never has at this time of year. It felt more like fall.
I had to take Neville to a 2:30 nail appointment at Pretty Pet Parlor, and of course Charlotte came along. She's now more familiar with the routine of Neville disappearing into the back for a few minutes and no longer has the intense anxiety she used to exhibit.
After that was done, I drove to Lowes looking for deck tension ties, but I couldn't find them in any of the places I thought to look. I ended up buying a $50 box of four inch structural screws instead.
Back home in Hurley, Gretchen was just beginning participation in a podcast that would eat up an hour of her afternoon and leave her disappointed. Her time is valuable these days as she works almost constantly to plan the upcoming march to end animal testing, and appearing on some chucklehead's vanity podcast is a poor use of her time. But once she was done with that, we could begin our drive up to the Adirondack cabin for the weekend. We hadn't been there in three weeks. Since I was driving, we took the Middleburgh route, though Gretchen was so obsessed with her time that she initially tried to lobby me to take the Thruway route, which might've saved us a half hour. But I hate driving that way and said I'd just drive faster.
The temperature in Hurley was in the low 80s when we left and rapidly dropped into the 70s as we drove from East Durham to Preston Hollow. They were down to about 75 at the base of the Adirondack escarpment and fell into the low 70s by the time we'd reached its crest. The temperature at the cabin when we arrived at about 6:20pm was 69, which is right about what I'd predicted. Gretchen saved precious daylight hours for spending on the dock by dispensing with her usual hike with Charlotte of the last mile from the Woodworth Lake gate and left for the lake soon after we got to the cabin. Neville insisted on joining her and Charlotte, as he seemed particularly delighted to be back at the cabin. Gretchen apparently thought this was okay despite the thinking that he shouldn't be getting much exercise at this phase of his heart worm treatment protocol.
Meanwhile, the ESP8266 that performs as a cellular hotspot watchdog was acting crazy and had been for the entire Mediterranean cruise. It was pulsing a 12v lightbulb attached via relay to one of its GPIOs and was mostly unresponsive, though occasionally it would wake up and transmit weather data. I found that its own Atmega328 watchdog was disconnected from its reset pin, so that accounted for why it wasn't being immediately brought out of extended fugue states. But how was it able to come out of them on its own periodically? And why did reflashing it with the latest firmware not fix it? These were questions I needed answers for, but not today. So I fixed myself a boozy beverage and headed down to the lake to join Gretchen and the dogs. She was on the dock reading a book and had been out plying the glassy waters on a paddleboard but had deemed it too cold to go swimming and was actually wearing a jacket. There was no sign of wildlife except for a blue heron flying high above the east lake shore, where a loud songbird (I wasn't sure what species) could be heard singing.
I headed back to the cabin not far behind Gretchen on the Mossy Rock Trail. About halfway up, I heard Charlotte barking enthusiastically at some critter, so I ran through the woods to see what she'd found. It was important to get there before Neville if he took an interest and what she'd found was a porcupine.
And what Charlotte had found was indeed a porcupine, a mid-sized one that was already ten feet up the trunk of a tree not far from Ibrahim's A-frame on Shane's parcel. Charlotte had stopped barking by the time I got there and Neville apparently didn't think the matter required his attention.
This evening after eating a sandwich containing both home-grown cucumbers and lightly-pickled pickle chips, I retreated to the loft couch and watched the fourth episode of the third season of House of the Dragon, which was mostly doing what I like that show to do.
This evening's porcupine. Click to enlarge.
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