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spring peepers 2017
Sunday, April 2 2017
It was a sunny day, with temperatures peaking at around 60, and it was what it took to slough off the cruft of winter attitudes and renew my attitude with Spring. I filled a couple big bean cans with soil and put them in the window. It's a little late to be starting tomatoes, but it's hard to think about gardening when there is snow on the ground. And despite the balmy conditions, snow persisted in piles in front of the garage doors. I shoveled some out onto the driveway to accelerate the melting, but a couple of those chunks didn't melt even when separated from their friends and put in the full light of the April sun.
I went on a couple forrays north and east of the house in hopes of photographing birds, but I was only successful on my first forray, when I lucked into snapping a photograph of a house finch. The original photo wasn't very good, but there was enough data in the dark silouette of a bird to yield the following photograph after just a little fiddling around in Adobe Photoshop (click to enlarge):
In among other things today, I watched all of the 1975 film version of The Stepford Wives, which is to sexual politics what Get Out is to race. Of course, the male chauvenist power structure of The Stepford Wives is evident from the start, and there's no awkward attempts to demonstrate feminist bonafides. What the men want from women is vapid compliance, obsession with housecleaning, and constant sexual availability. Donald Trump and Roger Ailes would've fit right in there in the Stepford Mens' Association.
After some effort, I found a reference online for attaching a couple USB 1.1 ports to a Linksys WRT54GS router, and proceeded to remove a couple tiny surface mount resistors on my WRT54GS and then attach a couple thin pieces of armature wire that I glued in place so as not to be accidentally ripped away. I don't usually emjoy soldering tiny wires to tiny surface-mount copper pads, but's that is the world we live in. After attaching the necessary wires, I called it a day. Gretchen wanted to meet me for dinner at the Garden Café after she got off work at the bookstore. Of course, for me driving in that direction was bound to result in another visit to the Tibetan Ceter's thrift store. There were a couple fresh bags of unsorted electronica that included a device for attaching a cellphone to a car window, multiple kinds of USB cables, and a full-on bestiary of wall warts. There was a Belking N router there that I briefly researched to see of it could be assimilated by the DD-WRT borg. But It looked like it didn't have enough memory. But no worries, a highly hackable Linksys WRT54G v3.1 was for sale, and those are the devices that started the whole router hacking scene. I had to have it, despite the somewhat excessive $5 sticker price. I should mention that as I was loading things into my car, I could hear the spring peepers for the first time this year, Their confidence, blind as it is, is surprisingly infectious. [REDACTED]
Gretchen wasn't at the bookstore when I arrived, so I parked at the parking lot at the end of Old Forge Road. There, I let the dogs loose in case they had a pooper to deal with. After they went briefly nuts, I was able to wrangle them into the car and head off to the Garden. There, Gretchen and I split a TLT sandwich, had some surprisingly spicy potato & kale soup, and split an order of baked enchiladas with tomatillo sauce. I wouldn't say the food blows my mind there, but it's a warm friendly place and I can usually find something I have a hankering for. As for booze, Gretchen drank a bloody mary containing sake instead of vodka. And I had the Southern Tier 2X IPA, though it wasn't as good as I'd remembered it. Gretchen had hosted an event called something like "Fish and Game" to promote some big coffee table books sold by a fancy gourmet restuarant in Hudson that will eat anything so long it can be made miserable first. Always the subversive, Gretchen worked the register in her VEGAN hoodie. I told the story of my house finch photograph, and how I'd had to extract its beauty by tweaking a histogram of its darkness levels. I explained how I throw away all the lightest colors in the chart and then move the center of the chart down to the blob of historgram bars in the dark end. This reveals all the detail in the hidden shape, assuming they're there. And with my new Nikon camera, they are.
For dessert, Gretchen got a cup of decaf and I ordered a cup of the real deal. It put me in a calm, jaunty mood for the drive home, stuck behind a truck that never went faster than 30 mph for the entire length of Dug Hill Road.
Our new cat Charles today. He's beneath a stool we draped with cloth to make a hidey-hole.
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