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I have next week off from work ⛺

Kind of a running list of where things stand and what I need to do to make vacation happen.

It looks like it will be a great week down in West Virginia with lots of sun and temperatures warming up to the upper 60s by the end of the week. Maybe some rain for the drive down on Saturday but even that evening doesn’t look like a wash out. Checked the oil over the weekend, and that was good, I could pick up some pre-mix coolant and top that off just to be safe.

Tonight I’m going to run to Walmart to get some initial supplies and things I need around the apartment. Start packing and getting ready. Been thinking a lot about what I want to cook down there, as food shopping options really are limited in Davis and Thomas high country area and I don’t plan to drive to either Oakland or Elkins mid week if I can avoid it. I was hoping to get ice cream in Davis/Thomas but the one ice cream parlor in the region closed before Columbus Day Weekend. Kind of a bummer as it’s going to be warm by the end of the week. Maybe I can get my fix of pumpkin ice cream on the way back home. Doesn’t have to be fancy — I’m all for vanilla soft-ice cream with a pumpkin dip. I’ll bring some cans of pumpkin puree to have pumpkin with non-fat greek yogurt at camp, plus pumpkin-oatmeal pancakes and pumpkin-oatmeal biquits for my pumpkin fix.

Got to transfer $300 from my rainy day bank account to my main account to keep the balance up and then withdraw $200 in small bills for miscellaneous expenses like campground fees and farm stands on the way down. I get paid next Tuesday but my bank balance is currently fairly low and with rent due along with automated investment and retirement there still will be insufficient funds despite the money coming in. At the end of November though my deferred compensation will max out so that should mean a good boost in pay that will help me catch up again on my bank balance.

I need to print up some maps for some of the areas I’m exploring plus make sure I have cached the forest service and topographic maps on my phone. While I should have service at camp, not all locations will and it’s better to be safe then not have the maps I need. I really plan to GPS and share as much of my trip as possible, including posting tracks of drives, bike rides and hikes along the way. Plus get podcasts to listen to up at camp, especially for the first rainy night where it’s unlikely I’ll have much service.

I want to soak 15 bean soup tonight, make hard boiled eggs and knead bread to bake on Friday afternoon so I have things to eat on the way down and Saturday night without much cooking especially if it turns out Saturday evening is wetter then it’s trending. I also want to get some cider doughnuts to enjoy on the way down, maybe in Oneonta. Hit the hay early Saturday night at camp in Penna and get on the road early Sunday around day break to Cumberland, Maryland.

Sunday looks like the rain will pull out fairly early which is good if I want to spend a few hours exploring the Chesapeake and Ohio Trail in Cumberland on Blackie my mountain bike before heading down to Keyser to top off my propane and do one more supply shop at Walmart before heading up the Allegheny Front and setting up camp in the high country.

Monday is going to be a bit cool but sunny and the rest of the week could very well be t-shirt weather at least by the end of the day with lots of sun. Planning many bike rides and hikes through the week to scenic locations. Want to have many good, delicious and healthy meals to cook even though I won’t have my full oven but I’ll bring my camp oven and Dutch oven. Undecided about the food processor, I could bring it or I might just mill up oatmeal for pancakes and baking in advance.

Then just kind of relax. I want to have fun but not be rushed or trying to see and visit as many places as possible at once. Be able to watch many sun rises and sunsets, have some nice fires, listen to music and podcasts. Take pictures and enjoy the scenery. Eat good healthy meals. Maybe do a bit of bike riding under the moon light, get a craft beer from Mountain State Brewery. Make the most of it before heading back north come the following Saturday.

My Evolving Views on Fracking

A few years ago, I was pretty supportive of fracking in New York State. I thought it would be good for the Southern Tier and Western NY, as there is already a fair bit of historical natural gas production in that part of state.

Natural Gas Well

I always viewed the anti-frackers as being the same group of extreme lefties who decided they had to ban open burning on farms and rural locations to save the environment from rednecks burning a little bit of plastic in a fire. Or the same people who decided the entire state land holding in the Adirondacks could not ever be used for responsible timber production, like is common in our national and state forests. Or those at war on ATVs, snowmobiles, and even back-country campsites and trails. In other words, environmentalists who are opposed to fracking are generally bad people.

Circa 2006 Natural Gas Well

Over time claims that I once saw as best distorting the truth, are proving themselves somewhat true. Accidents happen and as you scale up, there is a potential for accidents get worst. Conventional natural gas production is not unlike the high volume horizontal wells, much like a convenience store is much like Super-Walmart. Much of the products and methods are the same but the scale is much larger than conventional processes. Bigger means bigger risk.


View Larger Map


View Larger Map

Is it more dangerous or polluting than conventional wells? It depends how you look at it. Natural resource extraction, to a certain degree, is always polluting, although pollution can be controlled. Areas with a lot of natural gas drilling underway tend to be busy with heavy truck traffic and big construction equipment, which can certainly bring in a lot of pollution, at least temporarily. Even modern big-rig diesels can be pretty polluting, and many of the equipment is older and dirtier from the era before strong diesel emission regulations.

Another View of Well Pad

I measured some of the the high-volume fracked wells in Pennsylvania to conventional natural gas wells in New York on Google Maps. The footprint was in some cases 2-3 times larger, but in other cases about the same as a New York State Black River-Trenton formation well. Regardless, any drilling campaign uses some farmland and forest, and cumulative impacts have to evaluated to the environment, even if eventually the wells will be plugged and recovered when they run out of gas.

I also think some of the water pollution and methane contamination complaints are legitimate. As was cynical at first about such notions, and I am sure the anti-fracking activists tried to milk out every little accident and problem, but there are issues and accidents that need to be considered, especially when scaling things up. We need regulations that protect people’s water and ensure that any impacts on the land are temporary inconveniences not long-term headaches.

Edge of Marcellus Well Pad

I believe in keeping an open mind. I still prefer strong regulation over an outright ban, but we will see where this evolves. Many will argue that fracking should be banned be banned in our state. New York State created the Forest Preserve many years ago, and while controversial, wasn’t the great disaster that some people proposed. It’s something to watch.

New York, as an urban state, will never be energy self-sufficient, but we could do better if we could manage our natural resources better.

While I am still not opposed to oil and gas production in NY State, I can see where the winds blow and realize like any policy choice there are pros-and-cons.

The Weekend the Was.

The Weekend that Was. Or so goes this blog post, as the weekend basically fades away into the past. I think we all knew the weekend couldn’t last for two long, and indeed it’s now basically over for weekend.

Save the Pine Bush Hike on Saturday. It was a wild flower hike, and it went well. I was running a bit late for it, because I had trouble finding the house of a person I was picking up to carpool to the event.

Saturday Afternoon I Probably Shouldn’t Have Just Hung Out at Home. But at first, I thought it looked like a nice day on Sunday to go to North-South Lake Campground for some hiking, paddling, and swimming. The weather then crapped out on Sunday, and that idea went down the toilet — but so be it.

One of these weekends when I am in town, I am determined to use my EmpirePass to get into North-South Lake, do a little hiking up North Mountain, then go for a swim at beach, and a paddle on the lake. But so far the weather is not cooperating. i should have done something outdoors on Saturday — I seriously considered going to Schodack Iskland, but it didn’t happen.

Ended Up Screwing around with some maps, while my memory was fresh on the location of the roadside campsites in the Green Mountains. Setting up the mapping data for the Green Mountains, similiar to the New York maps I make, was kind of pain, as it required downloading totally new data and setting all the formatting, but now it’s done and working well. Made a dozen or so maps of the Green Mountains and other locations I explored or of interest in Vermont.

Also got music loaded onto a memory stick so I could listen to it on my truck. It seems I left my memory stick with all my music up at Romance Header Campsite when camping in the Green Mountains, so I ended up buying a new 32 gigabyte memory stick. What’s nice about that, is my entire music collection can fit on the memory stick, so whatever I want to listen to, I can dial it up on the radio. Also, have plenty of room for podcasts — over 9 gigabytes of free space remain, for adding whatever podcasts I want to it, for listening in the woods.

I originally wanted to organize it by genre/first letter artist/artist/ folders, but my truck can only have 700 folders on the memory stick. I ended up coming up with a script hat did genre/first letter/songs or genre/artist/songs or genre/artist – album/songs, depending on how many songs there were on an album. This seems like a relatively simple way or organize it.

Got a New WordPress theme up on the blog. The original theme I had used was kind of messed up internally, as I didn’t fully understand the concept of client themes in WordPress, and ended up hacking, somewhat badly, an existing theme. This weekend, I moved over to the Pinboard theme, with a much more carefully put together client theme, that gives the blog some unique look and feel, while staying constant with a theme that will automatically update as needed, and with clear delineations between my own code, and the code of the theme’s author.

Should instantly improve the way the blog looks and feels, without the heavy lifting and complicated code that was required for even the most minimalistic changes on the old blog.

Did an Oil Change Today. Going to take back the oil filter to Walmart for recycling — I noticed they now offer recycling for the filters. In years past, I would just toss them in the garbage, or burn out the oil in them in a fire and toss them in recycling, but now that there is a proper system for collecting oil filters for recycling, all the better.

One thing I hate about doing an oil change, is the habitual staring at the oil pressure gauge after restarting the engine.

The first time after the change, it literally takes a second or so for the pressure to go fully from 0-40 psi while the pump pressurize the oil. Then the oil pressure always runs a bit high in the 45-55 psi for the first 5 minutes of driving after an oil change, before returning to the normal 40 psi — all while I am holding my breath. Totally normal for this engine with cold oil to run in the low 50s especially under hard acceleration, but still slightly nerve racking.

I actually kind of like the fact that gauges go up and down on my Chevy (like others I have driven). The voltage gauge also goes up and down, a fair bit from 12.5-15.1v, depending on the state of the charge of the batteries. So much different then previous cars that I have driven, where I think the oil pressure gauge and battery gauge actually don’t do anything, or tell you anything as they are a constant level.