I see your flags. Your Andy Arthur, the one with that blog with all the maps, right? That was what the boys in the pickup truck hooting and hollaring said passing by last night. It was I think 4:30 AM before I got back to my campsite after hanging out all night, passing around the pipe, drinking beer and watching pallets and other shit burn in their fire last night.
I honestly had no expection of doing an all-nighter last night with the boys, but that’s how it worked out. 🔥 We chatted for hours on end, they were from the Utica area. They said that’s a pretty sweet truck, and I was like, it’s kind of old and crumbly with 14 winters under it’s belt. 🛻They were from the Utica area, living out in country, and I had to admit I was pretty jealous of them🧑🌾But of course, they said I’m fortunate to live in the big city and have the big director’s job at Data Services. It’s kind of weird how jealous we are of each other lives. We got talking about how they have families and I have none, and how I dream about owning my own land 🚜 and having livestock. 🐐 Or was it just a really strange trip? I should learn to talk to people less and listen more 👂 they often have interesting stories to tell.
Yesterday turned out to a be pretty beautiful day, but I was just kind of tired both from the grass and because I also stayed up super late on Friday night because it was a beautiful evening and I had a big cup of office coffee ☕ late in the afternoon before heading up to camp to make sure I had the energy to drive up after such an exhausting week at work. Amazing how strong office coffee is compared to my percolator pot I use a home. Spent all of the morning yesterday reading, then napping, 😴 then after a good lunch with lots of fried summer squash, bacon, tomatoes, and shallots I got last week at Shauls, I spent the next three hours floating on the East Canada Creek. 🏊 Terribly lazy but I needed it after the week that was.
I wanted to get Campsite 5 but I ended up at House Pond Campsite for the weekend. It’s fine, I liked being able to bike over to the Potholers last night. 🚲 I should have brought my swimming trunks when I rode up there, it actually got hotter and more humid as the evening progressed. By the time I was riding back to camp at 4 AM it was kind of cool, but sitting by that rip roaring fire, it was warm enough. 🔥 I don’t think riding my bike back to camp was the most dangerous thing ever, as it was a 4 AM on a dirt road in middle of nowhere, only a 1/2 mile or so, but I fully admit it was a sloppy ride back. I know I probably just curled up with that sloppy German Shepard and spent the night up at their camp rather then retiring back to my truck.
Yesterday was so beautiful, I am kicking myself for not going up to White House and picking blueberries, 🫐and doing some hiking along the Northville Placid Trail. 🚶 Today is already getting hot, but if I had been there, I could have just taken camp down relatively early, and spent all afternoon at the swimming beach at that state campground on the Great Sacandaga Lake outside of Northville. 🏊 The store bought blueberries I had were pretty good, as were the wild blackberries I picked earlier in the week in the Albany Pine Bush. I’m going to need more groceries on Monday, so maybe I should ride down to Norman’s Kill Preserve to pick some more after work. 🛒 Then shop. Really don’t think there is enough daylight left in the evenings now to go out to Five Rivers 🐸 after work but it was fun while the days lasted to read books up there. That one Libby book I have on homesteading stopped working so I ended up finishing up the Ansel Adam’s autobiography I had, and then while floating on the East Canada Creek I was listening to a history of Dairy Farming in Wisconsin. Dairy is somewhat different in Wisconsin then New York as it’s farther away from many big cities and cheese 🧀 production has always been a much bigger part of the industry. Also been reading this ebook that showcases southern cabin architecture – how people have turned chinked old-fashioned logged cabins once common in rural south and turned the into beautiful, modern homes. 📚 I got to admit it was a very lazy day, ☀️ but I really needed it after such an admitly rough work week.
The plan is to swim 🏊 and float for the morning, probably first do the East Canada Creek swimming hole by the House Pond Campsite, ⭕then I’ll ride up to the Potholers for the balance of the day. I’d like to get back to the truck by around 3:30-4 PM so I can drive down Canajaoharie and ride until around 7 PM tonight then head home while there is still some light. As it was only a two night trip, I packed fairly light 💼 so take down should be fairly easy once I get home. 🏡 It’s going to be a hot day, and after the wild night last night 🌃 I’m sure I’ll just want to collapse into bed 🛏️ and sleep soundly next to fan. Maybe I’ll do a hike up to House Pond first though. 🚶
I put the hub caps back on Red. 🛻 They really enhance the appearance of the wheels. It’s funny to think this very well will be my last trip up to Piseco-Powley for the year and that soon the road will be closed for winter. Probably the last time I will ever have Red up here. Big Red has been good but he’s getting long in the tooth. I’m kind sad to see Red go – my new truck next year will be a lot smaller – but also better on gas ⛽ and reliability 🛠️ so my hope it next year to do many more adventures. Trading in or selling Big Red will be like many a man selling his late 1960s Mustang or GTO in the late 1970s or early 1980s. A lot of regret all around but there will be the pictures and the memories.
One more weekend then summer vacation. 🏖️ I could do White House next weekend but I’m leaning more towards Shauls and Mine Kill and then visit with the family. Probably a week from Wednesday I’ll head out to the Finger Lakes through Labor Day. 🏕️ That works out to be 14 days, the maximum stay per 30 days in the National Forest. I have the vacation time and I should use it, though I do want to roll over the maximum into next year and want to take a long weekend up to the Saint Regis Canoe Area around early October 🍂 once I’m recovered from the LASIK.
“Mr. Green, He’s So Serene, He’s Got a TV in Every Room” – Pleasant Valley Sunday, the Monkees!
Being in my forties now and researching buying houses and land, I am struck by how many consumer ads I am flooded with. I get that I am in my prime purchasing years in my life, and once I own a home, I will need to make repairs and get at least some furnishings and appliances, but the endless advertisements for dinning room sets, roof replacements, insulation and building systems, solar panels and especially those gutter leaf guards. As apparently leaf-filled gutters are the biggest menace ever to the suburban house-owner. I get it — leafs plug gutters, they rot, make gutters heavy and overflow, rotting the boards near them, then eventually the gutters fall from the building if not cleaned. Just like vinyl siding is convenient, even if it’s often poorly applied and accelerates underlying rot, as is case in one house I looked at earlier in the summer.
There are first the endless seeming ads for heat pumps and grid-tied solar. I swear NYSERDA with their promotion of Heat Pumps is always one of the top targeted ads on my blog, at least for me. Since I’ve started advertising on my blog it’s usually the first ad I see. I am not saying that that a heat pump won’t necessarily be a choice when I build my off-grid homestead, but I think I would much rather use a woodstove and locally-harvested source of wood for heat and open the windows in the summer. I’ve never had air conditioning nor do I have much interest in it.
Maybe I am particularly annoyed by the web and podcast advertising as I don’t own a television so I’m not bombarded with television messages all day long, and I’ve cut back dramatically on listening to NPR as it’s mostly stories about how Donald Trump is a dark cloud over the nation. And maybe it’s a good change over what was the advertising I got a few years back, which all way praising the benefits of Better Help and Mental Health Therapy, then weight loss and meal plans, then financial advisors. I get targeted advertising is just trying to sell to interested customers.
But it makes the whole idea of owning a home all the more repulsive. Buying a new house — you’ll want to consider renting a dumpster for all that shit you’ll inevitably rip out and not want to bring into your new life and instead send to that growing mound of toxic filth on the outskirts of the city. Don’t forget the convenience of garbage service, as the advertiser remind you. You can toss it one bin for pretend recycling! Don’t even think of burning it, that’s illegal even out in the country. And you’ll want home internet, because nobody can live without high-speed internet in every room. Got to recycle the paint, that you inevitably won’t use up, because they’re is lots of state money now for paint take-back programs. And so forth. Even thinking of buying a home, or expressing any kind of interest, fills you feed with so much repulsive advertising crap on all the things you will want to buy.
There is the assumption in the popular culture that the good times will go on forever — low unemployment, cheap gasoline — and that our parks and highways will remain crowded. But that assumption is dangerously foolish.
Everybody knows that the next recession is around the corner, and that only one big upset in the Middle East could put world oil markets into a tailspin. We could have gas lines or prices over $5 a gallon in six months.
We really don’t know. The economy is white hot right now, and gasoline is super cheap, but just because things are really good now, doesn’t mean things won’t change.
One of the great luxuries of this time of year is fresh tomatoes and I have been taking advantage of that the past few weeks. Some tomatoes freshly sliced, but also lots of tomatoes run through the food processor and used as a sauce with eggs and fried zucchini. I think the anti-lectin diet is silly, and if anything encourages people to eat junk food.
Do you want access to the Chat GPT code assist as part of your job was the question I was asked. I said no, I’m not sure what I would use it for as the data structures I build and link together. To explain a task in English and then pose follow up questions to an AI Chat Bot seems like a lot more work and slower than just writing the code in plain old R directly.
Maybe I’m not with the times and fail to see the power of artificial intelligence but I generally see it clumsy and something more likely to get in my way rather than be actually helpful. But maybe I’m just stubborn. Years ago, I had this real beginners belief that it is better to code your own solution to problems then include a lot of libraries that to do a lot of extra things that I’ll never use and is overhead – though that’s not how the compiler or linker work in reality – libraries only link to symbols actually used and compilers optimize our unused code. And any library is likely written by an expert in the field who has included many optimizations I’m unaware of.
But AI is different than linking to a library. For one, it requires an external pay service that depends on internet access and you have to hope the API never changes. It also allows or maybe requires you to explain in English what you to do. That sounds nice if you have no idea what you are trying to do in code but in my experience working with AI, the generated code is full of bugs and by the time you explain what you are trying to do and then debug the code, you might as well right it correctly yourself. Libraries you learn the API and then you just link to them. No internet required.
