Notes

Studying the rural landscape 🐐

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One of the things I find myself spending a lot of time lately is trying to understand the rural landscape and people’s relationship to land and property. The architecture and barns, the livestock raised, how people piece together a living in the country.

Methods of study vary. One is the simple just traveling to rural areas, riding rural roads on my bike. Climbing mountains and peering down into the valleys. Things I’ve done for years now, but now with a much more careful eye, trying to figure out what I actually want to some day not that far in the future incorporate into my life. Styles of architecture, layout of homesteads and gardens, livestock and even toys like ATVs, tractors and trucks.

But at the same time I’ve been doing a lot of reading and listening to e-books about farming and homesteading, books about the wilderness and how people relate to the land. In many ways it’s taking off my rose colored glasses on the topic. I grew up in the country, I know about barnyards and breaking ice to water ducks and feed dogs in the winter and all the smells and hard work that go along. Still maybe I didn’t think as much about stewardship and how much farmers of all stripes struggle to stay on the land, and the hustle to stay afloat selling what they can. Often it really is a fight for life against markets, pests, disease and weather. Or how 5 acre homesteads chew away at once vibrant farming lands. YouTube videos are good to get a look at every day operations of farms and homesteads but sometimes five hundred page books give you a lot more of the back story.

People will say I’m wasting my time in analysis and study, years of my life are rapidly fading away while rent checks fly out the door padding my landlords pockets. But I want to do it right, build the right homestead in the right location, be thoughtful not rushed. The time is not now but will come and armed with facts on all aspects of rural life, I will make better decisions. I grew up in the country and went to school in a small town, yet there is much more to learn.

Back on Cheese Hill 🧀

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Just sitting here, staring at the Catskill Mountains much like three weeks ago. I’ve been coming up here a lot especially in the autumn. I should bring my shot gun and get my license but I’m fine just sitting here. I don’t eat that much meat anymore.

I know that cabin for sale out here that stole my heart out here was much too far from work,🏚️ but I do love it out here. Years ago when I was young – decades before this was state forest I used to come out here and just sit at the end of the road looking at the mountains. ⛰️ Plus out here was a good place to seek out homesteads with burn barrels to look at even in years after the ban. 🛢️ Mostly all gone fifteen years later. But even if I lived remote, I’d have those shit gun 🔫 laws of New York. My apartment is a mess, it needs a good cleaning but I’ve been away so long. Facing another winter there, I need to get more weather stripping around the door 🚪 that continues to rot away. Still it’s fairly cheap. Been quiet 🤫 the past few weeks as the landlord – dairy man has been busy harvesting not working on the unit next door. Money 💰 has been good this past year, between the high interest rates and the booming stock market. I can make the leap when I want but I don’t want to fall flat on my face, ☺️ and still kind of want to get in twenty years with the state for the higher pension amount.

Smoked some grass and forgot to tighten my kick stand 🏍️ before I went out riding. Bolt 🔩 bounced out and is gone but I found the kickstand and it’s a standard water bottle cage bolt 🍶 so I stole one from there and will replace by stealing another part of my old bike 🚲. Made me cranky for a while this morning but after lunch and some riding I’m feeling better. Plus that whole issue of my eyes 👀 being irritated from the contacts. I’m out of paper towels 🧻 so I didn’t wash my hands 👐 well enough before putting them in it seems.

Been thinking 💭 a lot about my use of the R statistical language. Is R a real programming language? It’s not a general purpose language like C or even Python and I wonder what value I get out of learning and using it every day. I think that’s why I’ve been so interested in learning and getting really good at C and now Rust. I do like a lot about Rust. But I’ve also been study a bit of modern Javascript and Java. Truth is a lot of the concepts can be used from language to language and for a lot of things I do R and the tidyverse are perfect. 🖥️ Still when I tell people I do most of my work in R, I just get snickers. Of course, a lot of scripts in the office are based around good ol Awk which is if anything far less of a language then R.

Landowner, not a homeowner

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Eventually, I plan to become a landowner more then a homeowner. Land not just a place to have a home on, but land where I can call my own, use for my own purposes, study nature and wildlife, hunt and trap on. Public lands are a fantastic resource, but they aren’t really my own even though I temporarily occupy the lands.

As a landowner you become responsible not just for your home, but also maintaining the land to maximize habitat and value to you. There are many ways to use land, farming, firewood, timber, hunt, trap, and so forth. Careful methods of use can maximize both the value of the land to you and wildlife that lives on it.

Land is more important to me then any kind of home I would have on it. I don’t want to chop down the forest or develop it more, I’d much rather take an adapt an existing structure, and use as much of the land that I own for natural purposes — be it agriculture or forest property. I would like to meet as much of needs on-site as possible, from renewable energy to food, to an live with as small of an externalized impact as possible.

Cabin

Delegitimizing government is a feature not a bug of Trump

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If there is anything that I really like about Donald Trump is that he is making government less legitimate and heald in less esteem then it often has been in the past. I’m not at all convinced that government workers and politicians are all noble people, indeed most of them are there primarily for a job and getting paid.

Calling government work noble and declaring government workers to be heroes is simply an excuse to underpay government workers, have unsafe working conditions and generally be uncompetitive to the private sector. Parades for fallen cops and soldiers doesn’t make their work places safer or better compensated, it simply strokes egos without improving anything. And it causes cops and soldiers to do inferior work as they believe they are special for being underpaid and forced to work in an unsafe work environments. And it displaces jobs potentially done better privately.

Trump is tearing down the notion of “the people” in the courts, holding the government rather than individuals in contempt. A ruling of any court is inherently political, all judges are either elected or are appointed by elected officials. They have biaes they face when interpreting the law. He’s also reminding us how laws are often rigged to favor incumbents and established players – and while he likes to point at Democrats and liberals – it’s pretty obvious it cuts both ways.

It’s not to say there is no role for government. There is. But government service is no more noble than any private persuit, indeed cops and soldiers are just as essential as farmers, plumbers and software engineers and cell phone manufacturers. Truth is modern life is impossible without all facets of the economy and government workers really aren’t any more important to society than any other industry.

Clearing out after the rain ☔

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Last night was clear until well after bed time when it rained for a while. It was foggy this morning but by eight the blue skies returned. Breezy but clear.

It’s nice to wake up another morning in the wilderness. 🌄 It’s quite autumn like this morning with a reasonable amount of color. 🍁 I’ll probably head out riding in a bit 🚵 and do some reading 📖 and just thinking 💭 and dreaming today.

Yesterday was such a busy day with remote work 💻 and I already have more label 🏷️ and data jobs to run but I’m thinking most of them can wait until Sunday. I’m thinking I can process a bunch of them all at once at the Rennselaerville Library. Plus I don’t know how much solar ☀️ I get at this campsite. 🏕️ Especially in the autumn with the leaves still on the trees 🌲 but the sun angle quite low. 📐

Continue to be a bit annoyed by the Drive Safe and Save app. 📵 It just complains every time I turn off the Bluetooth or enable power saving, and loves to remind me it’s willing to record a trip ⏺️, every time I am drunk or high as duck 🦆. What for? Saving $50 every six months – less than $10 a month. I get it if it inspires me to avoid crashes good but it seems to ding me for hard braking so randomly and never gets me for actual bad driving 🚘 like those almost crunch moments on the road 💥 or when I look down and see I’m actually speeding by quite a bit. It’s like riding my bike 🚲 to work to avoid paying the bus 🚌 fare or eating whatever crap is at the campaign committee to save on food at home. 🍲 Not that even waves money 💰 in the long run. I know, spend money on what you actually care about and not on the other crap.

Just kind of a cool and breezy morning today, ☀️ taking it slow, doing a lot of reading 📖. Trying to learn everything I can about the Rust programming language but truth is I just need to sit down and write code. You can be an expert on the borrow checker but it’s meaningless without practice. But it’s a cool morning. I do want to ride over to Mount Pisagh later on an to the OSI Parcel of Cheese 🧀 Hill and just enjoy the colors and the beauty of the day. It’s a Saturday so the pace of work slows down a bit but I do have a bunch of data jobs to process but maybe the can wait until Sunday.

I get it that they call it remote work for a reason 💻

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This was such a busy day from camp, I barely found time for lunch and to set up gear a bit. Now it’s getting dark so quickly but it’s a mild pleasant evening with the cricketa in the background humming. Cool enough to sit by the heater – I should start a fire but I’m in no rush as it gets darker and darker out.

It’s the weekend before Columbus Day Weekend. 🍁 My parents are off leap peeping, out in the woods working remote once again. The data jobs started before nine, I worked from the Westerlo library until I had to go pee and by the time I got Rennselaerville State Forest I sprayed a tree with poop 💩 and had to change my pants 👖 when I finally got to camp and wash up. I think that salad 🥗 I found in the fridge at the campaign committee on Thursday evening was kind of slimy. Or maybe it was slimy onions 🧅I chomped down. Or all the coffee ☕ with breakfast. I’m fine now, and despite what the internet advertisers think, I don’t have Chron’s disease or liver cancer ♋ my doctor checked me out last year. 🩺🩻

People think it’s all fun and games with the travel 🍀🛻 but it’s actually a lot of work to set up and take down camp 🏕️ plus all that packing and fuel ⛽. It’s not all that much money, 💰 bar the extra cost of gasoline, beer and weed. 🍺 Or propane. And I’m having a lot of fun when I’m not working which is less and less of each weekend. It’s fine, election day is in about thirty days and then I can deal 🤝 with all the stuff I’m supposed to be doing with my state job but are neglecting. I’m going to be in the office Monday as it’s going to rain ☔ and there is a list 📃 of things to do and review. Plus I need to get to the laundromat, I have so much dirty clothes 👕 and if I plan to be in the office four days next week I need to look halfway decent. And my whole apartment like usual needs a good scrub 🧼 but by the time I get home I’m much too tired 😴.

I’ve tried to be learning more about the rust programming language 💻 but to really master it, I just need to sit down and write code. ✍️ The best way to learn is to do. Do some cool things with data using Polars and Rust I tell myself would be a good way to learn. I mean I do many great things with R but it’s slow and I know it’s not a real programming language even if colleges 🎓 love to teach it these days. I know enough Qt from writing QGIS plug-ins I could certainly write apps in C++ or Python if I really wanted to. Or probably better yet in C with GTK+ or even Rust. I’ve studied enough C and C++ over the years with some Stack Overflow I could certainly build cool things if I knew what I wanted to build. Then again that’s true with so much of life.

Today was a weird day 🃏

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Maybe because I cast my vote for the rodeo clown. And maybe it was a mistake but the decision is done. It’s just one of millions. And I left my belt at home when I was getting dressed, not discovering it until I was home, so all day I felt like a prisoner, a sucidial patient, somehow just off — though these were nice new, tighter jeans that at least weren’t slipping off.

Am I fully comfortable with my voting choices 🗳, probably not but the decision has been made, my lot cast. Truth is I’m more alienated then anything else from all the politics, even if it’s how I make my money 💰, it’s what pays for the toys, the guns and cannabis — and some day in the not too distant future my off-grid cabin. 🏚I just hope whatever happens, the economy remains strong and we have good leadership for our nation, even though I know I’m pretty much powerless to change it. I can change myself, but I can’t decide who is going to be the next President. 🌍 I wish the politicians would do more about climate change and inequality in economy, but it seems all they do is cut ribbons on infrastructure projects and attend kids science fairs.

The belt thing just through my off today. 👨‍💼 It just felt so werid. Then I accidentally left my wallet in my bike box when I was in an hour long meeting. Which was fine but I was nervous the whole meeting not knowing where my wallet was, 👛 and my laptop charger is dying. I ordered another one. 🔌 It is what it is. My bike kickstand bolt came lose, but I found it on the road and just need to reassemble it. And tomorrow I’m planning on remote working and heading back out to the wilderness for a long weekend. 🏕 But I’ll probably be back in the office on Monday, as while I like remote work, I’ve come to realize my office needs more supervision. Things are happening and I’m not always finding out on the email or phone. Plus it’s going to rain on Monday. Columbus Day Weekend looks great though if I plan to go out to Madison County to ride trail at Charles Baker.

And it just a werid day in many ways. 🏇 Sometimes were super busy and other times were dead silent. Some of it was my fault, there was so many emails and so many data jobs to run the past few days, 🔢 that I would think I was all caught up but i missed an important email that needed to be run. When I had downtime though I’ve been reading up on the Rust programming langauge, which I think is the thing i want to learn next. That and POLARS data libraries. For some things, interpreted languages like Python and R are great, but the more heavy data stuff I do with R, the more I realize how slow and clunky it is. Surprisingly, I really like Rust, it doesn’t have a lot of boilerplate and it uses method chaining and function programming in ways that are so elegant. 🤓 I think it’s the future and while I’ve been mastering C for work, I think Rust is vastly superior in many ways. I know Java and C++ are very popular these days, but I’ve never been a real fan of classes.

Well, I should head home and get packed for heading out of town tomorrow morning before work. 💼 I don’t need a ton of things for camping locally through Sunday, but I do need to get some clothes and I might as well load some of the gear tonight so I can get an early start tomorrow and get camp set up before getting down to work tomorrow remotely from the wilderness. 🌲