Author: guillotinecat

Brush Burning Day

  • We’re waging a scorched-earth campaign against glossy buckthorn


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  • Before burning, review Denethor’s fire safety tips:
    Do NOT pour oil all over yourself before lighting a fire.
    If you catch on fire, stop-drop-and-roll, do NOT sprint off a cliff


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  • Just getting started. It got much bigger but didn’t think to get any shots when it was really going.


  • 3 1/2 hours later….

Random Object Found In Woods

CHONK!

No, not the bear. This thing:

Old plastic case with some wires, half-buried in dirt and leaves. Inside…

I had no idea what this was. But a friend of mine said it was a primitive pressure sensor.

“The pressure sensor moves the lever that moves the slidewire creating a variable voltage.
Op-amp, capacitors, and resistors condition (amplify/attenuate, filter) the signal.”

And annoted the pic for me.

Cool!

At this point I thought maybe I should clean off the writing at the bottom and look that up.

Aha! Viz was apparently an extremely popular maker of radiosondes. And this particular part is an old baroswitch. So this thing probably fell from the sky 30-40 years ago after being dangled from a weather balloon.

Evening Stroll

  • beautiful fall morning
  • in the late afternoon, went out for a walk in the woods
  • sometime the trail is smaller
  • whenever I get hungry, I eat whatever mushrooms I can find
    the ICU nurses tell me I should stop doing this, but what do they know?
  • I didn’t bring a headlamp or a jacket, so best to get back before sunset
  • nearly home….

Brush-Hogging

  • Brush-hogging is basically attaching a gigantic mower blade to the back of a tractor and using it to cut brush — grass, shrubs, small trees — down in fields. We do this every 1-3 years in the fields on our property otherwise they would fill in and no longer be fields. We hire someone to do this. We don’t have a tractor.
  • We do this only at the end of summer (no earlier than the end of August, usually later in September) after the birds are mostly done with the fields. Cutting earlier might yield useable hay but would slaughter young ground-nesting birds and we’re trying to optimise for wildlife conservation.
  • Freshly-cut fields look pretty good.

Another Hike

  • summit is just off the Long Trail
  • very tower
  • summit selfie
  • fire tower selfie, with appropriate expression
  • leg day

Today’s hike was to the top of the fire tower on Mt. Belividere. It was mostly rainy and overcast. We climbed the tower to find no view and a brutal wind. It was abjectly terrifying being up there. Perfect! 🙂

Sun came out, spectacularly, 35 minutes after we’d left the summit. Elevation at the starting point: 346m. Elevation at the base of the fire tower on the summit: 1024m. Quite a fun, and tiring, hike, despite the low visibility. Just under 3 1/2 hours round trip.