I join iNaturalist projects in part to help science but mostly as a nudge to get me to try places I haven’t been to before. So when the Ohio Dragonfly Survey put out a call for more observations from Lawrence County (an hour and a half south of me), I jumped on the excuse to explore.

Actually, I usually spend a lot of time in Lawrence County. My favorite dispersed camping lake (Timbre Ridge) and backup dispersed camping lake (Lake Vesuvius) are both located there. But the two dams blew out during heavy flooding in spring 2025 and haven’t been fixed yet.

Poring over Google maps and National Forest maps, though, I realized there are other paddling and camping sites in the county worth checking out. So I carved 24 hours out of my schedule and headed south…

I started at the Arabia Canoe Launch at Symmes Creek…which is very rustic. It’s a carry-in site with a steep, muddy bank that makes getting in and out tricky (but feasible alone even in my heavier kayak). I summed up that part of the day in the video above — note the chocolate-milk water and copious obstacles, but also the wildlife that came to visit even with only a thin strip of trees in some spots separating me from humanity.

Paddling time: 2 hours fighting my way upsteam against a pretty strong current + 45 minutes floating back downstream

Portages: 2 going upstream, 1 going downstream (since I was able to scoot over the partially submerged log shown in the video on the way down).

Odonata: 9 species (highlights included the new-to-me Fawn Darner, plus the Dragonhunter in the video which is a new county record)

Conclusion: Symmes Creek was useful for data collection, but I’d probably only go back if I had a way to float downstream and be driven back up. Time to move on…

Even though the Arabia boat ramp is located in the National Forest (where dispersed camping is allowed), the creek itself is almost entirely on private land. Plus, I wouldn’t have wanted to haul my gear through all that mud anyway. So after my creek paddle, I headed half an hour north to another under-oded county (Gallia) to spend the night at the teensy-tiny Kenton Lake.

There, I got out of the car…and promptly spent 15 minutes recording 7 Odonata species (including the somewhat rare Banded Pennant, bottom right photo, which likes sandy-bottomed lakes).

Kenton is small enough that you can easily see one end from the other, but there’s no boat ramp so most of the human activity is on the shore close to the road. I did see another kayaker (fishing) early the next morning, but I was thrilled to be the only one on the water on a Friday afternoon.

Highlights of Kenton Lake: tranquility, excellent emergent vegetation, Whip-poor-wills yelling at dusk, very cute Brilliant Jumping Spider, sandy bottom made for serene lake soaking. I was running out of steam, though, so the video above only shows the parts I adored the most…half of which is spider footage.

Odonata: 10 species, including three individual Swamp Spreadwings (which is a lot by my standards — I generally run across only a handful of spreadwings per year. The spreadwing is the damselfly in the upper-right of the gallery of Odonata earlier in this post in case you’re geeking along at home).

What I would do differently next time: bring a full-size trashbag. Ever since reading Braiding Sweetgrass (highly recommended, but yes this is an affiliate link), I’ve been picking up every shred of human trash I find near my campsites, and this one had so much I ran out of bag to put it in. Although visiting a site with so much trash is a bit daunting, I know from experience that cleaning up a spot changes people’s mindsets and results in less trash in the future. Plus, the practice of giving gratitude to the earth this way is very satisfying, a tangible counterpoint to audibly saying “thank you” to beauty outdoors.

Conclusion: Kenton Lake is now my favorite backup dispersed camping lake, easily beating out the much larger but also much more heavily trafficked Lake Vesuvius. I guess my husband is right: I did just need to keep looking until I found another source of serenity close at hand!

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any day where you get to remove a propane appliance is a good day

on the bright side I am looking forward to not having a copper water pipe closed off only by an ancient water valve that is pointed right at my house's main busbars

Last week I found a wire to an inverter that was dangerously hot near the terminal. This has now escalated to:

* fedex truck delivering replacement wire getting stuck so badly in my driveway that a neighbor's tractor had to pull it out. (Pro tip to drivers: Generally you want to keep the wheels on the ground, and the back of the truck not sunk into the hillside.)
* need to repair driveway damage now
* have to remove the water pipes going to the propane water heater to make way for new wire routing (hopefully I will never need that water heater again...)

@jgoerzen I would be curious about your take on this question.

(I would be glad to see the concurrency bug fixed otherwise; I had to work around it in my code.)

I’ve been noticing two Wood Ducks sitting together when I go to the lake recently, but I hadn’t zoomed in and really paid attention until this week. Such a treat to realize this was a pair preening each other to boost their pair bond!

Sexing Wood Ducks when the males have shed their brilliant feathers and donned eclipse plumage is all about the eyes. The bird on the left (bold red eyes) is male. The bird on the right (dark eyes ringed by yellow) is female.

As I watched, the male did most of the grooming. But the female eventually got in on the act too.

In case you want to see more action, here’s a video. Possibly NSFW? (That means it might be a little racy for you, Mom.)

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software development today for me: Examining commit messages to guess if AI use was responsible for a dependency starting to fail to build.

dude forked myrepos by pointing an LLM at the source code and telling it to rewrite it in rust, failed to preserve my copyright

Protests that "this is fair use"

Has incorrect documentation that insinuates that myrepos is insecure. Even after I have pointed out that the documentation is incorrect.

Obviously it is buggy. I'm not gonna file bug reports tho.

If someone uploads malware to your software repository, they should be banned from future uploads to your repository. I think this is a basic rule that any repository would agree with.

https://pypi.org/org/Anthropic/

I love wetlands in general, but I didn’t realize fens were a specific habitat until I started visiting the glaciated part of Ohio. Now they’re one of my favorite places to visit for birds (which like the open habitat) and summer flowers (including unique species I see nowhere else).

The video above is from the tower at Siebenthaler Fen, where the open expanse looks a lot like any old cattail marsh. You have to look closer to see the uniqueness of the fen.

What makes a fen a fen? I’ll let the educational signs above clue you in. The most important parts: fens are fed by mineral-rich groundwater year-round, allowing peat (partially decomposed plant matter) to accumulate. Unlike bogs (which also make peat), fens are alkaline (thus the cool plants!).

In the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes region, glaciers are responsible for laying down the sand and gravel necessary for fen formation. Although the photos in this post are from Siebenthaler Fen where this is harder to see, if you go to the nearby Pearl’s Fen, you can see water bubbling up out of the ground.

Every week of summer seems to bring new blooms to Siebenthaler Fen, so it’s worth repeat visits. When I dropped by last weekend, Queen of the Prairie (the pretty pink flowers) were in full bloom, as were Shrubby Cinquefoils (which seem to be a dominant fen plant).

There are always lots of birds rearing babies at Siebenthaler, but you’ll want to keep a particular eye out for Red-headed Woodpeckers and Willow Flycatchers (both of which are common at there but not in most of my other haunts). I didn’t get any good shots of either rarity time around—birds pictured above instead include a Downy Woodpecker and an Eastern Kingbird. You can see and hear the Willow Flyctatchers in my video though. (Sorry about the wobbly non-tripod zoom…)

Not pictured: Kirtland’s Snake, with a gorgeous pink belly. (Found dead, so I didn’t think you’d want to see.)

Finally, the damselfly above is a Seepage Dancer, a fen specialist which I found in another park which I’m not going to tell you the name of because, even though the sign didn’t say so, apparently you’re not supposed to enter without a permit. Oops! But also, too pretty not to share!

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I enjoyed reading this post by Marginalia "Your harddrive is probably full"

You can construct an entropic argument that there are simply more ways for a harddrive to be full than ways in which it can be empty.

Of course it made me check how full my laptop drive is, and indeed it was more than 75% full, as predicted.

But, I almost never feel that my hard drive is full. I can very easily free up almost any amount of disk space at any time, without any thought. While writing this blog post, I ran a single command and now my harddrive is 50% empty.

The other part of the equation is that a full disk isn’t a problem until it’s so full you can’t put more stuff on it, and at the point it’s so irredeemably cluttered that when you do clean it up, you only have the patience to clean up enough to bide your time, judging the fate of every file on the harddrive is simply too much work.

Why doesn't this apply to me? Because I have put in the up-front thought to organize things, so that I never have to do that anymore.

I have 3 categories of files that I can remove at any time I need more space, without any thought:

1. Any files that are stored in git-annex. This is one of git-annex's superpowers; you can git-annex drop any file and stop it using disk space, but the file is still there (as a broken symlink) so you don't risk losing or forgetting about it.
2. Caches.
3. Files in ~/tmp/, which is reserved for any files I only want to have a passing acquaintance with. If I'm not comfortable with something being deleted at any time, I don't put it there.

Not only do I only have these 3 categories, these are the only 3 categories for everything except OS files and files I have decided I never want to remove (eg dotfiles and other files stored in git repos).

Computer scientists invented caches (and of course cache invalidation is no problem lol) so I only needed to learn about that one. Unix gave me /tmp/ as an example that I long ago used as the basis for the rules for my ~/tmp/. I hope that git-annex might also serve as an example that moving files between drives is not the best way to manage disk space use.

making best use of solar time

- caramalized onions in instant pot while also programming
- heat pump water heater cooling the air
- thyme from solar field garden going into the quiche too
- that's baking on solar power
- oh and EV is charging of course

My most geeky fun this week involved exploring fens—stay tuned for my Friday post on that topic. In contrast, the most beauty involved backlit spiderwebs, either dewy like the one above…

…backlit by the setting sun like this lucky catch…

…or being picked apart by fledgling Red-winged Blackbirds (who I’m pretty sure were stealing insect dregs while waiting for a parent to drop by with fresher food).

On the arachnid note, this video does include a Harvestman (Daddy-long-legs) plus Water Striders (which are bugs instead of spider-relatives). But it’s really just a distillation of what it feels like to be out early on a gorgeous summer morning.

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If I could recommend only one destination to lovers of colors and light and avian excitement, it would be Mindo, Ecuador. Our trip was pretty much perfect, so I thought I’d give you a rundown of everything we did.

Our adventure began at an airport hotel…which doubles as an alpaca farm. Our Airbnb host in Mindo recommended against being on the roads at night, so we opted for the hotel’s airport pickup, fell asleep, and woke bright and early to foggy beauty.

For our first real day in Ecuador, I’d chosen the less-traveled route to get to Mindo itself. Rather than paying for a private transfer, we doubled our payment and enjoyed an all-day, private guided ebike ride.

We were driven up to the ridge west of Quito, then it was so amazing to watch the plants and animals change as we worked our way down from the upper montane forest at 11,000 feet to the cloud forest at 5,000 feet. On the map below, note that the beginning is on the bottom of the page (south side).

It was harder than expected to pedal on the few uphill areas, partially because neither of us fully understood the bike’s assist function but mostly because the elevation just made any exertion untenable. Our tour involved a backup van in case we needed to bail, but we decided to stick it out even when it began to pour.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that our guide was the best one I’ve ever had. Definitely recommended!

Day one’s grand finale (if you don’t count the dropoff at our Airbnb) was eating a late lunch while watching the astonishing diversity of wildlife at the feeders at Alambi Reserve. There are multiple places in and near Mindo where you can enjoy a similar experience and I’m lukewarm about birdfeeding so this is the only one we tried out. But the simplicity of it definitely hit the spot after six hours on bikes!

I wasn’t at the point of wanting to ID any longer by the time we got to Alambi. Instead, I just marveled at the colors and patterns of the birds flitting all around.

Of course, I did go back and obsessively upload each one to iNaturalist so I could decipher the beauty later, but that was…

…on the porch of our Airbnb.

While many parts of the trip were exciting, the place I go back to most often in my mind is the elevated Airbnb porch, inches from epiphytes and overlapping a wood-walled horse pasture. I spent hours sitting there, watching birds flit through the canopy, often as rain fell.

Due to the equatorial location, that was enough light even on drizzling days for good shots. The colors at midwinter were a perfect antidote to the Ohio gray I’d left behind.

In addition to sitting on the porch, on day two we followed our host’s instructions to walk to a nearby “private” waterfall. From the multiple black pipes running up the trail, it was apparent that this was actually a neighborhood water supply. But we didn’t see anyone else and had a blast enjoying the glasswing butterflies, the amazing climbing plants, and the waterfall itself.

To find the secret spot on your own, follow a “grass path” — wide and road-like but with pasture-like grasses, shown on Google Maps as going past Magic Elf Glamping. You’ll walk east out of Mindo until the wide path hits its end, then turn left on a smaller path. The waterfall is near 0°03’47.6”S 78°45’32.2”W.

We did completely soaked our footwear on the many stream crossings. Given the wet weather, my boots didn’t dry for days. Pro tip: bring multiple pairs of shoes!

All on her own, my sister found another magical place (0°03’32.8”S 78°45’40.0”W) within easy walking distance a couple of days later. (Yes, I am jumping ahead here — deal with it.)

She promised me toucans and quetzals and guans and I said, “No way they’ll still be there tomorrow!”

Except for the quetzal, all birds were still present and accounted for (plus a trogon and some other beauties joined the show). Big sisters are always right…

Things I don’t regret but that weren’t top of my list:

The Night Tour: Keep in mind that I’m terrible at night, and I also am not a big fan of group activities. I do enjoy how night tours expand my understanding of a place, so I keep doing them (hoping for a repeat of that amazing night tour in Australia where we saw flying foxes). My socks weren’t knocked off this time, but there were a lot of cool frogs.

Tarabita Mindo a las Cascas: Again, caveats include the fact that I was coming down with what turned out to be a terrible head cold that ate up a day and a half of our trip. But this attraction draws tourists from Quito on the weekend and we accidentally visited on a weekend.

To cut a long story short, there were just a lot of people around, which lowered the awe factor for me. The cable-car ride was pretty darn cool though!

Other recommendations:

Grab a copy of Wildlife of Ecuador to dream before the trip and to understand the larger-scale ecological factors at play. While actually in Ecuador, I relied on apps (Merlin and iNaturalist), but my app-less sister thoroughly enjoyed having the field guide on hand the entire time, even though it only had a small fraction of local species in it.

Plan outings in advance if you want to hire a driver. Our Airbnb host very kindly hooked us up with two local drivers, but it turned out not to be realistic to expect them to drop everything and show up within a few hours. They were, however, excellent about being asked to come back at a certain time to pick us up from trailheads or town.

Expect the bird-obsessed. People come to Mindo for birds, so don’t be surprised if a driver you hired to simply transport you from point A to point B hears a flock of toucans, slams on the brakes, then as you’re all standing in the middle of the road staring up, another car approaches…and also slams on their brakes so everyone in their vehicle can also pile out and enjoy the show.

Try the local fruit. Some of it was weird, but all of the fruits I’d heard of (mangos, papayas, pineapple) were ten times as delicious as the ones imported to the States. And one of the “weird” fruits (yellow dragonfruit, pictured above) was kiwi-like and delectable!

Don’t expect a lot of mammals. The only mammal we saw outside of the night tour was a resident pair of Agoutis. I didn’t see a single reptile either. But frog and insect diversity was very high.

If the local hummingbird pair chases everyone else away from your porch’s feeder, let him fly into the house and get stuck then watch what happens. (I mean, ethically, I don’t recommend doing this on purpose. But when the floodgates of porch diversity opened before I realized where our resident Rufous-tailed was located, the effect was astounding.)

New species on my iNaturalist life list: 82

New continent on my life list: 1 (!!!)

Surprising similarities: Many plant families were ones I remembered being introduced to in Monteverde, Costa Rica. Apparently, from a floral standpoint, Central America is mostly part of South America.

Time in Ecuador: 7 days and 6 nights (of which I spent about a day and a half flat on the couch on the porch fighting off a cold)

Are you still reading? I’m so impressed. If so, you’ll definitely want to:

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_{Affiliate note: All links are clean except for the book link, which nets me a couple of pennies if you buy after clicking. Thank you!}

water leak is finally fixed! confirmed with a water level test during a camping trip

Escaping summer on the Roan

Odonata update: although a few are still emerging, we’ve now entered adult-flyers season. The Blue Dasher pictured above is one of many dragonflies filling the air above every body of water I came close to this week.

Moth week: I’m not good at staying up late enough to see many adult moths, so I celebrated this geeky holiday by peering at caterpillar feet and catching a pair of Luna Moths mating.

Rain update: I got caught out in a sudden storm while kayaking again…and loved every minute of it. There’s nothing like getting soaked to the skin to really feel in your body.

(Yes, I realize this is an acquired taste. If you prefer to stay inside and dry, just pretend you’re watching this video through a window…)

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confirmed fast leak in my 300 feet of buried water line and bypassed it with an above ground line temporarily

also confirmed a number of smaller and probably insignificant leaks... pressure tested everything

I've had one of these same twist valves blow up and start squirting water out the top when I turned it, they seem to be crap

there are 2 outgoing water lines that are unused and the valves are shut off, and if I'm really lucky the whole leak is just crummy 30 year old valves that have started passing water through

cut the water line and pressure tested the incoming line and house, and it's leaked 3 psi in 50 minutes

this is actually good news

11 months ago I realized my water system is leaking

Still is... 19 gallons per day. Despite all my efforts so far I have not identified the leak. Seem to have ruled out the water tanks leaking, and from what I can tell the buried manifold (now excavated) is not leaking.

Best result from today's pressure test will be if I find that the old copper pipe feeding into the house is leaking. Worst result is no leak there which would mean it's probably somewhere in the 300 feet of hand-buried PEX.

it failed the first test but fingers crossed more thread tape fixed it because if not I don't have a replacement for the fitting with the slightly dodgy threads

the local mom and pop hardware store here closes at noon on saturday

every time I do plumbing there comes a point where I realize I am missing 1 part

∎

pressure testing the pressure tester

Want to write an import like this? Tutorial!

https://git-annex.branchable.com/tips/how_to_make_a_simple_importtree_special_remote/

Wrote a 58 line shell script and now #gitAnnex can treat Internet Archive items as remotes, tracking changes to files in them and downloading files from them as needed like from any other remote.

This is a new git-annex feature and it really just comes down to a few lines of shell script, with the meat of it being a `curl | jq`. The rest is boilerplate that would be the same in any script doing this for any web resource.

https://git-annex.branchable.com/special_remotes/external/git-annex-remote-internetarchive

When my bridge camera accumulated too many hardware issues to be worth fixing after 3 years of hardcore use, I considered an interchangeable lens camera. My budget possibly could have stretched to cover a basic DSLR with a zoom lens and a macro lens, but I decided to stick to my current hack.

Would my system work for you? Who knows! Keep reading to assess.

My workhorse camera is a Nikon P1100 (almost unchanged from the Nikon P1000 it replaced, which took all of the photos above; the ones in the very last collage in this post are by the P1100).

What I love about this camera is the amazing zoom, which gives me closer-up shots than all but the most pricey DSLR lenses. I use it in place of binoculars, with the bonus that I can snap shots for ID. I’ve become so much more intimate with the lives of birds since beginning to take the Nikon out in the field!

The price tag is significant, but is low enough that I’m willing to bring my Nikon paddling on level 1 rivers without a dry bag. (A camera in a dry bag is dead weight — not many photos are going to happen that way.) I’ve only capsized once, and my instinct was to grab the camera and hold it above my head. On the other hand, I have let the Nikon get wetter than I should have during a downpour and had to wait a week for the damp to stop fogging up the inside of the lens. (Oops.)

What I don’t love:

The downside of the ultra-zoom is that it only produces non-grainy shots (especially in “bird”/burst mode) in excellent light. If I had one of those huge lenses I see on hardcore birders’ cameras, I’d get better shots…but fewer of them since I’d more frequently leave my camera at home. It’s all a tradeoff.

As you can see in the photos above, the Nikon manages moderate-scale macro pretty well. But it didn’t let me zoom in as close as I wanted to on teensy-tiny things. Which brings me to…

Macro hack:

Two years ago when I had to send my Nikon P1000 in for a repair that took months, I splurged on a second camera. The Olympus TG-6 has a “microscope mode” that lets me see much closer up, and its in-camera focus-stacking deals with the macro issue of blurring everything that’s not on the focal plane. Just like with the Nikon, the Olympus opened my eyes to a different sort of wonder, this time about the complexity of invertebrate life.

Pros and cons:

At the level of water droplets on flowers or faces on toads, the Olympus is excellent. But at the jumping-spider level it starts to lose a bit of acuity. Also, even with the in-camera LED on, I almost always need a supplemental light. Luckily, it’s cheap and simple to provide backup illumination for small, closeup things.

On the downside, the Olympus’s focus-stacking only works if absolutely nothing moves, which isn’t very realistic in the real world. A tiny bit of breeze and you get odd artifacts when you zoom in. That said, the camera makes one unstacked and one stacked photo each you push the shutter button. So even if the focus-stacking fails and your critter hops or flies away, you still have something to remember it by.

Another negative: Images tend to come out dull, so I always have to boost the colors manually afterwards. (Not a big deal, but worth knowing if you don’t post-process. Honestly, I often boost colors with my Nikon’s images too.)

The biggest downside of this camera, though, is that it’s usually in my bag, not in my hand. No wonder I have far fewer “I love this!” photos from the Olympus compared to the Nikon.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the obvious — your phone! After getting hooked on iNaturalist and Merlin, I started keeping my phone accessible in the field. Then, after upgrading to a Google Pixel 7 Pro six months ago, I really tried out that always-on-hand item to see where it excels.

Landscapes are where the Pixel usually wins over my other cameras, with an occasional good semi-macro shot. The phone also seems to be able to manage images with strong contrast of dark and light and to capture the bright colors I see better than my other cameras, which means less editing.

Finally, the Pixel zooms just well enough to snap an ID-able shot of a perched dragonfly when I’ve purposely left my camera at home so I wouldn’t get sidetracked during short exercise breaks (that cut into my writing hours more now. Oops…).

Cons: I mean, this is a phone, so don’t expect too much. Especially in the resolution department — the stats say Pixel image files are huge (and they are), but when you zoom in on the image in the computer there’s far less detail than in photos taken with a “real” camera. And that’s sticking to the 1x an 5x sizes that don’t require a digital zoom.

To sum it all up: When folks ask what camera I use and I share the information above, they usually look at me funny. But all three cameras (refurbished) cost less than the price of a very basic interchangeable lens setup. And I have backups if one fails.

One bridge, one mini, and one phone. It works for me. Maybe for you too?

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_{Note on links: all links in this post are affiliate links, which means I get a few pennies if you click then buy. But my honest opinions above are entirely my own.}

excited this morning about writing a short shell script

The highlight of the week was stumbling across multiple broods of Green Herons just released from the nest. The one above was part of a group of three with baby fluff still sprouting from their foreheads.

In contrast, the young heron shown in this video (interspersed with an adult for contrast) seemed to be on its own. I hope it gets better at fishing fast!

The adult from the video, or another one, visited the fluff-fledgling bush with a mass of food in its gullet about fifteen minutes later. I wasn’t fast enough to catch the moment adult bill met baby bill and food was downloaded, but I thought you might enjoy some of the not-quite-in-focus snaps as the parent called its baby in.

Have a happy, herony week!

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Unfortunately this is the kind of actor who seems to be driving the Haskell Foundation these days. Well them and the finance bros.

AI pilled CEO is on the haskell discourse claiming that this vibecoded patch

a) saves them $200k/year in AWS fees
b) "Solving this problem by hand would have been so difficult"
c) "Testing this without LLMs would have been an absolute nightmare."

https://github.com/scarf-sh/gateway/commit/c45a4599742217b1957198a8a652d70b12a704f0.diff

I am dying laughing. Once you get past the indentation level changes, the meat of this is a check for /v2 in an url, followed by a little bit of url munging. Oh and a random timeout change thrown in for good measure.

https://discourse.haskell.org/t/after-7-years-in-production-scarf-has-reluctantly-moved-away-from-haskell/14380/48

Yatesville Lake, Kentucky, is about halfway between where I currently live and my previous stomping grounds, so I’ve dropped by a couple of times in transit. But this week was the first visit where I spent real time there.

Surprising nature highlight: Mushrooms!!! There were so many of them, often big enough to draw my eye from the water. My favorites were the Amanitas just starting to drop their veils, but there were also boletes and brittlegills and many others. Of course, mushrooms are very rain-dependent, but this is definitely a spot to visit when it’s been wet.

Plant diversity is also high. A cool find this time around was Pigeonwings (shown above with a baby katydid in the flower). This legume is one of those oddball species that grows both here and in Asia.

In general, the rocky shore creates an ecological niche that I don’t spend much time in. So I always seem to find something new-to-me at Yatesville Lake, which has included Purple False Foxglove and Virginia Meadowbeauty on other trips.

While animal sightings were relatively low, the rocky shore has a good population of Fence Lizards. I also saw a tiny mantid that might be my first sighting of the native Carolina Mantis (versus the invasive and much larger Chinese Mantis). And I heard ravens and learned Summer Tanager calls. Okay, so maybe there was more wildlife present than I’m giving the lake credit for…

The water is perfect for swimming with a sandy bottom in most places. On the downside, that means the lake is very busy. Think fishing boats starting at dawn and jet skis and motorboats roaring into life around 9 am and continuing until dark, unless…

…you paddle west into the Wildlife Management Area and go up a side cove. There, I learned it’s easy to be completely alone all day. I only barely dipped my toe into this vast wild part of the lake!

My home base this time around was a boat-in campsite. As you can see, there is a road to these campsites, but it’s only used by the park staff. If you camp midweek and peruse the reservation form to choose a site as far from other campers as possible, you can get a bit of serenity here even in the high season. Don’t expect true solitude though.

Pros: gorgeous views of the lake from the tent pads and you have your own stretch of lake to swim in and launch from. Vault toilets and water (potable?) are also available very close to each site. I grade this camping experience a C (but keep in mind my preference is dispersed camping with no people in sight).

All things considered, Yatesville Lake is worth a repeat visit…especially since my favorite camping lake and my favorite backup camping lake are both closed for two years due to dam slips. But I’m going to keep looking for that true solitude lake within an easy drive!

Exploring converted filling stations and solar powered EV chargers in South Carolina

One minute video on how to handle the heat by: finding water, immersing in beauty, focusing on something else, taking a bath, getting up early, going for a swim (even if you’re a squirrel), and relaxing on a cool rock…all in the time it takes for a Central Ratsnake* to cross our driveway. The sounds are dulled because even the birds were panting instead of singing on those hot afternoons…

*Yes, the species I grew up calling Black Ratsnake and had just trained myself to call Gray Ratsnake got split again by the geneticists this week. As of today, this beauty is a Central Ratsnake.

Favorite photo of the week: Green Heron preening, best of 70 photos taken in bird mode before my model got tired of posing.

Current seasonal highlights: catching spiderwebs gleaming in the sun and the first colored buckeye leaves, a few already on the ground.

Don’t forget to go out and play! And:

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My house has the same amount of solar, passive HVAC, 1/10th the battery and inverter, can charge my car 3x as fast.

Dad's new and older solar arrays

Interesting to see what people are getting up to with vibe coding and then reverting that in the next release without any indication of what bug it introduced.

In other news, replaced a git-annex dependency and sped it up by about 400%