quite a change from when it was under construction 2 years ago!

fixed my electric lawnmower -- my guess was right, and a off balance blade was causing the motor to think it was overloaded at low idle

my rural neighbors have started asking me about solar and whole house batteries

Also worth noting that this fact is not disclosed on the ballot or vote.debian.org at all, which is probably emblimatic of how well Debian will do at disclosing LLM use going forward.

A college friend and I get together halfway between our home bases once a year, so we’ve spent a lot of time exploring the western slice of Pennsylvania and Maryland plus a little bit of north-central West Virginia. This year’s expedition involved five nights along the Allegheny River just outside Kennerdell, Pennsylvania, and it has been a definite crowd pleaser!

The river is the most amazing part due to its clear water, copious submerged plants, and so much aquatic life. We used an outfitter to make the paddle from Franklin to Fisherman’s Cove an easy trip then DIYed it with a shorter paddle from the Kennerdell launch to our Airbnb a mile and a half downriver. I also pulled out my snorkel so I could revel in the fish, crawdads, mussels, and snails up close and personal, as you can see in the video above.

We could have easily spent all four days on and in the river, but there was much more to explore on land. The region is a nexus for rail trails, and we dipped into two different paths which pleased us for two different reasons.

First came the Allegheny River Trail, which runs along the eastern bank of the river for 32 miles. We enjoyed a short 4 miles each way from Kennerdell Tunnel heading south, then half a mile through the tunnel plus a bit further north. That was enough to see that the paved path passes through communities (a downside for me) but also gives easy access to lots of gorgeous mountain streams (major plus).

(Do not miss the tunnels! It was a literally cool and exciting experience to bike through the Kennerdell Tunnel, pictured above. For me, a phone light was sufficient, but my friend needed the real flashlight I’d brought and you might too.)

Despite loving the tunnel, the best part was elsewhere. If you drop down off the side of the rail trail, you can pass through Civil-War-era stone culverts like the one pictured here (mile marker 115) and find ultra-cool cave species (like the Eastern Cave Long-jawed Spider with its gauzy egg sac) that have made these human-created structures home. There were even little stalactites forming on the twentieth-century concrete addition in the front!

Next up, the Sandy Creek Trail crosses the Allegheny River Trail at Belmar (where you can pedal across the Belmar bridge and enjoy lovely river views). We made time for a short jaunt from Rockland Road to Belmar and back, which involved passing over several fun bridges.

The downside of this trail is that it’s raised up so high that there aren’t many spots where you can easily access the beautiful stream running below it. However, just a short distance west from Rockland Road, there’s a well-used walking trail running down to a gorgeous streamside spot that’s clearly used for swimming and fishing…and which also gave me an opportunity to wade and look at more aquatic critters like the Johnny Darter above.

My friend is a waterfall-lover, so I always try to find her at least one waterfall on every trip. Freedom Falls was the only one nearby, and it did have a lot of visitors. However, at lunchtime on a Friday, the space cleared out for almost an hour and we were able to relax at the base of the falls while enjoying the roar of water all on our own.

While waiting for the falls to depopulate, we ambled extensively upstream, enjoying the diverse mushrooms, plentiful salamanders, and one very amenable toad. Even though this area is a network of well-trodden ground rather than a preserved area around a single trail, I highly recommend the spot for naturalists as well as waterfall lovers.

Our other on-the-ground amble was along the River Trail in Clear Creek State Forest. The trail is basically a road, so you have to wander a bit to see cool stuff, but we were thrilled to stumble across a newt, scads of mushrooms, and perhaps a dozen tiny toads who were clearly enjoying their new life on land.

What I would have liked to do if we’d had more time: Hire the same excellent outfitters (but reserve ahead so they’d actually be there when we showed up!) to float down French Creek. Plus repeat and extend many of the adventures above, especially the snorkeling and culvert-hunting.

What I wouldn’t change: The airbnb was so much better than anticipated. Both amazing deck and riverfront access could have kept me happy for days, and you can easily bike to the Allegheny River Trail from its front door.

Gear I used for underwater photography: Full-face snorkel and waterproof camera.

For real geeks: INaturalist trip report is here if you want to see all of my observations.

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_{Fine print: The two gear links are affiliate links, so I get a few pennies if you purchase these products I already use and love…}

2026: the year of the linux cringe

watching chimney swifts from my porch, 

writing something to share later

being aware of crickets

 Cycles of energy and mood have put me to bed by 5PM half of my recent nights.  It is a luxury to be able to go to bed early and to return for a spell of sleep in the mornings after I complete my chores.  But I do not want to get to used to missing out on these hours of living.  

So I am reminding myself I love writing in the evenings at least for now.  

I recently had a realization about personal narrative.  I have been telling myself a story that I am not traveling anymore because of my disability and the effect of aging but a different way of looking at it is that I am choosing to prioritize my stability.  

How might looking at your abilities from a different angle benefit you?

Trash panda in chief

One of my favorite spots to paddle is Raccoon Creek, putting in at Crow Road in Vinton County and heading upstream until my arms give out before drifting back to my car. I always see something lovely, and this weekend was no exception.

The highlight was a mink temporarily stuck on a rock ledge, meaning it hung around for a whopping three minutes while I was only about ten to thirty feet away. (This is a very close and long sighting by wildlife standards.)

I wasn’t fast enough to catch the moment it leapt off the cliff to belly flop into the creek then swim away underwater. You’ll have to take my word for that part.

My favorite photo of the day was a Bronze Jumping Spider on a cardinal flower bud.

Favorite missed photos: the seven Yellow-billed Cuckoos (all of whom flirted but none of whom posed!).

I’ll end with two bonus arachnid shots: a crab spider hanging out on a sourwood flower so it could kill and eat a pollinating bee, plus a fishing spider with feet in the water to hunt by feel.

As a side note, I’ll be heading out on vacation later this week, taking lots of photos but likely not posting them. So be prepared for a gap then a photo dump!

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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...)

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%