What became of yesterday's fate? Yardwork, tangles of jungle amount of yardwork. Three instances of my 80V battery in my attempts to bring civilization to the wilds kind of yardwork. I regretted I never took the shot with a window opened up in these past few weeks. And plants hate me.

Still, the takeaway was that I had the stamina to keep pushing, even if took up my day and hampered my breathing. Even the battery to my Aftershokz audio ran dry as my line to the weedwacker met its end.

At day's end, I was beat. There's more to do; there's always more to do. However, it was just after 7:30 PM and I was scheduled for routine maintenance.

Among the things I loved about the country is that I could just ignore wide sections of my property for the whole season! Here, I have to give thought for a single bush! The last place...how many trees did I have? Hundreds? I don't know. I know we planted 30 for funzies and it seemed like just a few. Incidentally, I chose to keep 4 tulip poplars in the old horse pasture. One of these days I'd like to drive out that way to see how they've held up after 7 years. I got the sense that massive, high fantasy oak that in that back, the one without a couple of Tolkien Wood Elves living up there, saw the founding of our nation.

My old yard:

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At any rate, natural is just better. Maybe that's what makes these city neighborhoods just...weird to me. Everything's sculptured, a place full of people but you see no one—well, other than the outsiders who sculpt. There's something that's just...uncanny about it. Dystopian even.

I had ChatGPT define uncanny valley for me this morning because I didn't want to define a definitive source:

The uncanny valley is a concept used in the field of robotics, animation, and human-computer interaction to describe the phenomenon where humanoid objects that closely resemble humans but are not quite perfect evoke feelings of eeriness or discomfort in observers...(As they) become more humanlike in appearance and behavior, there is a corresponding increase in their appeal and familiarity up to a certain point. However, once the similarity reaches a certain threshold where the artificial entities appear almost but not entirely human, it triggers a strong negative response in humans. This dip in the graph, or the "uncanny valley," represents the point where the observer's sense of familiarity is disrupted and they perceive the entity as eerie or creepy.

The uncanny valley effect can be attributed to a mismatch between the expected human behavior and the subtle cues that reveal the artificial nature of the entity...