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friendships are important
Sunday, December 14 2025
After I'd had enough coffee, eaten the last of the Fantzye bagels, and gotten pretty far past genius in Spelling Bee, I went up to the laboratory to continue my work on the microcontroller firmwares for my ESP8266 Remote system. The plan now is to somehow incorporate a serial parser into an I2C slave so that I can offload all that special-purpose work to the slave and then use an ESP8266 flashed with my standard firmware instead of having a special-purpose SolArk Copilot. The plan is to be able to configure the slave from the master so that it looks for various sequences in the serial stream and then grabs bytes from various places to store locally until the master can retrieve them. Such a parser could be used for lots of purposes and would free the serial port on the master for rapid REPL-like queries when debugging the many issues that will need to be debugged. Today I focused just on creating a system for using the master to edit configuration locations on the slave's EEPROM. The slave's EEPROM has a kilobyte of space, of which I am using less than 300 bytes for a fairly comprehensive set of master configuration values. This leaves me plenty of EEPROM for storing the strings and integer offsets I will need for serial parsing. To get all this working, I just made the existing system for saving and retrieving master configuration values generic.
I would've been happy to work on this all afternoon and into the evening, but Gretchen had arranged another social obligation for us, this time dinner over at Lynn and Gregg's place in Woodstock. I like Lynn and Gregg, but I'd just had to dedicate a whole evening to community theatre, which is very much something I would never attend if I were living on my own, so the idea of driving eleven miles in the cold to chit chat with friends for hours about not particularly interesting subjects didn't really appeal to me. I half-jokingly groused about it at the beginning of the drive there, and Gretchen took umbrage, socratically asking me what I thought the value of socializing with friends was. I didn't really know what she was going for; maybe the mental exercise slows the onset of dementia or something. So I had her answer the question and she offered that it keeps us out of the bubble that exists between us while also building friendships we will need to rely on when trouble (such as sickness) inevitably arrives. These were good points, so I tried to not be a complete debbie downer.
At Lynn and Gregg's house, we sat in front of the fireplace in their little hall-like living room eating crackers with dips. I was the only one drinking an alcoholic beverage, in this case an IPA left by one of their kids. (The options had mostly been a bunch of Pabst Blue Ribbon and other American macrobrews that I never drink anymore, but thankfully there were a couple IPAs in the mix.) We talked about various things, including the horrifying conditions at my childhood home as my mother Hoagie sank into dementia and about how I generally don't breathe through my nose when I am visiting my brother Don in the trailer across the street.
Later we all checked out an interesting lounge chair made entirely of plywood that could be set at different angles on a curved base or could be taken off its base to act as a rocking lounge. I felt like I could build such a chair on my own with just a piece of plywood and a jigsaw, so I took a number of photographs.
Gretchen had spent the late afternoon making a lasagna with gluten-free noodles, and that was our main course. Much of dinner conversation concerned Lynn's attempt to find professional help for her various allergies, which include gluten and all domestic animals. The technique being used (perhaps it is NAET) to diagnose and then eliminate the allergies is to hook Lynn up to some sort of electronic apparatus and then apply pressure to parts of the body to look for weakness and then to deal with that weakness as a way of reducing the effects of the allergies. It sounded to me like pseudoscience, but the truth of the matter was that I wasn't paying enough attention to the tiresome details of the clearly bogus procedure to provide any contribution to the conversation. I should mention that I was't loving those gluten-free lasagna noodles, which were like pieces of plastic in places where they hadn't absorbed enough moisture.
After watching some SNL skits upstairs in the grand teevee room, we played three games of Rummikub, a fun card-like game featuring plastic tiles with colored numbers on them. The goal is to eliminate tiles by placing them adjacent to existing tiles according to specific rules about the sequence of numbers and the diversity of colors. These rules always sound complicated when introduced, but all it takes is a little play to grasp them completely. Lynn won two or three of the games, and even when we played the last game until the last chip was put down, I came in last.
Before leaving for the night, we lit a tiny menorah to celebrate the first night of Chaunukah. The others knew the complete Hebrew prayer song one sings while lighting it, but all I knew was the "baruch atah adonai" part.
That plywood lounge chair at Lynn & Gregg's house. Click to enlarge.
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