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unblessed matzah
Monday, April 22 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
It was a nice sunny day but a bit cool for comfort in the shade. The dogs spent much of it stretched out in the driveway (sometimes with Lester the Cat) absorbing solar photons. At some point in the mid-afternoon I took the dogs for a walk on the escarpments west of the Farm Road and they found something to do that kept them in the forest for awhile after I got back home.
Today was the first day of Passover, and for some reason we were completely unprepared. Gretchen tried to buy matzah in Woodstock at various places, but of course all the stores had been cleared out of that part essential Passover product. So she had me drive out to 9W to look for some at the bigger stores. First I went to the Ghettoford Hannaford, and they didn't have any. Then I went to the bigger Hannaford on 9W, and they didn't have any. Finally I went to Adams and actually found a shelf marked "Passover items," but it was mostly empty and had no matzah.
When Gretchen got back from the bookstore, she used Google's "supermarkets near me" to look for matzah. She called MyTown, a kind of ghetto supermarket in Rosendale we'd never been to and asked if they had matzah, and, surprisingly, they claimed that they did. So we drove down there with almost no electricity in our Bolt's battery to get what they had. They only had two boxes of matzah that was, it turned out, not-kosher-for-Passover (because some rabbit hadn't mumbled over it), but that was going to have to be good enough. We also got a few other things, such as a hard-to-find Indian curry containing kidney beans. They had several pouches of it, but two off them were stuck together by the moldy contents of some that had escaped through a rupture.
Back at the house, we both made "matzah pizza" by spreading tomato paste on sheets of matzah and the sprinkling faux cheese on top of that. But there was something a little wrong about this matzah, and it wasn't that it had been insufficiently prayed-over. It had that vaguely musty flavor that either comes from spending too long on the shelf or being made with cheap raw materials.
This evening after a bath, I dedicated myself to making significant advances on the "local remote" control panel for my cabin-based remote-control system. I hooked up a 20 by 4 character LCD and wrote the code to display information about the remote-controlled devices (derived from the JSON resulting from a network call) on its screen. I then soldered four little push buttons to a fragment of a solder breadboard and began the work of writing the code to get those buttons to provide interactions with the display. I quickly realized it would be best to use interrupts, something I've only ever used (in the Arduino context) on a weather station that needed to count pulses from wind-driven sensors.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?240422 feedback
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