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my heart can count
Saturday, February 14 2026
This morning Gretchen and I did the usual Saturday morning routine, which meant we both had french presses of our respective coffees. Valentine's Day is a real holiday for us, because it marks the anniversary of Gretchen getting back in touch with me after a twelve year estrangement. She didn't realize it was Valentine's Day when she sent me her first email 25 years ago, but it was.
Later I went upstairs and quickly got my I2C bootloader working on yet another AVR microcontroller, this one the Atmega1284. I'd recently received a 40 pin DIP version of it, and the great thing about it is that it has 16 kilobytes of RAM, which makes it ideal for use as a serial parser.
But as I was working on that, I kept being distracted by heart palpitations. My heart would beat normally some number of times (maybe only five) and then on the next beat it would swoon instead of beating. It kept doing that, and I didn't like the feeling this had in my chest. Eventually I got up and went outside to shovel a little snow (in this case, to make the driveway wider just east of where we park the Chevy Bolt, since I've noticed that if I exercise at all my heart palpitations go away. That helped, and I went back inside and eventually tried to make myself a BLT from leftover BLT-making materials. But my heart was back to palpitating and all I wanted to do was sit in a reclining chair. The palpitation were so persistent that I thought I should tell Gretchen about them just in case anything bad happened. She wondered about a medical checkup I was supposed to have back in January, but I told her I'd canceled it because I wasn't sure what state our insurance was in after I'd lost my job. But, as Gretchen pointed out, we'd already been enrolled in an Obamacare bronze plan, so I could've gone through with the appointment. This led into a brief argument, but I begged off and said I really wasn't in any shape to be arguing. Then Gretchen wanted to know if I should go to Emergency One. I didn't think my situation was quite that dire, though one never knows when it comes to an organ as essential as the heart. When Gretchen started getting critical of me again, I told her that this sort of thing was going to make me less likely to share my health problems in the future, which probably wasn't the best thing to say.
Gradually the palpitations faded away and I went upstairs to relax on the laboratory beanbag watching YouTube videos with Diane the Cat on me. My palpitations returned, and I noticed that they were very regular, with every fifth heartbeat being skipped as if my heart could count. Then it was skipping every sixth heartbeat. I made myself a slurry of gin with snow in hopes it would make my heart beat more regularly, but mostly all it did was make me drift off into a nap, which was ideal for Diane because it meant she would be undisturbed for awhile. I couldn't think of anything I'd done that was causing my heat palpitations except, perhaps, my pattern of recreational pseudoephedrine use. Today would've been a day I would've typically taken it, but I didn't. Perhaps my body now has a physical addiction to it. I know from past experience (mostly with caffeine) that the body can become reliant on very unusual patterns of drug use.
I awoke the the sound of Gretchen clanking around in the kitchen. Previously we'd made plans to make a pizza from a pizza dough I'd bought instead of going out for pizza (our usual Valentine's Day tradition). So I joined her in the kitchen to help stretch the dough out on the pizza pan and spread out the cheese (we had thin slices of Daiya Swiss-style instead of grated mozzarella-style. While we were both down there puttering around, we ended up doing a deep clean of both the refrigerator and the microwave oven (which still has taped-together shattered glass on its door and surprisingly amount of rust developed inside).
After watching Jeopardy!, Gretchen suggested watching a romantic movie for Valentine's Day. I'm never enthusiastic about her movie suggestions, but it being Valentine's Day, I agreed to watch Moonstruck with her. I'd never seen it before and was skeptical I would love a movie starring Cher from 1987, but it was much better than expected and one of the better movies Gretchen has ever convinced me to watch. It had a great story arc and spread out its attention across multiple couples.
Before going to bed, I managed to get my I2C bootloader working on the Atmega32U.
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