|
|
|
our dogs are our family
Sunday, August 14 2016
location: Twenty Ninth Pond, Essex County, New York
I (but not Gretchen) would be driving back to Hurley tomorrow, and Gretchen thought I should maybe remove a tree that had fallen across the access road today so I wouldn't have to do it tomorrow. So she and I (and the dogs) hiked out to where it was, which was just a little before the good cellphone spot. I'd brought a saw, but it turned out that the fallen tree could be dragged off the road more easily than cut into pieces. After that, we both went to the now-nearby cellphone spot and interacted with our little slabs of technology for awhile. News from Gretchen's parents was that the new place they'd be moving to, The Watergate, didn't allow more than one dog at a time. Did this really mean we could no longer visit Gretchen's parents with our dogs? Gretchen's father tries to color within the lines when it comes to such things, and, in a later email, he seemed to think not. Over the course of the day, Gretchen came to take this as a massive passive-aggressive fuck-you to her and her life choices, perhaps even worse than their partial-disowning of her during the five years she was in a relationship with a woman. There would, after all, be no problems for her brother-in-law and his family (which now includes a poofy little designer dog bought from an Amish puppy mill).
We talked about this later down on the dock as I used my slingshot to fire stones as far as I could out into the pond. Still, it's hard to be that mad at Gretchen's parents after all the stuff they've done for us. But it's things like this, like considering our family (and yes, our dogs are our family), that really count in the world.
After all that effort I spent cobbling together a USB connection for my Arduino-based weather system, it seemed prudent to do some actual work with it. Mostly, though, all I'd been able to do was document the commands I could issue through its serial interface, and that hadn't even required me to get it working. Once I did try to make it do something, I experienced all sorts of problems, some of which were the result of having forgotten how I'd left things. Others seemed to relate to reliability issues of the sort I'd seen in the past with my Ahmed Mohamed clock. Perhaps the connectors on the jumper wires I use on my recent microcontroller projects don't form connections that last. Or maybe the problems come from the poor quality of the cheap Chinese knock-offs I use in place of proper Arduino gear. In any case, I did eventually manage to display some stuff on the little Digole screen attached to the device (and certain functions, like the real time clock, seemed very reliable). But I didn't write any new code or implement any new features.
This evening Gretchen made a meal of Thai-style peanut noodles flavored with kimchi. And then, as always, we watched a couple episodes of Orange is the New Black. I should mention that when I was wiring up my makeshift USB connection the other day, I mixed up a couple of the wires and orange came to carry the ground. In low-voltage projects, black usually carries the ground, so my memory aid after the mixup was "orange is the new black."
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160814 feedback
previous | next |
