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what the tweaker didn't steal
Sunday, December 23 2018
The Sunday before Christmas is a big day in retail, so Gretchen didn't bring Neville to the bookstore this morning, as he might've been trampled to death. The store ended up selling $6000 worth of books today, which made it the biggest day Gretchen has ever told me about. Since the dogs hadn't gotten much of a walk this morning, I tried to get them to come with me on a firewood-salvaging forray. But only Neville accompanied me into the forest, and I lost him somewhere before crossing the Chamomile. I didn't go much further than that, stopping to cut up fallen trees on the side of the steep escarpment just west of the Stick Trail. I started with an oak, but it was too wet and rotten for immediate use, so I cut up a fallen white ash instead, managing to assemble a whole backpack load out of it. This would be the only backpack load of firewood I would gather this weekend.
Back at the woodshed, I found enough empty space around the roof girder to stuff a fair number of smallish pieces into the third tranche, which I've considered full for two weeks now. But if I hadn't done that, it's hard to say where all this firewood would've gone in the house.
One of the things I wanted to do today was to paint a tiny painting to give to Gretchen on Christmas morning. Since I'd yet to paint any paintings of Diane the Cat, she seemed the most obvious subject. So I found her asleep on the bed, stroked her until she was moving around and frisky, attacking the lens cap on my Nikon camera. She was moving so much that I had trouble getting a good picture, but I got one good enough to work from. And so this was the painting that resulted:
I have a plan to build a little stationary robot that logs data to the cloud. Useful data would come from a smoke sensor, a humidity sensor, a temperature sensor, and a camera that can be positioned to look in different directions. The idea would be that I could check the data periodically while I'm at work to see if the woodstove is filling the house with smoke or someone has left the front door wide open. Since the device would be logging to an FTP server, it would probably have to be a full Linux computer and not something simple like an Arduino. A natural candidate, then, would be one of my three Raspberry Pis, preferably one of my two simple Raspberry Pi Bs, since they're not powerful enough even to provide the sort of GUI anyone would want to use. Unfortunately, the smoke sensor I have produces an analog output and Raspberry Pis have no analog inputs. This meant I would have to process the signal with an attached Arduino. That's not really a problem; I have experience making Arduinos into I2C slaves, and the Raspberry Pi has an I2C bus that I've written Python code for. I also have a special HD Raspberry Pi camera and even a pan and tilt mechanism with servo motors and an Adafruit servo-control shield for Arduino. This meant that I'd actually have to use an actual Arduino board and not one of those stripped down mini-Arduinos of the sort that I used in my Ahmed Mohamed clock. I wanted to use a cheap knock-off Arduino Uno with a tiny Atmega328 soldered to the board, not one of my old-school Arduinos which accept Atmegas in a DIP socket. But when I looked around the laboratory, I couldn't find the one I knew about anywhere. I looked high and low, becoming increasingly suspicious that it was one of the things pilfered in the summer of 2017 by that housesitter-tweaker who also ran off with my Adderall and Leatherman tool. I also noticed that one of my two Onion Omega II one-board Linux computers had vanished. Why would the tweaker have taken those? But then I looked up my purchase history with Sparkfun.com and saw I'd bough the Onion Omega II in October of 2017, months after the tweaker and done what he did. This new information caused me to dive back into my stuff looking for the missing boards and being increasingly dismayed by the chaos in my laboratory. How could I live this way?
Then I remembered that the last time I'd used that Arduino was with the RFID projects I was attempting at the end of 2017. Perhaps the Arduino was still attached to the pickup coil of the big RFID reader I'd bought back then. Sure enough it was! And then it turned out that the extra Onion Omeag II was hanging on a single wire from a solderless breadboard, dangling above an abyss of dusty cables under a makeshift table at the north end of the laboratory.
After dark at some point I took off my shirt and went out into the cold and cut my hair while standing in front of the doghouse where I store pine needles. I put the hair on the roof of that doghouse so it could be picked up by birds or squirrels without having to venture down to the danger of the ground. My first attempts to cut my hair were thwarted by the dullness of the scissors, but then I sharpened them using a simple file. As I cut my hair, Diane the Cat cavorted about on the leaves at my feet. I couldn't see well in the dark and she might've been playing with tufts of my hair. I should mention that I was not using a mirror or any other visual aid to help me see what I was doing. All I did was feel for long bits of hair and then I'd cut them away blindly. When I later looked in the mirror, it looked fine. I wasn't able to see how it looked in the back, but Gretchen didn't say anything so it must not've been too bad.
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