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coping with a damaged brand
Sunday, March 23 2025
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
I'd had a moderate amount of alcohol but no diphenhydramine last night, and I slept right through the night for the first time since the night before I drove down to my childhood home. It's possible the Shaque itself somehow woke me up in the middle of every night that I slept there, though it's also possible that now diphenhydramine is causing more problems with my sleep than it is solving.
Gretchen and I had our usual Sunday morning in the living room with a fire in the woodstove and Spelling Bee on our devices (we no longer seem to play it collaboratively, which is just as well). When I wasn't doing that, I was reading the Wikipedia entry about the Intel 80286, trying to get a better handle on what was so cursed about that microprocessor. At some point I took a recreational 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine to help put me in the mood to deal with piles of crap needing organization.
Then I resumed the work I'd begun yesterday unloading the Forester, which was filled with many treasures from the Shaque, the abandoned house were I'd grown up, and the honey house attic. Most of this unloaded stuff ended up in piles on the floor in the laboratory, and I hope not to have it sit there long before finding places to put all that stuff. (In the past, hauls from my childhood home have been the precipitating factor in the arrival of a phase of unmanaged clutter to the laboratory.) I eventually reorganized my storage of things based on all the circuit boards I'd brought back with me from Virginia. I moved most of the arriving circuit boards into a drawer in the desk in the northwest corner of the laboratory that had once held a wide variety of disembodied heat sinks, all of which I moved into the plastic tray that I'd found in the honey house attic and used to transport the latest batch of circuit boards back from Virginia. And I could just stack that tray atop a box full of old AGP video cards that I will probably never find a use for.
This evening, Gretchen and I drove to Woodstock to have dinner with our friends Lynne and Greg at the Garden Café. Among the topics discussed was how to signal they hate Elon Musk while continuing to drive their Model Y Tesla. They already have applies stickers to the back of the car to distance themselves from the man at the top of the brand, but they had other ideas as well, such as putting a curved rainbow sticker at the top of the the T-shaped logo. I thought maybe a sticker could be added to the top of the Tesla logo to perform gender-affirming care to convert it into a Venus symbol. Later Lynne and Greg told us about their recent trip to Zion National Park (which Musk and DOGE have yet to destroy) and the back-to-back illnesses suffered by their daughter, who has also yet to find employment after graduating from a software development bootcamp. The illnesses included Norovirus followed immediately by Covid, which is apparently still rampaging. The mention of crippling diarrhea caused me to relate the story of the time Gretchen had to pull over on the side of I-295 in New Jersey so I could unburden my bowels into the trash strewn along a concrete barricade. (Of course I added the joke about finding a toilet paper dispenser mounted to that barricade.) Later I talked about my new job (which I would be starting tomorrow) and the recent visit to Virginia. As for food, I had a somewhat-disappointing lentil soup and the mushroom tacos special, which seemed even greasier than usual (by then, I only had the appetite to eat one of the thre). Greg and I also drank glasses of Montepulciano wine.
We later learned that Greg was driving them home when they were pulled over by a cop who looked to be "about eighteen." Greg had swerved to avoid hitting some trash and rolled through a stop sign, and then it turned out that he didn't even have his license on him. But white privilege being what it is, he got off without getting a ticket.
The back of Lynne & Greg's Tesla. Click to enlarge.
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