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as if being hit by a baseball bat
Saturday, May 31 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
As is normal in the morning at the cabin, I started up a fire in the woodstove (it was a cool morning), made coffee and toast, and wrote the letters for the day's New York Times Spelling Bee on the little whiteboard we use to play the game collaboratively. Once we'd played that to the status of queen bee, I turned my attention to the OBD2 project I'd mentioned a couple weeks ago. The plan was to wire up a CAN-bus adapter board to an OBD2 cable and then connect that CAN-bus board to an ESP8266 and get a little "hello world" sketch running on it to perhaps log some data from the Bolt in the cloud. It wasn't easy to track down the specifics of how to wire those first things together; the key was to do an image search and then quickly scan through the resulting images to find the one doing what I needed to do. I then added a 12v-to-5v adapter and hooked it up to the Bolt. When the voltages proved good, I could start working on the software side of things. But because I'd brought my work-issued laptop, I had to install the Arduino IDE on it. And once that was installed, I had to access a stupid password vault for the admin password for that laptop to install it (since it really is not my laptop at all). Then it turned out that the password in that vault hadn't been updated after the password on the laptop was changed, so I couldn't install anything. My OBD2 software experiments would have to wait for another day.
So then I turned my attention to another project. Gretchen had been wanting a reading lamp for the north end of the couch in the great room, which is where she usually sits when she is reading in the cabin. The light there isn't great, so I thought maybe I could set up a 12v spotlight in the balcony above and control it with the remote-control functionality on the nearby Hotspot Watchdog (which runs my ESP8266 Remote software). Using 12v instead of 120v would mean I could use the other relay on a two-relay board (the first being used to trigger restarts of the Moxee Hotspot) to control it and, as a side effect, it would be available even if power from the household inverter was lost. because it would be driven by a big 12v marine battery.
I hooked up some wires to the marine battery and extra relay and put a 12v spotlight in the balcony. To control it, all I needed to do was add a record to the device_feature table. (I didn't have to change the Hotspot Watchdog firmware at all.) Gretchen was happy with the new light above her, but she was not happy learning that the only way to control it would be a web application. (She wanted a simple switch, though it was difficult to imagine how a switch would work without a string dangling from the balcony.)
At a minimum, though, I needed to make it so Gretchen could control that light without fighting through the pages of my ESP8266 Control web app. I'd been thinking of making a system for producing simple stripped-down control panels for this system to be placed on smart phones, so I asked ChatGPT how best to do this. It cheerfully suggested a simple stripped-down web page and then, based on my description of the backend API, spit out some code for me to use. I added this code to the hollowed-out shell of my inverter graph page (which had the necessary login hooks) and then pared it down until all that was displayed was a single button with some Javascript tricks to show the device's actual status. I also made it so the url would take device_feature_id as an argument so that I could easily make other single-button control panels. Later I made it so that a comma-delimited list of device_feature_ids could be included in the URL and it would produce buttons for each of those, all properly labeled and all properly showing the state. I'd basically built the stripped-down control panel system I'd been wanting. It was a simple matter to then just use the "add to home screen" functionality to have it appear as an icon on Gretchen's phone, allowing her to easily change the state of the light. The several-second latency of the switching was still a little jarring, but there was no easy workaround for that.
At some point in the afternoon or evening, Gretchen made a delicious stew containing purple cauliflower, kale, red beans, and chunks of polenta. It was so good that I went back for seconds.
Periodically I'd go outside to check out what the effects of the rain were. The north gutter was either leaking or overflowing, for example, and I wanted to know more. But on one occasion when I went out onto the front entrance deck and began to go down the stairs, my feet unexpectedly slid out from under me on the rain-slickened steps. I immediately fell down on my back and slid the rest of the way down to the bottom. There were only four (or five, depending on how you count) steps, but as each hit my lower back, it was as if being hit by a baseball bat. I could feel the pain ratcheting up with each blow, and by the time I hit the bottom, a spot on my lower back felt like it was on fire. I got to my feet (happily my back wasn't broken!) and went into the house as Gretchen came rushing out to see what had happened. "I need to lie down!" I moaned as I stumbled into the bedroom.
There was no pain medication in the cabin, so I had Gretchen make me a scotch on the rocks. I couldn't really tell what exactly was wrong with me, but it felt like I had a severe abrasion wound on my left lower back just above the hip bone. Gretchen looked at it and it was just red, so the pain I was feeling must've been an internal problem, likely with a muscle that had been pulled. Both arms were also banked up where they'd hit the steps as I'd fallen backwards. But I hadn't injured anything else.
Some time passed and eventually I was comfortable enough to read websites on a Chromebook. But any time I tried to change position or get to my feet, it would feel like someone had plunged a red-hot knife into my back. Gradually I started feeling out the limits of motion I could engage in without this pain, and they weren't much. If I lay still, I'd be okay. I could also walk and crouch without much pain, but if I tried to lean over at the waist, that invisible hot knife would stab me.
After the initial trauma subsided, I tried to join Gretchen and the dogs in the great room, but I soon found sitting in a chair uncomfortable. So they all came to join me in bed, where I kept struggling to find ways to change position without triggering an agonizing pang of fire.
Since there wasn't much I could do in this state, I allowed myself to drift off to sleep and slept for about three hours (until 9:00pm). Then I drank some more booze and eventually fell asleep again. Gretchen wondered if maybe I should go to the hospital, and I pointed out that our new insurance wouldn't be kicking in until midnight. (Otherwise we were uninsured, as Gretchen had allowed our Obamacare to expire prematurely.)
A goldfinch on an elder bush (those are elderberries) near the southeast corner of the cabin. The goldfinches have been loving all the dandylion and coltsfoot seeds produced by our weedy cabin site. Click to enlarge.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?250531 feedback
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