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spicy vindaloo
Sunday, September 7 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
The weather was back to being sunny again and perhaps not as cold, meaning Gretchen was soon back down at the dock. This time Neville even came with her. I came down shortly thereafter, Gretchen dove into the water, and I went on another paddle around the lake. This time I paddled closer than usual to Pyotr's dock, and even got a look at the cabin he is very slowly building up the slope. It's a massive building, the kind a billionaire might build on their own private island in their own private lake on their own private island. Fortunately, none of it can be seen from our side of the lake.
Back up at the cabin, I decided to try to implement something that had been percolating in my brain: adding a hardware watchdog function to my Arduino I2C slave firmware. Since the read functionality of that software can only read from values that correspond to pin numbers or 64 plus a pin number. This suggest that reads to values over, say, 128 can perform various other commands that I can define as needed. One such command would be to "pet" a watchdog feature on the slave. If the petting stops, then, the slave can send a signal to the reset pin of the master, rebooting it and hopefully bringing it back online. It turned out that I had no suitable small Arduino available to use as a slave, but I did have a Raspberry Pi Pico. So I soldered pins onto it and had ChatGPT alter my Arduino I2C slave firmware to incorporate this new command functionality. I then added some code to the SolArk Copilot (the ESP8266 most in need of a hardware watchdog) to support the petting of a watchdog (by sending command #129 to a slave) and hooked up the Raspberry Pi Pico to the SolArk CoPilot's I2C bus. After fixing an apparent short across the power rails, I got the slave working. But it was acting as though it was never being petted and kept rebooting the master. Eventually I had to give up on getting this working on this particular weekend, as it was getting late in the afternoon and Gretchen (who had already tidied up the cabin) was eager to begin our drive back to Hurley.
When we'd been getting lumber at the Lowes in Amsterdam Thursday evening, Gretchen had noticed a previously-unknown Indian restaurant, Grand Indian Kitchen, directly across the street. She'd looked it up online and was impressed by the vegan options, so she wanted to have dinner there tonight. This required heading back the way we'd come, and ultimately driving home via the Thruway.
When we arrived at around 6:30pm, there were three or four other tables occupied. The restaurant looked nice and clean and wasn't too cluttered with cultural items. The music playing from the sound system was mid-tempo jazz, though two different Bollywood movies were playing silently on two screens over the bar.
We both ordered the mulligatawny soup, a chickpea salad to share, and two curries. The chickpea salad was fresh and very good, but Gretchen didn't like the mulligatawny at all, saying it had the flavor profile ("sweet spices") that she'd disliked so much in Sri Lankan food. The mulligatawny wasn't great, but I was hungy, and it was good enough. As for the curries, mine was a vindaloo vegetable curry and Gretchen's was some sort of tofu dish in a brown sauce. I'd asked for the vindaloo to be spicy, and it was perhaps a little too spicy. (It was definitely too spicy for Gretchen to have any.) The food was okay, and we'll be coming back again. But next time we'll know to avoid the mulligatawny and not ask for the curries to be made too spicy. One indication that this restaurant was an authentically good one was that a couple of actual Indians (dot not feather) sat down at a table nearby after we arrived.
Once we got on the Thruway, the rising moon in the east was full and looked enormous, hanging in the sky for us to marvel at for a good many miles.
The dock today with Neville and Gretchen (who is hard to see). Click to enlarge.
Neville on the dock. Click to enlarge.
The view across the lake from its northeast corner, with our dock on the far left. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen swimming naked. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250907 feedback
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