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dehydrated dogs
Friday, September 19 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Today I experienced an unexpectedly bad hangover, the result of drinking too much while jacked up on pseudoephedrine. But I'd also eaten some cannabis, which generally reigns in my drinking. But the cannabis had been old and weak, and I'd ended up drinking too much. This was the first real hangover I'd had in weeks. It was so bad that I decided not to drink any alcohol at all today in penance.
Despite the hangover, I had a surprisingly good day working from the Adirondack cabin in the remote workplace. It started out as all such days do, with me making coffee (no pseudoephedrine today; I'd had it yesterday and know better to take it two days in a row or three times in six days). It takes awhile to begin my day even when I am physically in the office, but it takes even longer at the cabin with nobody keeping tabs on me. But eventually I got to it and did some work, which involved querying a database to look for the origin of a data discrepancy in a report. I figured I knew everything until I read the earlier part of a ticket and saw that certain kinds of rare transactions are supposed to be applied negatively. With that information, I changed the underlying procedures for two different Crystal Reports reports so that the transactions were appropriately subtracted. And once I'd done this, both reports showed the information the client wanted to see. Success! The best part about it was that I was fixing Crystal Report reports but really only having to deal with them in the SQL layer (where I have decades of experience) instead of the crappy Crystal Reports GUI layer (where I want to know as little as I can get away with).
As usual, I took Charlotte for a midday walk and then, at the end of the workday, took her for a bigger walk. It was a gorgeous sunny day with temperatures in the low 70s.
As is often the case, I had a ESP8266 Remote Control issue to fix this weekend. Data had stopped flowing from the sensor on the SolArk Copilot early in the week, and I needed to know why. It turned out that the LGT8F328P-based board I was using as an I2C slave was doing something to the I2C bus after it had been up for a half hour or so, and after that the sensor would lose communication. Today I tried swapping in an Atmega328-based Arduino Nano board, and that no longer had the problem of corrupting the I2C bus, but now I had other problems. For some reason the Atmega328-based slave was rebooting the master much more than it should've been given that it should leave it alone if it is "petted" at least once every 1000 seconds. This was not a problem that I managed to solve tonight.
Another thing I wanted to do was get some Meshtastic LoRa devices working and see if they could be an option for tracking Charlotte. But then it turned out that I needed to do massive downloads to get the proper "cores" for these devices in Arduino (in perhaps other IDEs). So I shelved work on that until I can take a laptop back to Hurley and load it with the appropriate software.
I found some other, stronger, cannabis today and ate a small amount this evening and then took a bath. I could feel it kicking in and decided it best to go to bed. At some point I heard the dogs come in through the pet door and then I heard Neville trying to drink from the pink ceramic dish where we provide water. Oh shit, was it empty? It turned out that it was. So I filled up as as Neville enthusiastically drank from it. And then Charlotte came up, licking her lips. So I put a different bowl full of water in front of her and watched her lap it up, filling it frequently as I did so. I felt terrible; how had I let them get so thirsty? The reason was pretty obvious though. Usually there is water in one of the empty planters out on the deck; it gets filled by rain. But there's an ongoing drought in much of New York, so the planter no longer contains any water. And, unlike Ramona, neither of our dogs are in the habit of drinking from toilets when that's the only option. So they just allowed themselves to get dehydrated, though it's possible they ventured down to the lake at some point to drink. (They were gone for a few hours today, and the only thing I knew for sure they'd done was try to extract a chipmunk from the cabin's drainage system, scattering the stones I'd used to conceal the end of its corrugated plastic drainage pipe.)
The cannabis ended up making me feel very paranoid about the political situation in this country. This is something I'd been fearing for months after Trump won the 2024 election, and it kept me from consuming cannabis until at least the late spring. But then I had a few good experiences with it and decided paranoia was less of a concern. Perhaps conditions in this country are just getting too bad for me not to be paranoid, at least after consuming a reasonably mind-altering amount of cannabis.
Throckmorton the Loon in front of someone's private dock along the east shore of Woodworth Lake. Click to enlarge.
A large dock spider among the stones of our dock's "ice wall." This guy probably has a wingspan of three inches. Click to enlarge.
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