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off to save the African black-eyed susan
Thursday, October 9 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
It was noticeably cooler (temperatures were deep down in the 40s) when I set out for work in the dark this morning. Later I saw that a frost warning had been issued, and that made me concerned about the African black-eyed susan outside the cabin up in the Adirondacks. But when I checked the weather data up there, I saw that outside temperatures had dipped only to 34 degrees. We would be going there this evening, giving me a chance to bring that plant indoors before the predicted frost.
Among the things I built today was a system for storing text messages in my ESP8266 Remote Control system. This might seem outside the scope of the control and monitoring functions it provides. But now that it processes packets from Meshtastic nodes, it seems like handling those text messages could be very useful, particularly since my system acts as a gateway between wireless communications and the internet. A simple off-grid messaging app using infrastructure in place to track dog movements could also allow text communication with places unreachable by cell or WiFi signal, such as our dock on Woodworth Lake. Adding the message table and the UI to display messages (and even have that display automatically update) was a fairly trivial task in my system.
At the end of the workday, I visited MyTown Marketplace to pick up corn flakes and Cheerios. While there, I also went to Walgreens to get another 96 count box of generic pseudoephedrine (which I generally use twice a week). I noted that 3:45pm was a very good time to go to the Stone Ridge Walgreens' pharmacist, as there was no line of old biddies in front of me to pick up their bone density medication and gush about what all their grandkids are up to.
Before returning to the house, I drove up the Farm Road to pick up some bluestone I'd cached over the course of the week.
While Gretchen was off at pilates, I took Charlotte for the same old boring walk I have been taking her on, remembering again to grab some nice pieces of bluestone to add to the low bluestone wall along the north end of the Woodshed Path. That path is a couple hundred feet long and now has some sort of bluestone wall running along most of its length.
When Gretchen returned from pilates, we immediately packed up the car (starting with the bluestone, which I concealed from Gretchen, as it now seems a little crazy to still be taking pieces of it to the Adirondacks). I drove us there in the dark using the Middleburgh route while we listened to two episodes of Heavyweight, one about a short-lived bookstore in Dripping Springs, Texas, and another about a colorful painting found in the trash that turned out to have been painted by a significant Black artist.
As we were unloading the car at the cabin, we were horrified to find that the plastic cover had come off the big glass container full of vegan yogurt Gretchen had made, spilling at least two thirds of it into the cloth grocery bag it was in. This seemed initially like a nearly-complete disaster. But that bag had recently been washed and was much cleaner than most of our grocery bags. So I used a spatula to gather as much of the spilled yogurt as I could. Ultimately I managed to get the container more than half full with all that I salvaged. It also seemed that much of what was lost was actually water, which had escaped through the bag, leaving a thickened residue of yogurt behind.
Before going to bed tonight, I sipped some of that 100 proof whiskey (which I'd brought from the laboratory) on the rocks while adding the code necessary to get my Meshtastic bridge to save text messages from my Meshtastic nodes in my ESP8266 Remote Control backend. This allowed me to send texts from my Lilygo T_deck and see them appear in my system's UI. The main thing left to do now was to make it so messages created in my system's UI are broadcast via LoRa.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?251009 feedback
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