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five glasses of opening wine in Woodstock
Friday, December 5 2025
Gretchen has been on a refrigerator-cleaning jihad of late, and today she took a bunch of odds and ends and shit-ton of lentils and made a soup. I rarely get excited about lentil soup, but this soup was truly amazing. I had two bowls and then felt a little too full.
This brutally cold weather has me feeling like hibernating. At some point this afternoon I lay down in bed and took a nap that lasted about a half hour while Gretchen was walking Charlotte.
Yesterday I'd asked ChatGPT to come up with ideas for more functions in my I2C slaves, the Atmega328-based boards that already serve as port expanders, hardware watchdogs, and for configuration storage. ChatGPT came up with a number of good ideas, along with some I'd been thinking of, especially a means to interrogate the slave to find out what version of the firmware it is running. One other fun idea was a command to read an on-chip thermometer. I implemented these commands this afternoon and also addressed a possible issue with interacting with the on-chip EEPROM from within an I2C request. After implementing these changes, they seemed to work okay. But then they stopped working so completely that I assumed some electronics had been inadvertently destroyed. I didn't know it at the time, but apparently I'd swapped the I2C's SDA and SCL pins, which is very easy to do, given that there are conflicting pin diagrams on the web, with some saying A4 is SCL and others saying it is SDA. (On my particular Arduino Nano, A4 is SDA and A5 is SCL.)
This evening, Woodstock was having some village-wide event where stores would be staying open later than usual and offering things like special events and even wine. The bookstore where Gretchen works, for example, would be hosting two book signings. After parking illegally in the parking area just south of the businesses south of Tinker Street, we briefly visited the bookstore just to get some boxes suitable for shipping the menorah I recently made. And then we crossed Tinker Street to attend an art opening at the Kleinert. They were showing the submissions to the annual 5 By 7 Show, a show where all the works are supposed to be five inches by seven inches (and of approximately those dimensions and a third similar one if sculptural). I'd been to at least one of these 5 By 7 Shows before, but I don't remember the price of admission being so high: $25/each just to get in and look at the art, although this came with four drink tickets. The art was all the same price: $150, and there was no indication who had done the works until they sold, though, for some of the more famous artists, it was obvious. I wished I'd been thinking about this show, as it's a format I like to work in and I would've liked to have participated (if only just to get in for free). We arrived at around 5:00pm, and the place was soon so full of people that it was hard to get around to see all the art. Our friend Greg of (Z & Greg) had a couple low-relief sculptural works in the show, and after we'd found those, I spent most of my time marveling at how horrid some of the submissions had been. (I also used one of the many rare-earth magnets used to attach the paintings to the wall to determine that a tiny compass in one of the works had a magnetic needle.)
I kept finding discarded drink tickets on the floor, and soon had so many that I gave them to one of Gretchen's acquaintances with whom we struck up a conversation. (I only used one of these to get an actual extra drink, as I had two of my own and one of Gretchen's, since she's not much of a drinker.)
As the 5 by 7 Show wound down, Gretchen and I decided to go check out something else happening in the village. It was really cold at the time, so we didn't go far. There's a little boutique second-hand store back behind the Golden Notebook that we decided to check out only because it was open and Gretchen had never seen it open before. It claimed to have books, clothes, and, intriguingly, science supplies. Stores never mention having science supplies even if they happen to have some!
The store was tiny and there were only a few people in there, but the woman running the place seemed to be having fun as she rung up someone's order and offered us wine from a box of rosé. "Hook me up!" I said cheerily. This would be my fifth glass of cheap wine for the evening. After a little vaguely-tense banter with Gretchen about business hours (underlain with a soupçon of resentment that this store was selling books so close to Gretchen's employer), the store owner and I got to chatting about the science supplies, which included some obscure chemistry glassware and an amazing collection of old glass syringes that could all still pull amazing vacuums. I mentioned how I used to distill cooking sherry back in college and that these days I have my own laboratory. The owner's eyes seemed to light up at this, and she excitedly asked if she could come "play with" me sometime. I liked her crazy energy, which might've been the result of a substance a little more substantial than rosé. That energy is something I seem to crave, at least when I am reminded of it. But now that I am with a mostly sober, generally responsible partner like Gretchen, it's largely missing from my life, at least the social part of it. (It was a big component of my life back when I was with Bathtub Girl and, before that, when I hung out in Charlottesville. And I usually get to experience it again whenever I visit Charlottesville.) At some point I told Gretchen to buy me one of the vintage syringes as a stocking stuffer. When Gretchen bought it, the store owner offered to throw in a needle too, but I said that was unnecessary.
When we returned to our illegally-parked car, we could see someone having a little trouble getting back into their vehicle in a handicapped parking spot, as our car was occupying the blue-hatched "supposed to be empty" spot adjacent to it. Gretchen decided we should wait until they left before actually going to our car so as to avoid a possible confrontation.
Lester the cat with the new menorah. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?251205 feedback
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