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mushrooms and beer
Tuesday, January 6 2026
Neville was so excited when our neighbor A came by to walk the dogs (though she'd left her own dog Henry behind) that he opted to go on the walk too. The weather was still cold, but perhaps a little warmer than it has been. Temperatures would eventually rise into the upper 30s, which is a normal high for this time of year.
Gretchen went to a early afternoon pilates class in Glenford, and I continued work on refining my amazing Arduino I2C slave, having taken a recreational 120 mg dose of pseudoephedrine. First, though, I added the new parsing style code that ChatGPT had come up with. It seemed solid, that I didn't have an easy way to test any of the new parsing styles that had been implemented. For now, I was taking it as a win that it could still do the parsing in the original style.
Now that pretty much all the possible functionality was in there, I could do things like clean up the code and add documentation in the form of comments. At some point I added more serial modes to help with the inevitable remote debugging that I will have to do when SolArk (or some other serial data generator) changes their data format. The great thing about the new code is that the parser is flexible and can be reconfigured remotely to handle just about any parsing scenario. I was running up against the limits of the Atmega328, the slave's microcontroller. The biggest constraint was the 2 kilobytes of memory available, much of which I needed for things like buffers and parsing structures. But if things get too complicated, I can always switch to an Atmega2560, which has 8 kilobytes of memory. Or I could port the code to an ESP8266 or a Raspberry Pi Pico (though the main problem with those is that they use significantly more electricity than an eight bit Atmega microcontroller, and I do not want my array of microcontrollers to consume too much in the resource-constrained situation at the Adirondack cabin).
After Gretchen got back from pilates, I made what has become a rare solo trip into town (though I brought the dogs with me). I needed more beer, having not bought any in well over a month. But I also needed mushrooms, and Gretchen much prefers if I buy those at a place where they are offered in bulk so as to minimize our consumption of packaging. This was why my first destination was Adam's Fairacre Farms, where I got bulk mushrooms, bags or organic spinach, and lots of small tomatoes. Unfortunately small tomatoes are never offered in bulk, so I had to buy them in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) cartons. While there, I also got pizza making supplies, a $16 cherry pie, and a can of cold brewed coffee (a typical impulse purchase for me at Adams). Adams has no alcohol and terrible tofu, so I bought four blocks of tofu and a 12 pack of Sierra Nevada Atomic Torpedo at the Hannaford on 9W. And then I went to the nearby CVS (a store I've rare if ever been in) to buy a $25 jar of diphenhydramine, the drug that ensures I sleep well at night.
On the way home, I went out of my way to visit the Tibetan Center thrift store, where I pawed through the junk boxes and found nothing of interest. But on the drive home on Hurley Mountain Road, I passed a place where a large red oak had fallen across the road and been cut into pieces roughly 30 inches in length. I grabbed three of those, as I didn't have a lot of room to bring home more.
Back at the house, I wanted to buy myself the right to drink alcohol. So painted a small painting of a white rhinoceros using a fairly large (but sharp-tipped) brush. I'd like the results from using a larger brush some weeks ago, and again I was happy with what I managed to produce.
Tonight Gretchen and I saw the episode of Station Eleven where we flash back to the day of the apocalypse at a small airport in fictional "Severn, Michigan." With the exception of some people not allowed to leave their plane, the people who end up stranded there are never exposed to the flu that is causing the pandemic, and so we see the origins of what is to become the post-apocalyptic society. It was by far my favorite episode of a series that is proving difficult to follow.
Today's rhino painting. Click to enlarge.
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