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cooking for a dog tragedy
Thursday, February 5 2026
I spent nearly all of today consolidating yesterday's victory against entropy in my I2C bootloader project. There was a lot of code cleanup to do and then later I had to probe the limits of last night's victory. Would I2C reflashing continue if I eliminated the delay from all those prints to serial? Could I install the I2C bootloader on other Arduino Nanos? I ran into some problems trying to do the latter, and only managed to get other Nanos to work after issuing a avrdude -c usbtiny -p m328p -U hfuse:w:0xD8:m on them. But once I had my new bootloader installed, those Nanos had a new superpower: I could put them in-circuit as I2C slaves, confident that if I need to change them in the future, I could do so from anywhere where there is internet access. Accordingly, I painted their USB-mini ports (that's how old their technology is!) green.
Meanwhile Gretchen spent much of the day preparing food in the kitchen. This was in response to a tragic series of events involving a dog belonging to Gretchen's childhood friend Dina. That dog had required a complicated immigration protocol when Dina recently moved back from Tel Aviv, and Gretchen had been the one to drive the dog (and Dina's husband Gilaud) from JFK to Tacoma Park. But since arriving in Maryland, that dog has done poorly, refusing to eat and seeming generally miserable. Originally the theory was that this was a psychological issue, perhaps exacerbated by the move from a balmy Mediterranean climate to mid-Atlantic North America during an unusually cold period. But the other day the dog went to the vet to receive an ultrasound to see if there was some physical basis for her issues. What the vet discovered was horrifying: the dog had end-stage liver cancer that had spread to other organs and had, at most, weeks left to live. But the dog was in so much discomfort that Dina and her family decided to have her euthanized today. It was a huge unexpected tragedy, though, contrary to Dina's original fears, it had nothing to do with the move. Gretchen is extremely close to Dina and her plan was to drive down to Tacoma Park to be with Dina in her hour of need. And, as is the Jewish tradition, the loss would be buffered by the bringing of an enormous amounts of food.
Gretchen went out several times today to go to pilates and other things, and each time she visited a grocery store to get necessary supplies. This evening she realized she didn't have any baking powder and convinced me to drive down to the Old Hurley Stewarts to get some. So off I went, and I stood for a long time looking at the small Stewarts kitchen supplies shelf for baking powder. They didn't have any. Since I was already a third of the way there, I opted to continue all the way to the Uptown Hannaford (aka "Ghettoford"), arriving (as I always do) at their south parking lot. It was so empty, I thought maybe Hannaford was closed. But no, after a certain hour they close the door to the south (the most ghetto) parking lot. I could still enter from the east.
The sad news about Dina's dog isn't the only dog news Gretchen has been relating to me. In an amazing bit of good news, one of the dogs lost by the people who had lost their dogs just before the big snow storm (those are the people to whom Gretchen recently delivered a noodle bake) was recently found alive. He (or she) had frostbitten ears and had nearly starved to deat, but he or she wasn't far from home when found. The other of the two lost dogs is still out there somewhere, but as time passes in this unusually cold weather, it's becoming increasingly less likely that that dog has survived.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?260205 feedback
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