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day before the Caribbean
Sunday, February 15 2026
Today was our last full day before leaving for a two-week cruise aboard a sailing ship in the Caribbean, so Gretchen and I had tasks we needed to do. Most of these involved doing laundry and eating through some food that would otherwise go to waste (though, with the pizza leftover from yesterday, this was hardly a chore). In the late morning our neighbor A came by to drop off a Valentine her kid had made for us, which was sweet (even though the actual kid decided to wait in the car while her mother dropped off the card). Soon thereafter I drove out to Lowes to return some tools I hadn't used and get a gallon of antifreeze (which now costs more than $40 after tax). While I was out, I also gassed up the Forester so we'd have an easy time getting to airport in Albany tomorrow morning.
Later I spent a lot of time trying once again to get my I2C bootloader working on the Atmega168. I thought maybe the problem was that I'd gone to installing it as a two kilobyte bootloader instead of using the fatter four kilobyte space. But to make it so my slave code could coexist with a four kilobyte bootloader in the small 16 kilobyte flash space of an Atmega168, I had to make my slave code capable of being compiled to a smaller size. The easiest way to do this was to create a gcc compilation macro that, when set to 0, causes all the string parsing code to not be compiled. This saved a couple thousand kilobytes of flash, making it so I could now compile a 4 kilobyte bootloader, one that could send debugging messages via serial. It was in my experiments with this that I realized there was no way to get a sketch to jump into the bootloader on the Atmega168, even though this was easily done on all the other Atmegas I'd experimented with. So I had to give up yet again.
So then I turned my attention to packing my backpack for the coming trip and setting up remote monitoring systems for when we are away. Now that my ESP8266 has reached such an advanced level of development, I was thinking it would be fun to interact with it remotely while in the Caribbean. (The sensors at the cabin have been dead for a couple months now, as that whole region is buried beneath unusually deep and persistent snow.)
This evening Gretchen prepared a fun meal of various pre-packaged foods, including Asian dumplings, an Asian noodle dish, and Italian ravioli from Trader Joes. We ate these things while watching two episodes of the ongoing Jeopardy! invitational championship.
At some point this evening my brother Don called me, saying he wanted to wish me a happy birthday and wouldn't be able to tomorrow, since I would be traveling. He went on to point out (in a very Don sort of way) that I had lived longer than both Hitler and Lenin, who had both died in their 50s. Later when I mentioned this to Gretchen, I said that she and Hitler had more in common than me in one respect: that I had outlived Hitler and that she and Hitler hadn't.
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