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procrastinating video editing
Tuesday, May 12 2026
I took a recreational 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine in hopes it would help me do some light video editing for Gretchen and also maybe begin the work of parsing data packets now being assembled by the ESP8266 acting as a SolArk Copilot. Unfortunately, though, today was one of those bad-pseudoephedrine days, and, while it seemed to work with my brain okay for most of the day, by this evening it had me feeling somewhat anxious, requiring me to lie on the beanbag while watching YouTube videos (of the Bulwark talking about the recent Virginia Supreme Court decision striking down voter-approved gerrymandering) and stroking Diane the Cat.
Late this morning, I had to take Neville to his monthly nail appointment at Pretty Pet Parlor, and as I was getting ready to leave for that, I lucked out because Neville was sunning himself in the driveway while Charlotte had just gone inside, so I was able to sneak off in the Bolt with just Neville. It's much easier to deal with one dog than two at the Pretty Pet Parlor.
While I was waiting for Neville to get his nails done, a big thick guy came in with an overweight poodle who was friendly and seemed like a good dog, but (as I've often seen with people and their dogs), the guy was being a complete jerk to his dog, barking commands at him and being generally unpleasant. Interestingly, though, when Neville came out after his $15 procedure, the guy was nice to him, asking how old he is and being understanding about Neville's painful joints making him unwilling to walk.
I then drove to the Fitz's Liquor to buy a half gallon of cheap gin, this one for the laboratory. Then, before leaving the 9W area, I visited Adam's Fairacre Farms to buy fresh vegetables, cherries (suddenly in season!), and a bunch of carbohydrates designed to be eaten with chili. These included taco shells, corn chips, and whole wheat tortillas. The pseudoephedrine was making me feel that feeling I love of being connected with everyone in the human race, and that feels less depressing in Adams than it does in Hannaford.
To continue that pleasant buzz, I went out of my way to visit the Tibetan Center thrift store, where I managed to find a number of things to buy: a nice wine glass (the only good one there), an HDMI cable, an old Garmin Nüvi GPS gizmo, an old Nest thermostat (after first Googling to see if it might be hackable; supposedly it might), a dog dish, and some wacky word game that came in a little pear-shaped bag, which I thought would be fun to keep next to the banana-packaged Bananagrams we keep in our actual fruit bowl at the cabin.
For some sort of web promotion of a published animal-rights poetry collection, Gretchen has been recording audio of her reading various poems, and she wanted to turn them into videos by me somehow splicing in video with a video editor (not something I normally do, though I've made a few attempts over the years). To help with that, today she and I shot various clips of her hold, opening, and seemingly reading her poems. Then I shot some video shot from behind the dogs as they walked down the Stick Trail (this was specifically for the poem "The Dogs and I Walked Our Woods." Later, following the advice of ChatGPT, I downloaded an open source video editor called Kdenlive, though it was hard to actually get into the groove of doing any video editing. I kept being distracted by my ESP8266 parsing, which I soon realized wasn't working at all even if it was producing a superficially-convincing hexadecimal packet. The problem later turned out to be heap corruption or a race condition that I was able to bandage-over with either a 30 millisecond delay or writing a log line to a local file.
For some reason the chili I'd made yesterday started smelling like it might be going off (decompositionally) this afternoon, though it had been at room temperature less than 24 hours. (usually it takes at least 36 hours for this to happen, particularly when the house is as cool as it has been). I made two small burritos for myself for dinner despite this, but it's possible that chili didn't agree with me and contributed to discomfort I would've normally blamed on pseudoephedrine.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?260512 feedback
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