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troubled molar and heart palpitations
Friday, May 29 2026
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I woke up and was out of bed a little before 6:00am. That's the kind of thing that can happen at the cabin in the summer time, when 6:00am can look a lot like 9:00am and there is no clock handy to consult.
I wanted to get to the bottom of what I thought might be the race condition bug, since it only happened in fast communication mode. I decided to debug it while in the basement connected directly to the SolArk Copilot ESP8266, since it would be easier to reflash it over serial than going through the steps necessary to do it remotely. (It was also warmer in the basement than it had been the last time I did this; I've been dumping surplus electricity into running the basement minisplit.) Eventually I discovered the source of my so-called "race condition error." It was not a race condition at all. Somehow when I introduced a new global to the backend called $deviceOutputMode (used to keep track of what outputMode was being used on an ESP8266), I set it this way:
$deviceOutputMode = $mustSaveLastKnownDeviceValueAsValue = arrayDefaultFailDown($extraInfo, 7, 0);
when I meant to set it this way:
$deviceOutputMode = arrayDefaultFailDown($extraInfo, 7, 0);
Somehow my copying and pasting managed to include $mustSaveLastKnownDeviceValueAsValue, a variable that tells the backend that the ESP8266 is to be temporarily regarded as the source of truth in a system where such truth normally comes from a web-based tool. This was never a problem when outputMode on the ESP8266 was zero (and returned as that by arrayDefaultFailDown($extraInfo, 7, 0)). But when it was 3, meaning fast communication mode, $mustSaveLastKnownDeviceValueAsValue becomes 3. And when $mustSaveLastKnownDeviceValueAsValue is any value larger than 0, data flows from the ESP8266. This was causing the values on ESP8266s to flop around chaotically whenever I was in fast communication mode. It was a great bug to get rid of.
With that success out of the way, I decided to tackle another bug that only seemed to show up for a pin with a GPIO number of zero. I was finding it impossible to control that pin with the web tool and I assumed something about that often-magic number zero was making the code ignore updates to it. But after much debugging, I found that the problem was a different one. That pin just happened to have a very long name, and this was causing issues due to an "improvement" ChatGPT had suggested for one of my functions, which involved replacing the more complex String object with a limited-length cstr. The problem was that the name of the pin was so long that there was no longer sufficient characters in a configuration cstr to appropriate transfer state information. Once I increased a 50 character limit to 60, the bug went away. Yet again, I'd said yes to a ChatGPT coding suggestion that had come back to bite me months later. Not only do these LLM-produced coding fixes have limitations that my original code did not, but it is much more difficult to read. Not only that, but they don't actually save any memory when I implement them. If I could go back in time to myself back in February, I would strongly caution the slightly-younger me to be extremely skeptical of any LLM-suggested refactoring.
Normally it would've been more than enough days since the last time I took pseudoephedrine for me to take it again today. But for some reason I decided not to. Perhaps it's not unrelated that I suffered from heart palpitations nearly all day. I've mentioned in the past how unnerving it is to have something whose rhythm one absolutely depends on start behaving somewhat unreliably. Not that these skipped hearbeats actually caused any physical issues, but they took a toll on my psyche, eating into the general (though admittedly irrational) immortality I normally feel. When your heart is doing random things in your chest, one begins to focus on mortality, one that might be a lot closer than had been expected. At this point, the best working theory I have for these hearbeat irregularities is that I allow myself to become somewhat physically dependent on pseudoephedrine, and when I go too long without taking it (three or four days), my heart doesn't know how to calmly do the boring work it is supposed to do.
Interestingly, though, the moment I start exerting myself in any way (such as by climbing a hill or carrying something heavy), my heart seems to realize it cannot play such games and it goes back to beating normally. It's only when I am fully at rest that it skips beats. This behavior can sometimes be the reason I decide to go outside to get some fresh air.
Meanwhile, the day was sunny and warm enough for Gretchen and both dogs to spend some time down on the dock, where they had the lake all to themselves. (I'm wondering if higher gasoline prices are causing other owners of lake property to come to the lake less often, particularly on weekends such as this one, which were forecast to be cool and cloudy.) Gretchen had filled up the dock's ceramic water jug with water, but it was no longer water-tight after being damaged over winter by water freezing in its tiny pores and causing chips of material to exfoliate. Evidently some of that damage had occurred to its internal glazed lining.
Gretchen has developed a serious aversion to plastic materials, particularly when they come into contact with food and water. Obviously, a certain amount of platic, such as LDPE bread bags, is unavoidable. But she's particularly worried about heated plastic coming into contact with either food or water. So she never microwaves anything in a plastic container and would never drink tea from a plastic cup. She's also worried about plastic bottles uses for storing water if those bottles are exposed to the sun. All of this thinking led her to get the ceramic water jug. So when I suggested repairing it with silicone caulk, she clearly wasn't on board with that idea, since she thought of it as just another variety of scary plastic, one that will result in microplastics in our brains! [Later, though, I would suggest sealing it with pine sap, the way Native Americans might've done, and she would like that idea. I wouldn't go on to say that pine sap and plastic are not dissimilar materials!]
While I was down at the lake, I took a kayak for a paddle to the outflow beaver dam and then back, drinking a cocktail of gin and apple cider from a travel mug between my legs.
Throughout the day, one form of heart-palpitation-eliminating exercise I kept returning to was the process of dry small-diameter branches and tree trunks from the woods to the west and southwest of the cabin. Most of this wood went directly into the indoor wood rack, which ended the day full (but not heaping).
[REDACTED]
Another fun outdoor task I undertook today was to gather more stones from various places to add to a nascent stone fence I have built along the north side of the driveway just inside our parcel.
This evening Gretchen whipped up a meal using fresh asparagus from the Carrot Barn combined with leftover rice, tofu, caramelized onions, and mushrooms to which she added a dehydrated packet containing lentils and perhaps more rice and seasoning. There was also a little sauerkraut in there. The combination was very tasty, and we ate it out in the screened-in porch. This was about when the hollowed-out stump of my right upper wisdom tooth started acting up again. As pieces continue to calve off it and its edges become sharp and jagged, the nearby gum gets inflamed. Now it was genuinely sore and the gum felt swollen and inflamed when I ran my tongue over it.
I thought maybe a boozy drink and then retiring to the bedroom to read an actual book might help. One of the few remaining readers of this blog, upon reading of my mixed feelings about Andy Weir and my belated Joni Mitchell fandom, recently sent me an old copy of William Gibson's novel Spook Country with a little note written on a computer punch card and a curated CD of Joni Mitchell songs. His thinking, he said, was that someone like me really should be reading presumably better science fiction than Andy Weir. That's fair, so I've been trying to give Spook Country a try. It's clearly more literary than anything by Andy Weir, but it's also much less readable, at least for somebody like me. Characters are introduced at a rapid rate, and they're not doing all that much initially but receiving character development. So there's little to pull me in. I don't really care about individual human characters, I suppose, and that is why Andy Weir's novels are so readable.
As I was trying my best to read Spook Country, I had a tiny flat screwdriver in my hand and was using it to probe the gumline between my collapsing upper right wisdom tooth and the inflamed gum. I'd poke as deep as I dared into that gap and pull the gum away. This hurt, of course, but I felt like maybe I was giving infection an avenue of escape, and I would occasionally be rewarded by the taste or sight of blood. As I was doing this, I began to wonder if perhaps my gum problem was related to my heart palpitations. Perhaps I was, on some level, finally falling apart.
I kept having to get up to get or do things. Once it was for the tiny screwdriver. Another time it was to heat up some sort water to soak my inflamed gum. I mentioned to Gretchen that I was finding the William Gibson novel unreadable, so she suggested I read some Flannery O'Connor instead. We'd talked earlier about her weird, ugly, flawed characters. Gretchen had focused on "Good Country People," about a youngish woman with an artificial leg whom a traveling bible salesman takes to a hayloft to seduce but instead ends up absconding with her prosthetic. She gave me a copy of Flannery O'Connor's short stories, but I never got around to so much as opening it.
Throughout today, five or six of these parasitic wasps (Google Image Search says it is the long-tailed ichneumonid wasp) emerged from logs in our indoor wood pile and then tried to escape the cabin through the closed windows. I then carried them each out in a plastic cup, which they were surprisigly unhurried about flying out of. Click to enlarge.
An early season dragonfly in the cabin site just north of the cabin. Click to enlarge.
The view from Woodworth Lake of its outflow beaver dam. Click to enlarge.
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