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Cockroach for Midge
Saturday, June 10 2017
Gretchen has had terrible poison ivy rashes across much of her body for a week now, ever since extracting Ramona from the bushes behind Ray & Nancy's house last Saturday. After Saturday morning coffee, Gretchen suggested maybe setting up an appointment with a doctor so as to get an injection of the steroid prednisone, which Ray had told her is a fast and effective treatment for acute poison ivy rash (a doctor had told Ray about this after he'd noticed Ray's Harry-Potteresque forehead scar, a consequence of a severe poison ivy rash he'd gotten after a visit to Onteora Lake with Gretchen over a decade ago). Hold up, I thought, don't we have prednisone tablets left over from some veterinarian need? Sure enough we did: enough for the full therapeutic coarse (complete with taper) suggested by a website Gretchen found in a Google search. The prednisone had originally been prescribed to maybe add a few weeks to Eleanor's life as she died of lymphoma a little over a year ago, but we'd euthanized her before we'd used many of them. Gretchen immediately took 40 milligrams, and by this afternoon her rashes were already diminished.
Today I finally got around to doing a long-procrastinated chore. I swapped out Cockroach, the Zyxel X-550N router in a weather-safe pod just outside the greenhouse with Midge, a TPLink WR1043ND V3 reflashed with a DD-WRT open-source firmware. The Zyxel X-550N had been my last non-open-source router in service (if one excludes the Verizon-branded DSL router in the basement; I don't know of any DSL routers that can still function as DSL routers with an open-source firmware). More importantly, Cockroach had gradually become increasingly unreliable, requiring frequent manual reboots in order to do its thing. I wanted a router that just works and doesn't need babysitting. Midge isn't quite as powerful as Cockroach had been (even with the power turned up in the DD-WRT settings), but reliability counts for much more than range for that particular unit, which serves my needs in the greenhouse, in the brownhouse, and also on my side of the bed in the house (where I have a line-of-sight view of the pod it lives in). I'd originally planned to use my DD-WRT-flashed ASUS RT-N66U in this location, which would've given me dual-band capability. But its esoteric power needs would've required another cable down the side of the greenhouse, and I didn't want to fuck around installing that.
After getting all that working, I took a nice long nap in the futon in the greenhouse upstairs. When I awoke, I could hear Gretchen and Andrea back at the house singing a song that sounded like something convicts might sing while working on a chain gang: "Heidi, Heidi, Heidi! Ho Ho Ho Ho!" It turns out that they'd just gotten back from various health food stores and had a new kind of vegan nut cheese for us to try. It bore the brand HeidiHo and Gretchen and I had actually seen it pitched (and well-received) on Shark Tank. After eating many schmears of that on various crackers, I returned to the deck-building project just east of Gretchen's library. There I managed to extract all the big roots and dig down 36 inches, which, in this climate, is probably sufficient for avoiding frost heave. Now I'm ready to start setting posts. In the process, I opened up a wicked blister where the thumb attaches to my left hand. As I worked, I listened to the Science Friday podcast in which Hedy Lamarr and her various inventions, including frequency hopping wireless communications. (Her version of it happened in such primitive times that it depended on piano rolls to coordinate.)
Gretchen had made a big pot of spaghetti with pesto sauce, which I ate like a ravenous beast once my hands were clean enough to do so. By now the tips of the fingers on my left hand were mostly too raw to do any more work, though I returned to the hole later to snip away roots and do other such prep work necessary before pouring a footing.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170610 feedback
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