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eradicating the stank
Sunday, April 8 2012
I managed to patch together my old Arduino 23 Alpha environment, and rid myself (for the time being) of Arduino 1.0, an environment with too many broken code libraries. In the process of getting my solar controller functional again (something I had to do before the sun started warming my hydronic solar panels at around 10am), I realized that a hung slave Arduino would kill the controller. This would trigger the master's watchdog to force a reset, but that reset wouldn't reset the slave, and so when the master started communicating with the slave, it would get hung up again and reboot, a process that could go on indefinitely. The solution was to get watchdog functionality working in the slave as well as the master. That way both Arduinos could reboot themselves as needed.
My last batch of tempeh had been made with black-eyed peas and the incubation hadn't gone too well. I could tell things were going oddly on the morning of the second day of incubation. I'd walked into the laboratory while taking a bite out of a pretzel and I found myself wondering, "Have these pretzels been flavored with parmesan cheese?" Then I'd realized that the smell was coming from the atmosphere of the laboratory, not from my pretzel. At first I'd thought the smell was more of a feature than a bug. After all, I'd liked how funky fava bean tempeh had been. But the black-eyed peas never really incubated correctly. There had never been any evidence of white mold growing on or in it. Instead it had begun to issue a clear stinky fluid that dried to an unexpectedly obdurate hardness. Gretchen ended up making some tempeh dip from it, but it was so stinky (smelling like either cat shit or puke) that she was the only one who really liked it (it had been one of the foods at our Friday seder).
None of that would have mattered much, but some of that smelly fluid had dripped down out of the tempeh and found its way into my Zojirushi hot water pot, where it had contaminated the internal plumbing and was now giving an unpleasant flavor to my tea. Today I went to rinse out the pot in hopes of restoring freshness to my hot water, but it soon became apparent that the stinky stuff had found its way into all sorts of inaccessible nooks and crannies. In the process of trying to flush these out, I managed to get water into both the high and low voltage sections of the pot's electronics. I ended up having to rip the whole thing apart just to dry it out. In the process, though, I was able to get rid of nearly all of the contamination. Meanwhile Gretchen had made a tofu-based matzah brie which proved unexpectedly delicious, particularly when spritzed with a little Sriracha. The weather was nice, and we ate it out on the east deck.
I needed some bigger pots for my tomato plants (several of which are now flowering), so I drove with the dogs out to the Home Depot (Hertzog's isn't open on Sunday) and bought six gallon-sized pots, as well as a couple more five gallon buckets (they tend to get brittle and crack after five or six years in the sun). This expanded my usable dirt bucket collection to eight (40 gallons), and I filled them all on the east bank of the Esopus on my way home. I also filled all six of the little one-gallon planter pots.
Back at the house, I used most of the new dirt to further expand the garden between the two tomato patches. (Over the past several weeks I'd laid down a considerable pile of dog shit collected from the yard in the place over which this new dirt would go.) Once the dirt was in place, I planted it with spinach and a mix of salad seeds from a Hudson Valley Seed Library packet entitled Ultimate Salad Bowl (see if you can catch the visual pun in the art for that packet).
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?120408 feedback
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