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cheap 20 foot ladder
Monday, June 22 2015
This morning as I was coming back from the brownhouse, I heard a strange chicken-like clucking sound. When I got to the top of the steps, I could see where it was coming from. A sleek female turkey had wandered into the yard from the direction of the Farm Road. It was standing in a large puddle resulting from all the recent rains. Just then, Celeste the Cat charged at the turkey, and it reluctantly leapt into the air with a panicked cackle, smacking its wings on the towering Pitch Pine that grows there as it ascended in a spiral.
Early this afternoon, Gretchen drove off to John F. Kennedy airport in Queens to board a jumbo jet bound for Los Angeles. She'll be spending a week on the west coast, hanging out with Carrie (of Michæl & Carrie), who has been working as the live-in nanny for her shopaholic sister. Later Gretchen will fly up to Portland, hang out with Gilly, eat some great food, and then fly back home.
Meanwhile, I'm here by myself with all those IPAs Nathan bought me. Before I could launch into those, though, I did some shopping out on Route 9W. I had to get my usual staples from the grocery ShopRite (including an eggplant), a few things (particularly epoxy and better toilet plungers) from HomeDepot, and a 20 foot tree ladder from Dick's Sporting Goods at the Hudson Valley Mall. That latter item (which, at about $50, cost much less than a conventional 20 foot ladder) was designed for hunters trying to reach their stands, allowing them to pick off defenseless deer like an Iraqi sniper, but my use for the ladder will be to easily climb into a tree, perhaps to build a structure therein.
This evening, I watched an old episode of Mythbusters (the one where they test whether sliding around turns is a good idea; it's not) while drinking Firestone Double Jack Double IPA (one of the beers Nathan had bought me). It was good, but not quite as citrusy as I prefer my IPAs to be.
In other news, I managed to almost get my master/slave I2C Atmega328-to-AtTiny85 system working. It was reliably sending text data across the I2C link, though I was running into a problem with a 32 byte buffer. The key to getting it to work was to only transmit one byte via the requestEvent method on the slave. Sending more than one byte in a loop caused the slave to hang. I could send whole strings by keeping track of the position within the string with a global variable that I incremented with every byte transmitted, resetting the the position to zero when it hit the length limit of the string. Evidently requestEvent is called on the slave once for every byte requested by the master. (The code as it exists right now can be obtained here: master_ambientweather_temp.zip.)
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