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the vegetarian police
Saturday, October 7 2017
Gretchen is convinced that some of her medical setbacks early last week were from drinking coffee and eating antibiotics on an empty stomach. On this Saturday she elected to play it safe, letting me do all the coffee drinking whle she feasted on cereal and decaffinated tea. In the midst of my coffee preparations, I managed to spray some hot coffee directly onto my left knuckle, leaving a first-degree burn that was painful for hours afterward even after immediately holding it under cold running water for two minutes. [REDACTED]
At some point I went up to the laboratory to do additional experiments with the two Onion Omegea2 devices I now have. You'll recall that I'd complained about one being a dud, but I recently realized they needed much beefier 3.3 volt power supplies to boot all the way. By using a 3 amp 3.3 volt wall wart made for an old Netgear Router, I have the power supply I need. I can get both of my Onion Omega2s (the one I'd thought was dead, as well as the replacement from Sparkfun) to boot up and I can connect to them with a computer using WiFi. But then the challenge was getting them to connect reliably with the household WiFi routers. They could find the routers, but when I'd go to push the configure button, and the process would hang indefinitely, apparently until the heat-death of the Universe. It's frustrating to try to use equipment that provides no feedback about what is happening behind the scenes and that, when hung up, forces one to restart the whole complex process from the start. It's possible these little Onion Omega2 devices have awesome capabilities (they do, after all, contain the same amount of RAM as the first workstation I used at Launch.com), but that getting them to do anything reliably will prove impossible.
I was feeling restless, bored, and like I might be coming down with a touch of cabin fever. So I drove out to the Tibetan Center thrift store as a goal in itself (something I almost never do). It took some looking to find something I wanted. Unusually, the thing I found was outside in front, in a weather-beaten area that proves unkind to electronics and books. The thing I found was a broad tray on an articulated arm designed to be bolted to a wall. The tray was clearly designed to hold an old CRT monitor, though of course I could use it for something like a swing table suitable for holding a laptop. I have a good variety of such arms now and could build a beautiful transformer-like desk.
Earlier I'd said something about wanting to go to the Plaza Diner in New Paltz for spaghetti, a destination I'd jokingly said would be the first strong indication that Gretchen was finally recovered from her summer pelvic infection. Gretchen was mildly interested (despite being plagued for the past few days from throbbing pangs in her lower abdomen). So drove down there at around dinner time. Surprisingly, there weren't many people there; just a large table surrounded by dudebros in matching grey shirts. We had our usual spaghetti meal, though I had the full-dinner portion whereas Gretchen only had the small plate of spaghetti. Still, she was able to eat the whole thing, along with her cup of veggie soup (which contained an errant tuft of meat) and a few french fries. We joked about her thinness and her upcoming hysterectomy, which I'd likened to giving birth (since it would be removed via her vagina). Sometimes the package is the product.
During our meal, a second nearby table became occupied by a group of men. They were older, and there were only three of them. But it was making the dining room into something I of (I whispered) a "sausage party." When the oldest of the guys at the last-to-be-occupied table, he sounded like he'd either recently had a stroke or he had something badly wrong with the inside of his mouth.
Gretchen needed some groceries, so we walked to the massive Tops supermarket on the far end of the parking lot and bought things as we passed them: chips, cranberry juice, that sort of thing. Before or after her hysterectomy, Gretchen will be limited to things like jello, which she bought without any concern for whether it had been made from rendered animal proteins. Evidently that was not a concern, perhaps because such proteins are always byproducts. Still, it made me make a siren sound effect and then explain, "That's actually the vegetarian police comin' for you this time."
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