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Barbara's Bananagrams
Saturday, August 17 2019
Since Ray and Nancy had known and socialized with Gretchen's old girlfriend Barbara back when they all lived in Park Slope, this morning Gretchen invited them (and Sarah the Vegan) over for a big brunch for all six of us. As usual, Gretchen made her sour-batter waffles, fried up both vegan sausage and tempeh "bacon," and made a bunch of fresh-squeezed juice. My small contribution was to make french presses of coffee as needed and to also fry up the chanterelle's (with onions) I'd foraged yesterday (though only Ray and I, the only men at the meal, would be eating those). It was a nice day, so we ate out on the east deck. For my breakfast, I tended to roll up waffles into something resembling burritos, with a stuffing of chanterelles, some kind of delicious crema Gretchen had made, and slices of super-hot carrot peppers. The only food I avoided at this brunch was some sort of spicy "hash" made largely of sweet potatoes that Ray and Nancy had brought. As you know, I do not like sweet potatoes.
At some point during the meal, some idiot started firing a gun monotonously down at the bus turnaround. This reminded me of the Speakerbot, which I had still yet to deploy in the forest. But I thought I'd have fun playing it for the guests. So I grabbed the Chromebook and played a few samples, included "screaming man," "baby," and "screaming woman." There's something inherently funny about being able to call up sound effects that then issue from somewhere off in the distance (in this case, from the driveway on the other side of the house), and we all had a good chuckle. Well, all of us except Gretchen, who quickly switched to concern that I was creating a disturbance in the neighborhood.
After brunch, the others headed back home while Gretchen and Barbara walked the dogs in the forest. They would've taken Jack as well (and driven him back home), but he was unusually eager to leave with his parents for some reason.
Gretchen and Barbara spent the afternoon down at the Storm King contemporary sculpture museum while I took advantage of my alone time to tinker in the laboratory. I'd yet to solve the problem of why Max232 serial chips kept being destroyed by the solar controller, and today I tried a possible solution: reducing the size of the charge-pump capacitors from 4.7 microfarads (the default values on the Olimex board the controller is based on) to 0.1 microfarads (the values you typically see in documentation).
Another micro-computer problem I dealt with today concerned the flakiness of one of my Rasberry-Pi-based spy cams, in this case one mounted to the front of the woodshed. It had recently become unreachable, something I couldn't really fix even by rebooting it. Today I tried removing and then re-inserting the microSD card into its slot. This, amazingly, fixed all the problems, suggesting that over time (in this case, one or two months) the contacts on the microSD connector develop some sort of connection problem, perhaps as a result of the invisible accumulation of corrosion (it's the only Raspberry Pi that is outside, though it is protected by a roof overhang).
This evening after Gretchen and Barbara returned home, I gave Barbara a tour of the laboratory (which is still a complete disaster due to the ongoing cat piss abatement jihad). Later Barbara got us to join her in several rousing rounds of Bananagrams, a game that she'd brought with her in its banana-shaped pouch. Though it's totally her kind of game, Gretchen had never played Bananagrams before, though I'd played it at one of the Mercy For Animals retreats. The best thing about Bananagrams is the creative destruction it encourages as new letters have to be incorporated into your personal crossword design. I'm the kind of person who is loathe to destroy things I have built, so I am highly resistant to this necessary strategy. But I found that I greatly increased my success by slightly increasing my inclination to destroy existing words. Interestingly, Barbara seemed to haved detailed knowledge of all the small valid words using letters like Q and Z, and could rattle them off whenever I had a question about what could be done with, say, a Q without a U. This memory-based approach is very different from Gretchen's, which is based more on her ability to quickly come up with mental matches from her general working knowledge of vocabulary. Anyway, we all three had fun, each of us winning exactly one game.
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