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icy hill rescue
Friday, January 31 2025
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My brother Don called from Virginia early this afternoon with news that our mother Hoagie was no unresponsive and having trouble breathing. She'd stopped eating a few days ago. So it doesn't seem long now before we're both orphans. (On her mother's death back in 1985, my uncle Bob reportedly turned to Hoagie and said, "We're orphans now!"
This afternoon while it rained outside, I made good progress on my ESP8266 FRAM code, successfully getting it to save type information with every field in every record, an important feature for when I want to use FRAM as a general-purpose database. As always, ChatGPT was essential, serving as a judgment-free and extremely thoughtful StackOverflow.com (which I never use anymore). I pasted in a long rambling set of errors from the Arduino IDE, errors that mentioned code in various libraries, not my code, and ChatGPT told me where to look in my code for the problem. It turned out I was leaving the new "type" parameter out of call to std:make_tuple() being made in a record.emplace_back() call. (Both of which I would've probably never learned about had ChatGPT not been there to point me in their direction.)
This evening after making a lupper of pasta with pesto sauce and a cabbage slaw, Gretchen went with Nancy and Kate to see The Last Showgirl, a Pamela Anderson vehicle. None of us were paying attention, but the arrival of cold air made all the rain that had fallen earlier turn into sheets of ice. This didn't happen on well-traveled roads in the lowlands, so Gretchen was able to get Nancy home okay. But when she tried to drive up Dug Hill Road, she eventually encountered an iced-over roadway on the road's steepest part. At some point her wheels were spinning uselessly as the car slid backwards. So she stopped and gave me a call. I said I'd be right there.
Driving down the hill in the Forester, I could feel it start to slide as well, and I was worried I might lose control. So, when I had a chance, I slowed to a crawl and stayed near the right shoulder. I could see the Bolt's headlights off in the distance and Gretchen walking towards me in front of them, but I could only inch forward. When she got to me, I pulled into the shoulder to lock the Forester in place. Then we walked together down the hill to the Bolt. Conditions were so slippery on the pavement that we walked on the shoulder, where old crunchy snow provided reasonable traction. As we approached the Bolt, a truck coming up the hill stopped and asked if we needed help. We didn't really, so we said to just be careful. At that point that truck lost traction and the driver had to back it up a little onto the left shoulder to regain it. Then he managed to get enough momentum to make it up the hill.
I didn't see any way to get the Bolt up the hill with the road like it was. (It only has front wheel drive.) So I decided to try backing it very slowly down the hill to the relative flatland near the old bus turnaround and park it across from that (one can no longer park at the bus turnaround due to a bunch of large boulders, the result of Gretchen's political activism to shut it down as an ad hoc gun range). With Gretchen walking outside shouting guidance at me (which wasn't really necessary), I was able to back it safely down the hill and park it well off the road. We then walked up to the Forester, which I successfully backed up the hill all the way to the driveway of our downhill neighbors. I then turned it around and drove us home.
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For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250131 feedback
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