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Charlotte without Neville must be on a leash
Friday, December 12 2025
This morning Gretchen and I both had our respective coffees and briefly played Spelling Bee in front of the a woodstove fire in the living room. But then we had to convoy to VanKleeck's to drop off our Chevy Bolt to get new tires, an inspection, and all that. After dropping off the Bolt, Gretchen drove us through a previously-unknown redneck suburb of Kingston on Tuytenbridge Road to get over to 9W south and ultimately the park at Kingston Point. The plan was to walk the dogs there to give them a little change of scenery. Conditions were sunny but cold, with a face-freezing wind at the dog park at the top of the hill. There were no other dogs (or humans), but we let Charlotte and Neville run around in there anyway so they could check their "peemail." Then we walked down to very near the Hudson itself, where we found a segment of still-functional railroad track, kept in service to support a short trolley line starting near the Roundout. The wind wasn't as bleak down there, and we were able to walk about 800 feet before turning around and heading back. Along the way we passed a large flock of mallard ducks, who swam away from us quacking among themselves. Our dogs saw them but somehow knew it was pointless to chase after them.
We passed the dog park again on the way back to our car, and this time there was a guy throwing a ball for his large german shepherd in the otherwise-unused little dog park. He asked if we wanted the little dog park instead, and Gretchen wondered if we could have all our dogs in one place to play together. The guy was reluctant, appartently having been traumatized by a previous dog who was aggressive. But this dog just looked friendly, wagging his tail as Neville stumbled towards him and Charlotte shrieked at him from the other side of the fence. But the guy didn't want to risk it, so we gathered our dogs and left.
As we drove through Midtown Kingston, we passed a new bagel shop called Fantzye and Gretchen wanted to see what it was like (and send very specific signals by asking if the cookies were vegan). It was definitely part of the wave of new upscale businesses of the sort that were impossible to find in Kingston before the pandemic. We went in there and saw that individual bagels were $3.50 and a sandwich was $15. Those sound like they might actually be higher than Manhattan prices. But it's a cozy joint, with lots of photogenic young people noodling around on their MacBook Pros while somehow affording the coffee. (I would've had to find some other place to hang out back when I was their age.) We ended up buying six bagels (they're only $3/each in that quantity) and an $11 tub of vegan scallion schmear.
Back at the house, Gretchen was horrified to discover that the everything bagels, which were the kind she wanted, included carraway seeds. So she had to have one of my sesame seed bagels instead. Then she found the whole bagel experience disappointing; the bagel was, ultimately, an unremarkable Upstate bagel and certainly not worth $3. I was prefectly happy with mine, though. (I had one of the everything bagels, and I added tomato and jalapeños to the schmear.)
Neville gets a prescription thyroid medication every morning, and in order to keep receiving this medication, we have to have bloodwork done every six months. He had an appointment this afternoon that closely coincided with VanKleeck's telling us our Chevy Bolt was ready to get picked up. So we all piled into the Forester and Gretchen let me and Charlotte off at VanKleeck's. Charlotte was on a leash and was a little confused when Neville and Gretchen didn't also jump out. But she's good on a leash and came into VanKleeck's with me with no problem. But she kept wanting to be over by the door so she could look for Gretchen and Neville. I decided to just drop the leash so I could pay the bill (it came to over $600, as the tires were more than $200 each and the tire pressure sensor was $200). I was just about to leave when some idiot came in through VanKleeck's front door and Charlotte slipped through. Oh God! I'd been a little worried about this, but people come through that door maybe once every fifteen minutes, so what were the chances of this happening? I ran out after Charlotte calling her name, and she immediately ran to where we'd been let out. But there was no car there. She looked at some other black car, perhaps hoping it was ours, but when I tried to approach her, she ran away from me. This reminded me of her behavior in the woods when she was harassing that old deer and also of the evening of her first arrival when she refused to go into our house. But this time there was the added danger of 9W, a major two-lane road with cars moving at a fairly good speed. Fortunately there were no cars initially, but then as some cars started to approach, she wandered out into the road like it was just more parking lot to explore. I shouted "No!" increasingly frantically, but this just seemed to confuse her more. A car coming from the north saw what was going on and slowed to a stop. Then Charlotte wandered behind it and then appeared in the northbound lane just as a northbound car was arriving. It slammed on its brake too, skidding a little in the process. With all the cars now stopped, I could run after Charlotte in the road itself. She eluded me and returned to where she'd last seen the Forester, and, not knowing what else to do, crouched down and gave me the saddest, most miserable look. But I was all she had at this point, so maybe she was putting her faith in me. Whatever it was, it gave me the opportunity to grab her leash, and, just like that, the crisis was over. Still, I couldn't help but think about how easily this situation could've turned into a tragedy. As I walked Charlotte past a small gathering of VanKleeck employees and customers who had come out to either try to help or watch, I assured them everything was okay. The guy who had let Charlotte slip past him apologized, but I told him not to worry about it. Clearly, I'd been the one at fault. The lesson here is to never let Charlotte offleash in an unfamiliar place if she isn't also with Neville.
On the way back home, I stopped at the Hurley Avenue branch of our credit union to deposit he $345 check that had been written to me by Dina's father, who had bought my latest menorah. There were a lot of people in line in front of me, so I made myself a complimentary coffee from the coffee robot to sip while I waited.
With all my errands out of the way for the day, I returned to the problem of solving unreliable serial connections on my ESP8266 Remote Control devices. This time I decided to experiment with disabling various parts of the function setLocalHardwareToServerStateFromNonJson() to see which part specifically was causing serial to fail. It took me almost no time to find that it was where I was doing this: pinMode(pinNumber, OUTPUT);. But that is not an expensive command at all, so I hadn't considered it a potential problem. But then as I looked at where that line was in the code, just before a conditional to determine whether a pin is to be set on the local microcontroller or on an Arduino connected via I2C slave, I realized that it was always forcing the microcontroller's pin to be an output even if the actual output would be happening on a pin belonging to the slave. That line needed to be moved down to the "local only" part of the conditional. I've put comments in the code to help you see what I mean here:
Once I'd fixed that, serial worked perfectly on the ESP8266 no matter how long it had been running. I'd solved the problem, and now I could reliably issue REPL-like runtime commands to a sketch via the Arduino IDE.
Interestingly, ChatGPT had failed to identify this bug when looking at my code. So I pasted in the code and asked ChatGPT why it was that a pinMode command in the wrong place could cause problems with serial. ChatGPT was pretty sure it would cause problems because pinMode is "like a hammer," claiming it introduced jitter. [I wouldn't realize until later that the specific pin being affected by the manipulation I was trying to do on an Atmega328 slave was actually the ESP8266's serial read pin, which completely explains why serial read had been dying and failing to recover.]
Fixing that problem was an event worthy of celebration, so I decided I could drink booze. Since I'd also had 120 mg of pseudoephedrine, I was maybe took things a little far and Gretchen could tell I was drunk when she finally came home after a dinner outing with Lisa P.
Yesterday, Gretchen and I started watching a new sci-fi horror televisions series called Pluribus (it's by Vince Gilligan, the man who brought us Breaking Bad). It concerns a world where scientists determine that a message from hundreds of light years away is actually an RNA sequence. So they try inserting it into laboratory rats. Inevitably, of course, the RNA jumps from a rat to a human, and before long every human on Earth has it in their cells like a virus. The effect of this RNA is to give all humans a way to merge their consciousnesses into a collective whole, making them behave like a single superorganism. And, since they now communicate at a deep level, they go about their lives mostly in silence. If that had been the entire story, it might've ended there. But humans need someone to relate to in order to watch a television series, so Gilligan has made it so that there are a smattering of people on Earth who were completely unaffected by this alien RNA. They are, understandably, bewildered by what just happened.
Last night, the first episode of Pluribus felt like it might be just another zombie story. But no, it turns out that the hive-mind of collectivized humanity is not actually malevolent. They want to study the few humans left who are not part of their network, and, while doing so, they want to keep them happy. So, for example, one of the unassimilated humans has surrounded himself with attractive young women, all of whom are happy to serve him sexually. He's having the time of his life. But our heroine, the first unassimilated human, is convinced that assimilation is a terrible thing. This is partly because the process of assimilation is a bit messy; about one in every ten humans assimilated is killed by the process, including our heroine's girlfriend.
A view south down the Hudson. Click to enlarge.
In the distance is a lighthouse positioned in the mouth of Rondout Creek, which was once a major barge intersection on the Hudson. Click to enlarge.
Neville walking in the snow near the Kingston Point dog park. Click to enlarge.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?251212 feedback
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