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Gretchen makes the little kids cry
Friday, January 9 2026
Some weeks ago, Gretchen had agreed to give a presentation to a school classroom on the subject of poetry. The whole thing had been arranged by our neighbor A's daughter W. Gretchen had talked to the teacher to get a sense of what the kids would be like, who ranged in age from eight to nine. The main point that needed emphasis, according to the teacher, is that poetry does not have to rhyme. (Interestingly, Gretchen has found this to be a common problem for intelligences to absorb, including adult prisoner-students and a version of ChatGPT she trained a couple years ago.) Eight and nine are not ages Gretchen is particularly familiar with, though we do know W pretty well at this point.
This morning was the day of that presentation, and while Gretchen was off doing that, it was my job to take Charlotte for her morning walk (we went down the Stick Trail some distance before she disappeared, and I cut over by climbing the high escarpment to the west and returning home via the Chaomomile Headwaters Trail). I then sat around waiting for the autoglass repair gut to arrive and install a back window in our Chevy Bolt, its third to date. Fortunately, the weather was about as good as it can get in January for outdoor jobs; temperatures were in the upper 40s and there was even a little sun, though it would be raining by the late afternoon.
The autoglass installation took about an hour and cost $515. Gretchen returned while that was happening and told me how things had gone in the classroom. She admitted that she found it difficult to connect with the kids, since they were of an age before which all the things she likes in humans (irony, dry humor, etc.) develop. But apparently the kids found her poetry interesting enough to stay engaged. After W kept asking her about our pets, perhaps as a way of showing off that Gretchen was her exhibit, the kids wanted to hear Gretchen read one her poems about a dog. She doesn't have many such poems, and all of them are grim. She opted to read one about a poor dog kept on a chain, and once the kids understood what it was about, most of them were crying.
I took a recreational 120 mg dose of pseudoephedrine and eventually was upstairs working on my sprawling microcontroller universe. Unable to get any 32 bit microcontroller to work as an I2C slave, I decided to see if I could enslave an Arduino Mega (the kind with a Atmega2560 at its heart). But first I put in place a few additional slave commands that could put it into various states of sleep or into a mode where it went into light sleep after dealing with every I2C transaction. The idea here was that this would allow me to use more power-hungry microcontrollers (such as the Atmega2560) while mitigating their power use remotely. The Arduino Mega worked great as a slave on my first attempt, and soon I was trying out greatly-expanded buffers, taking advantage of all eight kilobytes of RAM.
The main problem with using an Arduino Mega is that the whole board is set up to operate at 5 volts, and getting it to run at 3.3v was going to require unpleasant customizations. But in the frenzy I had for Atmega microcontrollers back around 2010 or so, I'd bought a lot of other options. I had on hand not only a couple big Atmega32s in chonky old-school 40 pin DIP packages, but also an Atmega644 in 40 pin DIP form and an Olimex board for such microcontrollers. I even had a bare-bones board with a 40 pin zero-insertion-force (ZIF) socket. That Atmega644 was perfect for my needs; it had 64 kilobytes of flash and 4 kilobytes of RAM, twice that of the usual Atmega328s I'd been using for slaves and plenty for my serial parsing experiments.
But to get that Atmega644 working in the bare-bones socket board, I needed some quartz crystals so it would have an accurate clock. But where had I put my crystals. The last time I really needed one of these crystals was probably ten years ago or more, and back then they'd been in a shallow aluminum can at the top of an old CD rack I use as a shelving unit in the middle of the laboratory's west ceiling-wall. But I couldn't find that can anywhere and could only find a few scattered quartz crystals of unhelpful frequencies in various places. It was looking like I was going to have to salvage one from electronic scrap. But surely I'd done something with my crystal collection, which has it origins in the early 1990s back when I first overclocked my Macintosh IIsi. I'd clearly put it somewhere during one of my laboratory cleanups, but nothing in my memory was calling it up. Organization and consolidation of similar resources into one predictable place generally aids in finding them later, but only if you recall where that one predictable place happens to be.
Eventually I found the crystals all together in a tiny cubby in one of the plastic organizers I keep on shelves over the sides of the north end of the laboratory. They were in an organizer labeled "GPS" along with a comprehensive collection of ferrite cores and rods. So I was sure to add "XTL" and "Fe" to the outside of that organizer in white acrylic paint on all four sides.
After a struggle, I was able to install a MightyCore bootloader on the Atmega644, though I couldn't actually get the bootloader to do anything. And when I flashed the slave software to the Atmega644 using the programmer itself, it didn't seem to work at all. So it was looking like I was going to have to fall back to using an Atmega2560 after all if I wanted any extra memory.
This evening Gretchen cobbled together an Ethiopian-style meal using the remains of a bag of injera, leftover potatoes from Thursday night, and a makeshift wat comprised of Goya blackbean soup, among other things.
I ended up staying up late after taking 150 mg of diphenhydramine. I once more had that great desire to stay awake that only comes from mixing diphenhydramine with pseudoephedrine.
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