Valhalla’s Things: A Day Off

Today I had a day off. Some of it went great. Some less so.

I woke up, went out to pay our tribute to NotOurCat, and it was snowing!
yay! And I had a day off, so if it had snowed enough that shovelling was
needed, I had time to do it (it didn’t, it started to rain soon
afterwards, but still, YAY snow!).

Then I had breakfast, with the fruit rye bread I had baked yesterday,
and I treated myself to some of the strong Irish tea I have left,
instead of the milder ones I want to finish before buying more of the
Irish.

And then, I bought myself a fancy new expensive fountain pen. One that
costs 16€! more than three times as much as my usual ones! I hope it
will work as well, but I’m quite confident it should. I’ll find out when
it arrives from Germany (together with a few ink samples that will
result in a future blog post with some SCIENCE).

I decided to try and use bank transfers instead of my visa debit card
when buying from online shops that give the option to do so: it’s a tiny
bit more effort, but it means I’m paying 0.25€ to my bank¹
rather than the seller having to pay some unknown amount to an US based
payment provider. Unluckily, the fountain pen website offered a huge
number of payment methods, but not bank transfers. sigh.

And then, I could start working a bit on the connecting wires for the
LED strips for our living room: I soldered two pieces, six wires each
(it’s one RGB strip, 4 pins, and a warm white one requiring two more),
then did a bit of tests, including writing some micropython code to add
a test mode that lights up each colour in sequence, and the morning was
almost gone. For some reason this project, as simple as it is, is taking
forever. But it is showing progress.

There was a break, when the postman delivered a package of chemicals
² for a future project or two. There will be blog posts!

After lunch I spent some time finishing eyelets on the outfit I wanted
to wear this evening, as I had not been able to finish it during fosdem.
This one will result in two blog posts!

Meanwhile, in the morning I didn’t remember the name of the program I
used to load software on micropython boards such as the one that will
control the LED strips (that’s thonny), and while searching for it in
the documentation, I found that there is also a command line program I
can use, mpremote, and that’s a much better fit for my preferences!

I mentioned it in an xmpp room full of nerds, and one of them mentioned
that he could try it on his Inkplate, when he had time, and I was
nerd-sniped into trying it on mine, which had been sitting unused
showing the temperatures in our old house on the last day it spent there
and needs to be updated for the sensors in the new house.

And that lead to the writing of some notes on how to set it up from the
command line
(good), and to the opening on one upstream issue
(bad), because I have an old model, and the board-specific library isn’t
working. at all.

And that’s when I realized that it was 17:00, I still had to cook the
bread I had been working on since yesterday evening (ciabatta, one of my
favourites, but it needs almost one hour in the oven), the outfit I
wanted to wear in the evening was still not wearable, the table needed
cleaning and some panicking was due. Thankfully, my mother was cooking
dinner, so I didn’t have to do that too.

I turned the oven on, sewed the shoulder seams of the bodice while
spraying water on the bread every 5 minutes, and then while it was
cooking on its own, started to attach a closure to the skirt, decided
that a safety pin was a perfectly reasonable closure for the first day
an outfit is worn, took care of the table, took care of the bread, used
some twine to close the bodice, because I still haven’t worked out what
to use for laces, realized my bodkin is still misplaced, used a long
and sharp and big needle meant for sewing mattresses instead of a
bodkin, managed not to stab myself, and less than half an hour late we
could have dinner.

There was bread, there was Swedish crispbread, there were spreads (tuna,
and beans), and vegetables, and then there was the cake that caused my
mother to panic when she added her last honey to the milk and it curdled
(my SO and I tried it, it had no odd taste, we decided it could be used)
and it was good, although I had to get a second slice just to be 100%
sure of it.

And now I’m exhausted, and I’ve only done half of the things I had
planned to do, but I’d still say I’ve had quite a good day.