Our friend Kate came over this morning to meet Neville and walk the dogs with Gretchen. As with everyone else who has met Neville so far, she thought he was absolutely adorable. At some point during Kate's visit, Ramona decided to chase a white truck on the Farm Road, and when she returned she had a couple fresh new abrasion injuries on the right side of her face. She'd gotten a similar injury near her right eye a little less than a month ago, perhaps from the same risky behavior. Hopefully she'll eventually learn the cause and effect relationship between whatever behavior causes those injuries and the injuries themselves.
Later this afternoon, Eva and Sandor came over for a pleasant April dog walk (on which I found two different stones containing low-quality brachiopod fossils), and then we drank a bottle of cava they'd brought over and ate some cake Gretchen had baked for last night's dinner party. Eva and Sandor recently announced their engagement, so a large fraction of the afternoon's conversation was about wedding planning, a topic that was of little interest to Sandor and me. He and I talked about the usual stuff we talk about: firewood, fossils, drones, and building our respective family compounds.
After Eva and Sandor left, I drove to Uptown just to get a can of high-temperature black spray paint so I could make yesterday's chimney pipe repair look a bit less craptastic. I'd brought all three dogs and my drone so we could have a little adventure in the vast Esopus cornfields, but I'd neglected to bring a microSD card. This sent me into Wallgreens to get one. Unfortunately, the cheapest one they had cost $20 for 16 megabytes, and they had 8 megabyte ones for that same price.
On the way home, I drove to my usual drone-flying spot. I was in the Prius, which doesn't have as much clearance for the sort of road irregularities one finds on farm roads, but I mostly managed to avoid bottoming out.
My first flight went high and then got caught in the winds, which blew it quickly southward. It dwindled to a tiny speck in the sky and then I blinked and lost sight of it. I thought for a moment I'd lost it forever, but then somehow I caught sight of it again, a black dot low in the sky. Fortunately when it landed, it did so in the freshly-plowed part of the field and not in the large swath of green just to the east. The grass there is getting long enough to completely conceal the scale of drone I was flying. To recover it, I had to run something like a quarter mile south of where I'd started at the car. Ramona joined me as I did this and soon became distracted by whatever it is she finds interesting in some specific place in the grass to the east. Walking back towards the car, I caught sight of first Neville (a white speck in the dark green of the grass swath) and then Eleanor (a harder-to-discern black speck). They'd wandered surprising far to the east down near the Esopus but were on their way back. After another drone flight, some peanuts, some pale ale, and emergency ablutions involving a puddle of water (we've all been there), I drove with the other dogs down the dusty farm road to where Ramona still was and made her get in the car. I knew from the last time we'd been here that it would've been fruitless to call for her.
The longer of today's drone flights. Again, the bulk of this video consists of the drone lying inert on its back.
Back at the house, while I spray-painted the woodstove's chimney pipe and filled the living room with fumes, Gretchen cooked a special Thai-inspired meal of rice with vegetables and tempeh in a thick orange-brown gravy. We ate it while watching an episode of Better Call Saul. Later I took a bath, which felt really good while under the influence of kratom and marijuana (and the fading effects three strong beers).
Later I went to do an online check-in for tomorrow's flight to Los Angeles, which had been booked for me by a logistics person at my new place of employment. I'd never done an online check-in and so didn't realize that the key (the bit of information I would need to submit so the server would know who I was) was so short. I'd been expecting something like a twelve digit number, and so had overlooked the little six-character code printed inconspicuously on my itinerary. So I called Expedia not really knowing what I even needed to know, but eventually I got things sorted. Afterwards Gretchen wondered why I hadn't just asked her. But I hadn't known I'd necessarily been dealing with something that lay in Gretchen's area of expertise. Gretchen, on the other hand, often assumes that computer-application-related questions lie somewhere within my domain of expertise. This morning, for example, she had me help her with embedding video files in a PowerPoint presentation even though I've never created anything in that particular program. I do, however, have enough intuitive sense of how these applications work (well, that is, everything except the Microsoft ribbon, which I consider a terrible travesty of UI design) to figure out how to muddle my way through.
