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return of the rot
Wednesday, May 11 2016
Yesterday while Gretchen was at the DMV in Kingston to deal with the new car's paperwork, a photographer for the Times Herald-Record (based in Middletown, NY) asked if she could take a picture of her drinking from the water fountain there. As you can see, Gretchen had not brushed her hair. The article was about lead in Kingston's water, though the water at the Ulster County courthouse is now filtered.
Early this afternoon, Ramona and Neville ran over to the yard of our downhill neighbor barking viciously, and a little while later I saw them pursuing a leisurely-strolling bear heading south down the slope into the forested Chamomile swale. It wasn't a big bear, but something about its insouciance seemed to take the wind out of Ramona's sails. She'd normally be all over such a bear, but she was keeping her distance this time and it was Neville who was pursuing the bear most closely. I didn't see the bear disappear, but when it did, and the dogs proved surprisingly easy to call home. In the past when there has been a bear, it was all that Ramona cared about. But not this bear. Her attention soon turned to bones, which litter the landscape near the downhill neighbors' house (remember, he used to be a butcher), and she found a good one to steal before coming back across the ravine separating their yard from the forest just east of the greenhouse.
In remote work today, I had a few stressful engagements with Meerkat, who is now down to his final 13 days of work. He did his best to make me feel like an idiot when I accidentally deleted a file and it was lost (along with its history) from the svn repository. But I would not be cowed. "I thought it was a versioning system," I said. Later he freaked out when that same file (which I'd briefly pasted into Homesite, an old text editor from the early 2000s that I still use) turned out to be full of garbled characters. Homesite is not a UTF-8 text editor and can't handle anything but old-school ASCII text, a limitation that hadn't even occurred to me. In the past, this has never been a problem, but The Organization I work for is international in scope. Even the code for their backend scripts must be in UTF-8, which supports numerous character sets simultaneously. (Seeing Chinese characters specified in PHP variables in a text editor had been a little mind-blowing when I first saw them less than a month ago.) I hadn't even been aware of UTF-8 until fairly recently (maybe within the past year), but it's showing up in my other jobs as well. Just today, for example, the guys from California had me drop a table and add it back with an explicitly UTF-8 setting in hopes of curing a plague of garbled foreign characters.
As you may recall, my punk rock tooth became frighteningly loose in late March after I ate a tough piece of bread. It's remained that way since, forcing me to do all my biting with the right side of my mouth. Though it's unnerving to have such a loose tooth, there has been one benefit to it: the trace of rot that it still gets around its base, a rot that could be detected by massaging the gum and then smelling whatever was produced, seemed to vanish. Evidently the looseness of the tooth allowed enough air and water into the gap around it to keep things from getting in there and decomposing. Last night, though, I was alarmed to discover the rot was back, and seemingly as a bad as ever (though perhaps not as bad as it had been when I was in Scotland in the summer of 2007). The rot smelled like decaying shellfish, and it continued throughout today, though I brushed my teeth and assiduously massaged my gum in hopes of purging it. But whatever horrible was in there kept draining out and stinking up my fingers. At its peak, I could taste something sour being produced from the back of the tooth (inside my mouth). Happily, by this evening this installment of the rot was mostly behind me, and I was finding it difficult to produce enough to smell on my fingers. I'm wondering now if perhaps that new (and surprisingly copious) supply of "the rot" was from a deep anærobic reservoir around the root of the tooth, a reservoir that would normally be sealed up forever but which was breached by the tooth's new ability to move.
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