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big outdoor chore morning
Sunday, May 15 2016
I awoke at Susan & David's house fairly early and could not get back to sleep, though (owing to the stimulant I'd taken last night) I'd only slept three or four hours. But that's no big deal in my life; I routinely sleep ten hour nights, and presumably I'm able to bank some of that sleepytime.
I bought a coffee at Stewart's on the drive home and then put my unusually-long morning to work mostly on outdoor tasks. I dug trenches and pits in the main (eastmost & oldest) garden patch and then disposed of a number of biological products that help to fertilize the soil. These included six gallons of urine-soaked oak leaves from my urinal system, about thirty gallons of pine needles mixed with composted humanure (it was from my end-of-last-summer turd harvest and had composted nicely over the winter), and ten or fifteen gallons of absolutely disgusting kitchen compost (it had gone soupy and anærobic, and, though it smelled terrible, the plants will love it).
While I was in a mood for outdoor chores, I also pruned the White Pines that we'd had planted along the road so our fussy uphill neighbors (the Greenhouses) won't complain about the shoddiness of our upkeep of land that technically belongs to them. They'd recently hired a landscaper to go on something of a view-clearing jihad in the field between their house and ours, and I didn't want them to carry it too far (out of sublimated rage).
I spent much of the afternoon finishing what needed finishing on that crude network-based videogame I've been building on behalf of my mentee. He'll have to present it in early June, and I wanted it to be only somewhat crude and buggy (instead of completely so). I managed to get the animal-shaped avatars to move in sync across the network and bounce nicely off the edges of their worlds, which scaled to whatever size the screen happened to be. Once I had that working, I implemented an arbitrary scoring system based on the particulars of the avatars' collisions. When an avatar's score falls to zero, it is removed from the playing field, which nicely solved the problem of collisions where the avatars' overlaps were too big to separate using the available simulated physics. Now when this happens, one of the characters will bleed points until he dies and is removed, while the other will see his score rise by that same number of points. It's a stupid game, but at least my mentee will have something to show for my efforts. (Of course, had he really had an aptitude and interest in this sort of thing, he would've obsessively pimped out what I'd done and made it substantially more awesome; that was, after all, my initial hope.)
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