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Neville heads off into Woodstock
Friday, July 29 2016
There was a slideshow during the weekly all-hands meeting at The Organization, and we were treated to a diagram of how things would be organized for future international growth. There had been concerns in our IT department (particularly from Ca, who is something of a Gloomy Gus) that perhaps the "exciting organizational changes" revealed in this meeting would actually be massive layoffs, but that didn't match with the underlying reality: we have lots of work to do and The Organization is well-funded. I have to say, it's kind of refreshing to have the most contrarian, cynical, pessimistic person in our workgroup not be me. Hearing Ca gripe about naked political posturing by others in the meeting was music to my ears. It's the kind of thing I used to say after meetings at CollegeClub.com, though admittedly that was a soulless sociopathic corporation, and The Organization really is trying to do the things its founder feels will make the world a better place.
This afternoon, I ground up a 25 milligram dose of time-release amphetamine salts (for more immediate use) and took advantage of the resulting mental energy to begin converting an English-only donor acknowledgment system for multilingual use. I also worked on a new report within a limited reporting framework that didn't allow for the dynamic generation of a dropdown. To solve this, I made it so the JSON configuring the report would be regenerated every night by a cron job to ensure its dropdown stays up-to-date.
By the end of the workday, I was waiting for a phone call from the head of development, who (for some reason) prefers not to use email. I told my boss (Da) that I'd been there since 8:00am Pacific Time and I wanted to go to a party, but now I was waiting for a motherfucking phone call. "Your day is done, go!" he commanded.
So Gretchen and I loaded up the dogs into the Prius and drove to an ongoing party at Dawn's house in Woodstock along Millstream Road. Dawn is that vegan lighting designer with a neurotic dog named after a mushroom, and her house in Woodstock is both a multi-family rental and a weekend residence. Being part of the animal rights scene, Dawn had a rescue chicken at the party and she wondered how well our dogs would handle that. We thought it best the chicken be in a cage upon meeting our dogs. Besides, it was about 8:30pm, which even in summer is past a chicken's bedtime.
Also at the party were Sandor & Eva, Ben, realtor guy who built Sandor & Eva's new place, and Ben's vapidly woo-woo (but hot) girlfriend. There was also a skinny older guy whose loud way of talking was instantly off-putting. He was there with his girlfriend, who looked to be about seventeen. Happily, he spent most of the time being manly out at the fire pit.
The food was weird but pretty good. It had been catered by a local vegan caterer whom Gretchen doesn't much like, but she'd already left, and the coconut-flavored rice & chickpeas with plantains was surprisingly good, but not as good as the fist-sized spring rolls with a delicious red dipping sauce.
At some point Gretchen introduced Neville to the caged chicken, and he just sort of sniffed and shrugged. But then we brought in Ramona and when she saw that chicken she jumped on top of the cage, causing a massive lamp to fall against a wall. Nothing broke and nobody got eaten, but we closed the door so Ramona couldn't go into that room any more. After that, she spent most of her time at that closed door, single-mindedly focused on the poor caged chicken.
By now, most of us had relocated to the vicinity of the fire, and both Eva and Sandor were using apps on their phone to identify stars in the sky. Gretchen had never seen such an app in use and, as people always are when seeing such apps for the first time, she was astounded, particularly when it allowed her to look right through Planet Earth to see constellations on the other side.
Normally at a party like this, Ramona and Neville would've continued to be a cohesive wolf pack and do things togther (perhaps with the addition of the dog they were visiting, that is, if Polypore weren't so neurotic and obsessed with retrieving sticks). But with such a big difference in their interest in the rescue chicken, Neville found himself doing things on his own. By now it was so dark that we lost sense of where he was. By the time we were preparing to go, we realized he'd vanished. We searched the adjacent grounds and then started walking up and down Millstream with flashlights calling his name. But Neville never really responds to anything except the sound of food being scooped from the kibble bin, so I began to lose hope that we would ever find him. Wouldn't it be tragic, years from now, to talk about how awesome Neville was (and, indeed, to mentally inflate that awesomeness over the years) while realizing we'd only managed to keep him for about four months?
Meanwhile, Gretchen was driving around the neighborhood in the Prius, stopping pedestrians and telling them to be on the lookout for a white Pit Bull. Eventually, to her delight, she found Neville over by Old Wagon Road. He was apparently weary of wandering strange streets aimlessly and happily climbed into the car. I was out on Millstream with my flashlight when I saw Gretchen return in the Prius to Dawn's house. She beeped the horn and I knew that Neville had been found and all was well. Crisis averted.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160729 feedback
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