|
|
|
thanks, Stripey
Tuesday, February 28 2017
For most of the day in my remote workplace I was forced to continue using my smartphone's cellplan for internet connectivity, since the DSL (and the underlying phone line) were dead. By this point, I'd attached a USB WiFi dongle to my main computer (Woodchuck), which allowed me to work fairly conventionally. Even video chats in Google hangouts were working. At some point Dan and I managed to figure out why our email was going out at only a quarter of its normal rate. In his zeal to reorganize the clutter in the webroot of the email server, Dan had moved a module written in C++ that did something many times faster than its PHP equivalent. The code calling it had been designed to fall back to the PHP version, and that was what had happened. With the module back in place, our email resumed its normal throughput. Disaster averted!
At some point this afternoon, a very nice technician from Verizon (they're always nice!) showed up in a bucket truck to deal with my complaints. After he'd fucked around somewhere down the hill for a good hour or two, I noticed our phone no longer displayed the message "Check the telephone line." I picked it up and heard a dialtone! So I turned on the ethernet and unplugged the WiFI dongle. Sure enough, DSL was working. I'd been holding back on my internet usage due to concerns about exceeding my limited data plan, but no longer! But at least I'd been able to function fairly normally. Gretchen hadn't been able to use her desktop and days, and there was a backlog of things she needed to do on it that she hadn't been able to easily do from her phone.
Mind you, Gretchen still wasn't feeling well. Today she'd had something of a relapse and spent much of the day in bed. This was partly because last night she'd taken a double dose of diphenhydramine (benadryl), checked its expiration date, and realized it had expired in 2010. So then she'd taken another equal dose. Diphenhydramine never goes bad, so it was as if she'd tried to kill herself with OTC sleeping pills.
By this evening, Gretchen was on the couch watching lots of teevee. I think something was happening somewhere because the whole teevee room smelled of farts. So when I was done with work for the day, I took a nice hot bath.
Meanwhile, I'd been painting layer upon layer of semi-gloss white paint onto the ugly beige secondary door in Gretchen's library. At some point today, I decided to take advantage of the web brush full of semi-gloss white to touch up some of the white shapes on the painted floor of the laboratory. I thought I'd gotten away with doing it without any trouble from the creatures, but just before it had dried completely, Julius the Cat (aka "Stripey") showed up and walked through it, leaving a path of white paw prints on the floor beyond. I had to grab him and scrub his paws, and even though he loves me, this did not please him in the least.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170228 feedback
previous | next |
