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big earthworms and a maddening phone
Saturday, September 2 2017
It was just a bit cool to be outside this morning for Saturday morning coffee, but if one sat in the sun, it was comfortable enough. I had a hangover from last night's solo booze consumption, though it proved to be a mild one.
The other day I took delivery of a Mebo robot, which comes with a both a camera and an arm for grabbing things and manipulating them. It's not a great build, and, when controlling it from a phone, it tends to lose its connection and stop transmitting video, all of which makes it pretty fucking useless. But it has most of the stuff one would want for basic telepresence, so it seemed like something worth experimenting with. I played with it a little in the lawn as Gretchen drank her coffee and solved crossword puzzles. Surprisingly, she thought it was cute. But it kept crapping out, and I wondered if that was due to the overall crappiness of my phone. So I decided to try to reawaken Gretchen's old Motorola Droid Ultra XT1080, her second smartphone, which she replaced about a year ago (and which is pretty good technology, if it works). Last time I tried to do anything with it, I was overwhelmed by a constant stream of popup alerts saying such things as "Unfortunately, Email has stopped" and "Unfortunately, Moments has stopped" and even "Unfortunately, the process com.google.process.gapps has stopped." These alerts are all modal, meaning nothing can be done while they are on the screen. To use a phone that is doing this requires lightning-quick movements to first dismiss the alert and then, in the tiny fraction of a second before the next appears, to take some action. You can imagine how painful using a phone with this problem is. I should've stopped long before I did, but I kept trying to get it to do things like restore to factory and what not, but no matter what, it always came back up with this infuriating problem. Later I assembled more low-level tools, including RSD Lite and a copy of the stock firmware for the phone, but even when this appeared to install correctly, the phone continued with its endless alert problem. Had I known I would be wasting all of this time, I wouldn't have bothered. At this point I need to steer clear of the sunk cost fallacy.
Gretchen was off this afternoon hanging out with our friend Mark, who had been MIA for most of the past year as he's been dealing with his increasingly frail mother in New Jersey. I wanted to take advantage of the sunny cool weather to do some outside chores. So I fired up the battery-powered hedge trimmer and used it to prune the row of pines along the road. (This isn't something we'd be doing ordinarily, but the neighbor whose land they are on has expressed a preference for this). I also trimmed back the weeds, blackberry canes, and tree of heaven sprouts in the place where I'd begun work installing a screened-in porch off of Gretchen's basement library. With that out of the way, I could begin work digging a second hole for that thing's foundation. I encountered an enormous number of big fat earthworms in the top half inch of soil, which mostly consisted of their castings (worm shit). I suspect all the happy worms has something to do with our habit of throwing compost from the kitchen directly into this area. I did my best not to hurt any of these worms; I scooped them up with my bare hands and flung them into the bushes just to the east, where hopefully they can continue on as before. I then managed to dig down about twenty inches before I grew weary of the chore and called it quits for the day.
Gretchen returned from her social outing with a pain in her left thigh that was close to crippling. She was banging at it with her fist and moaning. Since the pain moves around, I didn't think it was being caused by anything actually in her leg. The culprit was probably her spine, so I suggested giving her a backrub. Amazingly, this helped, and for a few wonderful minutes the pain was gone entirely. But then it gradually came back.
Over the past few days, Gretchen has tried all the normal pain relievers in hopes of dulling the pain, but none of them worked. She even tried a cyclobenzaprine, the muscle relaxer, and it was useless. Today she tried hydrocodone, a narcotic, and even it failed her. In desperation, she had me prepare her some pot in my vaporizer. She managed to get a couple good puffs in and was soon so stoned she couldn't do what she wanted to be doing, which was reading. I suggested she watch teevee instead, since teevee is always fun when you're stoned. But she couldn't find it in her to get out of bed. So she just lay there. The pain in her leg continued.
At some point Gretchen tried a 10 mg pill of ketorolac, which a doctor had reluctantly prescribed her for back pain. It's a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug similar to ibuprofen (which hadn't worked for Gretchen's pain). And, miracle of miracles, it actually worked. This allowed Gretchen to finally fall asleep.
At some point this evening I took a bath, and during that I shaved my face for the first time in over a week. It was good to get my face back to the smooth way I prefer it. I'm just not all that into body hair. I haven't mentioned this in the past, but I also like to clip away my pubic hair with a pair of scissors when I'm bored in my laboratory. I do the same with my armpit hair, and I have a habit of chewing off (and swallowing) the hair on my forearms.
In among all the fucking around with the old Motorola phone, I managed to catch up on the last season of Silicon Valley, though I watched it a bit out of order, because I kept assuming I'd seen more of it than I actually had. The season-long threads were sparse enough (and the episode-only threads robust enough) for this viewing strategy to work perfectly fine.
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