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stud bay deathtrap
Monday, December 17 2018
By the end of my workday, I was starting work on a configuration frontend for this app I have been migrating from Python to Electron. It's not that the app is nearing completion and I am doing the finishing touches. It is nowhere close. But I'm feeling pressure to "show" something, and unless I build some sort of frontend, I will have nothing to "show." Unfortunately, though, everything non-trivial in Angular is about ten times harder than it needs to be, and the trivial things it makes easier are beside the point.
When I got home tonight, I resumed work on my tasks in the ongoing remodeling of the kitchen. Those tasks were mostly electrical in nature. I had new outlets to install in the northeast corner of the kitchen, and I also had to determine what the wiring situation was in the north wall where the refrigerator will go. The kitchen designers had decided that the best way to deal with the depth of the refrigerator was to recess its back four inches into the north wall. This would require someone to cut open a three-foot-wide section of the wall and eliminate any studs, wiring, and (God forbid) plumbing encountered. Since it was my job to handle the wiring anyway, it seemed like I needed to open up that wall. When I did, I was relieved to discover the only wires running in it were those belonging to the circuit into which the refrigerator would be plugged, and much of it could be removed, since the refrigerator would be the only thing plugged into that circuit.
While I had the wall open, I was horrified to discover a pile of mouse skeletons at the bottom of a narrow bay in the stud wall. There were at least five mouse skulls in the pile, though it looked like there might've been the remains of many more that had slowly disintegrated over the years. Evidently mice had fallen to the bottom of this bay and been unable to climb out. They'd then starved to death and died. Why was that particular bay such a death trap when the wider ones adjacent to it hadn't been? At first this seemed like an impenetrable mystery: the only access to it was through unused holes drilled sideways through the stud at about the height of a romex cable that for some reason had stopped short of the hole. But then Gretchen seemed to have figured it out: the mice had used the romex has a walkway to go from stud bay to stud bay and had then continued through the unused hole and fallen into the death trap. Why non had ever slipped and fallen from the romex into the other stud bays was a mystery.
Then it turned out that there was a second death trap in the narrow stud bay adjacent to that first one and it had the same issue with an unused stud hole. Such death traps must be common in houses; it just goes to show you that there's much more misery and suffering in the world than we can possibly ever know.
For dinner tonight, Gretchen experimentally followed a procedure she'd found online for cooking pasta in an InstaPot. Short of that, without a full kitchen, we had no other way to do it. Amazing, the technique worked great, though the InstaPot sprayed a bunch of starchy water all over the toaster oven in the process. While watching Shark Tank, we ate the pasta with some cabbage slaw Gretchen had made.
Meanwhile, the special digestive powder our vet had prescribed for Clarence had arrived today. The powder consisted of some sort of enzymes that, when mixed with wet food, acted to digest it on Clarence's behalf. The thinking is that Clarence no longer produces sufficient enzymes to do his own digestion, and this is why he's been so thin for the past four or six months. But Gretchen found the powder to be a strange-smelling material that imparted an unnatural shiny texture to the food it acted upon. Then she was horrified to discover, after looking it up, that it was made from the pancreases of butchered pigs.
As for Clarence, he didn't seem too excited to eat his now predigested food. And when he did finally eat some, it gave him a bout of either diarrhea or gas so foul that it stank up most of the first floor of the house. We never did find any diarrhea though, so perhaps it really was just horrifying cat farts.
I ended up working on the kitchen until about midnight. By the time I went to bed, there were westerly winds so powerful that it made me worry about the possibility of falling trees.
Mouse skeletons in the deathtrap discovered today in the north wall of the kitchen.
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