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another day without a broken hip
Tuesday, January 22 2019
It was warmer than yesterday, but still too cold to walk into downtown Red Hook, so today I drove to Bubby's for my weekly burrito (which I was taking early this week). Unusually, I eat my burrito at one of the window-facing stools so I could bathe in the glorious sunlight coming both from the sun and reflected off snow-covered surfaces.
When I was done with my lunch, I went out to the Prius (still idling on the street) and was preparing to venture out into the street to get into the driver's side door when I saw an old woman nervously attempting to walk through a low bank of slush between the street and the sidewalk. She took a step into it, thought better of it, and withdrew. I don't usually volunteer to help strangers, but this was a pretty obvious case of someone needing assistance, so I asked if she wanted help. She took my hand and gingerly look a step, and made it to the sidewalk without incident. For her, every day in Donald Trump's America without a broken hip is a good day indeed.
Gretchen would be driving with her lady friends up to Albany today to see the new Spiderman movie (the animated one that includes "Spiderverse" in its title), but she was sure to tell me to buy salt for our driveway and walkway at some point in all of that. Normally we don't worry about how slippery our walkway is because it's just us walking on it. But we would be getting a housesitter soon, and we cater to housesitters in ways we would never cater to ourselves. I got the salt at the Red Hook Agway.
Today at work and later tonight while drinking kratom tea, I watched various YouTube videos about the family annihilation perpetrated by one Mr. Chris Watts. That crime went down recently (in August), and what made it such compelling YouTube material was all the video associated with it, starting with a police officer's body cam when he responds to a missing person report concerning a woman and her two little daughters made by a neighbor. During that clip, the suspect shows up, doing his best to act calm and collected (though, tellingly, not too concerned). But it's hard for him to keep his anxiety in check, particularly when a neighbor shows clips from his surveillance camera demonstrating that the suspect was the only person who had any interactions with the house during the time the wife and kids went missing.
Eventually I took 100 mg of diphenhydramine and relocated to bed, where I continued watching such material until I became too sleepy to continue.
I should mention that this evening I'd taken some measures to make the servos on my pan/tilt EyeSpy robot quieter. I changed out the servo power supply, which required changing the orientation of the EyeSpy's Arduino. Though quieter in some positions, the servos still made a racket in others. Since I don't want them to be drawing attention to the surveillance robot, I will probably have to disable the servos entirely and just decide on something to surveil.
Meanwhile, the cats have begun driving me crazy, especially in the mornings when I'm trying to get ready for work. They tend to get underfoot or dart around my ankles, particularly when I'm carrying something with both hands down the stairs. I'm starting to fucking hate them, a feeling that I've slowly absorbed from Gretchen. Of late, particularly when the cats erratically follow me to some place where I just don't want to deal with cat energy (or, as I put it sometimes, "do cat stuff"), I start muttering "Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god!" to myself like some sort of off-camera Chris Watts.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?190122 feedback
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