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broccoli taco Monday
Monday, May 13 2019
The day was cold and rainy, and it was probably a good one to spend in the office, away from the cold and the cats (I can't stand Charles sitting on my computer staring at me like I owe him something, and the constant demands for food from Clarence is making me hate his twilight months).
There was an actual meeting this afternoon in my workplace about my next project, which will consist of conventional web development. That isn't to say the skills required will be conventional; an existing Cold Fusion web application needs to be reborn in Angular with a C# backend, and I will have to coordinate with someone else, the remote developer who maintains the Cold Fusion application and will be learning Angular. The details are all still sort of hazy, even after the meeting. But that's just how things in this workplace are, and I've come to realize it's fine.
[REDACTED]
On the way home, I went out of my way to visit the Home Depot, mostly to buy the biggest fender washers they sold (for possible work on securing solar panel glass), hydronic antifreeze, and some great candelabra bulbs I'd recently become aware of.
When I returned home, I found Gretchen unable to take a much-needed shower. It had been a couple days since the sun had shone, and my bath last night had burned through the bulk of the heated water in the hot water tank. In a situation like this, we could usually turn to an electrically-powered just-in-time water heater, but that device has been in decline for years, and today, after another winter of disuse, it didn't seem to work at all. So I was forced to power up the boiler one last time (and put the Arduino solar controller in winter mode).
I did a little evening tinkering in the laboratory, trying to solder together a single MaxMatrix board (controlling an array of 64 LEDs). But somehow, I fucked it up, soldering the components onto the wrong side of the board. The boards are too cheap to bother salvaging, so I threw the cursed thing into the scrap box. Building on this irritation was the cloying stench of cat piss, leading me to mop up the piss from the place in the laboratory where the cats that piss indoors now all like to piss. As i did this, cats kept following me around and getting under foot, particularly Clarence (who is, I think, the worst offender when it comes to pissing indoors). If he had dropped dead from a stroke then and there I would've sang Hosannas.
Gretchen realized we had a lot of broccoli, and she was in the mood for tacos, so tonight she pan-cooked a bunch of broccoli with tomato paste while I thawed out some soft corn tortillas directly on the stove burner. Combined with refried beans, some sort of vegan cheese, and crema, this made for an unexpectedly delicious Taco Monday.
While reading the Animal Activism Slack channel (which has a Game of Thrones channel), I suddenly remembered there had been an episode of GoT last night. So I quickly downloaded it using the technology at my disposal, and then climbed into bed to watch it. This was the episode where the inner Targaryen monster in Daenerys Storm Born came to the fore, and she proceeded to violate all thermodynamic principles in the destruction of King's Landing. What makes GoT golden-age television was that, up until this episode, Daenerys had been presented as a heroine on the side of righteousness. In this episode, though, we are placed on the ground in King's Landing while Daenerys unleashes her irrational fury, assisted by what must be a nuclear-powered flying reptile. Any conventional show with this material would've put us up in the air with Daenerys and presented the people on the ground as villainous ants. But no, tonight we saw them as innocent women and children. Hell, even the evil queen Cersei was shown in a somewhat sympathetic light. (Side note: Lena Headey might be the only actor/actress whose looks have improved over the course of GoT.) Watching this was a harrowing experience, and when it was all over, I felt like I too had been through a war.
Just before going to sleep, I used the FURminator to comb out as many knots as I could from Oscar the Cat's fluffy outer shell. His fur at this time of year is always a mess, as the winter coat dislodges and gets caught in the coat destined to remain, forming dreadlocks. Initially Oscar is irritated by being combed, but eventually he always comes around and begins to enjoy it, at least to a point. And then he starts swinging at me with his paws or biting me (fairly gently).
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?190513 feedback
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