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Jack acts out
Tuesday, February 2 2021
Supposedly 19 inches of snow fell last night in Hurley, and that was about right in terms of what was on the ground this morning. This was in addition to an inch or so remaining from the previous snow, and there were also some drifts resulting from a period last night of howling winds. I did some initial shoveling, but only made it to the north (closest to the road) end of the Nissan Leaf before I returned to my workday. At some point I noticed Powerful was out there shoveling, having cleared the area north of the Subaru and Leaf and had made it some distance towards the road. I broadcast some audio from my computer's FM transmitter and went out to help him. We'd finished nearly all the shoveling after only about 45 minutes. The snow seemed lighter and yet more cohesive than it had during our last big snow storm, the one back in December, which made it easier to shovel.
This afternoon, Gretchen and I had a remote conference with the guy at the modular home place and a contractor up in Gloversville to hammer out the final details on the cabin we're having built this year on our parcel on Woodworth Lake. The things we discussed were very minor, such as whether to have switched wall outlets or overhead lighting fixtures in the bedrooms or which direction the stairs should come off the six-by-six foot deck in front of the front door. Gretchen and I did our end of the meeting in the laboratory, viewing the GoToMeeting session on my enormous new monitor. At one point Jack the Dog was making a commotion near the trash (it turned out that he'd found a partial can of wetfood I'd been using the feed Oscar while he's been using the laboratory to hide out from Jack), so I evicted him. Jack didn't like that, and he scratched a few times at the door and made that squealing sound he makes when he's frustrated. But then he evidently gave up.
After the meeting, I found the detritus of what Jack had been doing after I no longer heard him. He has a long history of acting out when left alone, and apparently he'd reverted to the way he'd been in the bad old days. He'd apparently reared up to eat whatever he could find on the kitchen island. This included last night's shepherd's pie. He apparently hadn't much liked the lentils, mushrooms, and green beans and had mostly just eaten the polenta. Then he'd grabbed a couple partial loaves of bread and the rest of a bag of Cheeto-like foamed chickpea fingers called Hippeas. Gretchen figured he must've eaten at least $5 worth of bread alone.
At around 5:00pm I drove the Nissan Leaf out to Lowes to get a 60 by 20 inch plank, drawer slides, and several storage solutions. Then I got a some groceries at the Hannaford on 9G. I picked a good time to go shopping; there weren't many people out and about due to last night's snow and occasional flurries that continued to make driving seem more treacherous than it was. My big worry was not the snow but the remaining life in the Leaf's battery. I'd set out with 46 miles, and I was down to only 29 when I got to Lowes. (The need to run the heater and the lower capacity of a cold battery definitely reduces the car's range.) But I still had 14 miles left in the battery when I got back home.
Gretchen made an Asian dish of brown rice with grilled tofu and bok choy. I'm a sucker for bok choy, and it was even better in grilled form.
Before going to bed, I cut a 29 inch segment out of the plank I'd bought and used draw sliders to attach it to my new desk as a keyboard surface. I was able to do this much faster than expected, and I wasn't plagued as much as I expected to by wonky orthogonality.
This evening Dan wanted to have a happy hour for those of us in the diaspora of the old Mercy For Animals IT department. But I was the only one who joined it, and by the time I joined (at 8:30pm), I was feeling drowsy from the 150 mg of diphenhydramined I'd taken. I could tell it was slowing down my thoughts and affecting my short term memory. And it was all I could do not to seem deeply medicated. Unusually for a happy hour, I drank no alcohol. This was my ninth day of not consuming any adult beverages.
Because of my mental state, coupled with Dan's rapid-fire saying of stuff, we never got around to discussing anything in my life other than the continued presence of Powerful in my basement. Dan spent a lot of time telling me about his experience with Google Photos, which apparently uses artificial intelligence classifiers to identify objects in your photos, which can then be searched by keyword. You can even identify people that it finds, and it will find those people in all your images. It gave me the idea of setting up a script to automatically upload images to your Google Photos account from a surveillance camera so that you can be alerted whenever certain people or objects make an appearance.
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