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hallucinated people in there being malevolent
Tuesday, June 29 2021
As part of Powerful buying our Prius, this morning he tried to install the new license plates he'd just got. But of course the machine screws securing the old plates had rust-welded in place, and all he could do was destroy the place where the phillips screwdriver is supposed to supply rotational force. So later this morning I took a Dremel and cut slots into the screws and tried to back them out with an impact driver turing a flat screwdriver blade. But that only worked on one of the screws. I had to use a screw extractor on the other, and even that didn't work. As I tried to back it out, whatever threaded piece it was in broke loose of the surrounding metal and rotated on its own. In so doing, it ground away the plate beneath it, making that easy to remove. Without a screw hole to secure that corner of the new plate, I used a coarse-threaded sheet metal screw, sending it beside the old rusted screw to bind against whatever it could find inside the door hatch. In the past, I've used similar solutions for more demanding tasks, such as securing a head stud to an air-cooled Volkswagen engine (where it doesn't work very well).
At some point today my boss Alex was trying to run the Taxinator (the tax-importing software I wrote) after having not used it in over a year (while Rich worked for us; he's since retired). He was having trouble getting a mapped drive to show up and it was driving him crazy. He was swearing and cussing and carrying on like he sometimes does, not really at me, but more at the dysfunction in our company. I actually thought it was kind of funny as he raged, sometimes near his mic and sometimes from across the room. [He would apologize later, but I didn't care.] The problem in this case was some networking issue outside my expertise that Hunter (the person he usually rages at) fixed in about thirty seconds.
Meanwhile, though, I was trying to figure out why, when I compiled the backend for the big application built by the Ukrainians, I couldn't get the health check endpoint to give me any satisfaction. I ended up wading through old commits in the Bitbucket repository, doing a binary search of them until I found the one that broke the health check. In the process, I gained a whole bunch of knowledge, but doing so spilled way into my evening, after Gretchen and I went to the neighbor's pool and after Gretchen made another tofu curry noodle dish (using the remnants of the last such dish she'd made as a base). I should mention that when we were at the neighbor's pool, there was a small red-tailed hawk flying high above us, sometimes staying in one position and looking down and other times zipping down to fly above the canopy of the nearby forest. It reminded me how unfortunate it is not to have been born a raptor, though I don't know if having to spend my days killing squirrels would be an ideal life either.
This evening, my brother Don called as he often does. He's been more serious in his recent calls, talking less about arcane matters of biology and paleontology and more about the decline of our mother, Hoagie. The other day he told me that Hoagie has been asking him to help her walk home from the trailer even during the daytime, for fear she might get lost. Tonight, Don reported ominously that Hoagie needed help finding her way to the bathroom at Creekside. Don said he took the opportunity to steer her towards the master bathroom, despite Hoagie's protests that there were hallucinated people in there being malevolent. (Don prefers to keep the other Creekside bathroom for his own exclusive use.)
Tonight as I lay in bed, Gretchen came to get me to see something out in the front yard. When we got out there, I saw dozens of fireflies twinkling as distant lightning illuminated tall white clouds a dozen or more miles to the north and northwest. Bolts of lightning were lighting up the clouds about every two seconds, and neither of us had seen anything quite like it. Later, the storms arrived, bringing strong winds and torrential rains.
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