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tap-to-click from satan
Sunday, December 11 2022
This morning before anyone got up, I went out into the snow (which had only accumulated a quarter inch or so) to retrieve yet another backpack load of salvage firewood from where the Stick Trail crosses the Chamomile. I split it up and brought it all inside, as I didn't know how badly the coming snow would affect my ability to salvage more firewood over the coming days.
Then I made a fire in the woodstove, Gretchen came down from the bedroom, and we had another cozy Saturday-like day in the living room. I was trying to use my Raspberry-Pi-3-based Pi-Top laptop as my laptop, but this was complicated by a few things. For starters, its one gigabyte of RAM made it so it slowed to an unusable crawl when I had only a couple Chromium tabs open, particularly those running modern Javascript-framework-based frontends. Also, because it was running Chromium instead of Chrome (which is the most Chrome-like experience you can get on a Linux computer), it refused to synchronized my passwords from my logged-in Google identity, forcing me to remember the passwords to such sites as the New York Times (where I actually use Gretchen's credentials) and Facebook (which I don't have memorized). But most vexxing of all was that the laptop treated its trackpad as a mouse, and (because there is not and never has been a god) trackpads treated this way always have tap-to-click turned on by default (at least on Windows and Linux machines). Tap-to-click is an invention of satan designed to make you think you are losing your mind. You unknowingly brush against your trackpad while your mouse is over some window in the back and it pops completely unwanted into the foreground. I find a laptop in this configuration almost unusabl, and I will spend hours if necessary to track down what I need to kill to make it go away. Unfotunately, though, this morning the hours I spent on this yielded nothing. There is apparently no Linux trackpad driver for the Pi-Top trackpad, and it is always treated as a mouse, meaning there is no way to turn of tap-to-click. This makes it unlikely I will ever spend much time using that laptop at all unless I completely disable or find a way to replace the trackpad.
I took a recreational 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine this morning in hopes that, when it kicked in, it would help me power through the thing I'd taken pseudoephedrine to power through on Friday (only to end up doing other things with that power). Today, though, it actually worked, and I actually got the task moved out to QA. At some point along the way, probably because I was also drinking kratom tea, I started feeling jittery and not too pleasant. So I quickly painted a not-very-good lady beetle (some call them "lady birds" or "lady bugs") on an old credit card to buy myself the ability (under my drinking rules) to drink alcohol. This made me feel better, at least initially. But then I started feeling sick enough in my stomach that I needed to lie down.
I'd written my journal entry for yesterday earlier in the day, but somehow over the course of several reboots of my main computer, the entry got replaced with a blank document and saved that way, obliterating what I'd written. It's rare that I suffer data loss, but that's what this amounted to. Amazingly, though, I was able to systematically recollect every point I'd made in the entry and rewrite it in a form that likely closely resembled the original.
This evening, Ray and Nancy were having us and the dogs over for dinner. It had been snowing all day and there were four or five inches of snow on the ground. The road had been plowed, but not well enough to take the Bolt. So we drove to Ray & Nancy's in the Forester. Most of the other vehicles on the road at the time were snowplows.
Jack the Dog was so happy to see Ramona and Neville that he let out a squeal. But then he ran off to the neighbors' house to snort around for at least five minutes.
Since the last time we'd visited Ray and Nancy's house, a decorative theme seemed to have emerged: disembodied heads and skulls. These had been present in the past in scattered places, but now they comprised a theme. There was a red plastic skull with a fake flame flickering away inside and even a faux fur with a pattern that looked like skulls.
Nancy was doing the cooking tonight, and she was making a meal based on very well-cooked asparagus, rice that had been cooked even more, and slabs of tofu with some sort of spicy sauce comprised mostly of sambal oelek. But she'd only used a single block of tofu for the four of us, so it wasn't all that much food. But my stomach still wasn't feeling great, so I didn't have too much of an appetite.
By this point my drinking had moved from a diet 7-up vodka cocktail Nancy had fixed to a dry white wine.
Meanwhile, Ramona and Jack kept bringing out various toys from a toy box, including a bone that both Ramona and Neville found very and took reasonably-polite turns chewing on. At some point Nancy got out a fake lion's mane and put it on Jack (where it was cute) and then Neville (where, due to the match of colors, made him look exactly like a lion). This all had us laughing until it hurt. I tried putting the mane over my head, but my huge human head was too big for it, and it smelled like stinky dog in there.
Part of what we'd come over to do was to watch the season two finale of The White Lotus. It was a long episode and didn't disappoint, especially once Tanya started blazing away with the pistol meant to kill her.
Today's mediocre lady beetle painting.
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