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cats not liking netwear
Monday, April 24 2023
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
I had a difficult day in the remote workplace as I tried to track down the source of some SSL certificates. The ones in the IIS certificate manager didn't match the ones reported in the Chrome browser, suggesting they were somehow coming from a source that I had no access to. I even installed a certificate "snap-in" to look for every possible certificate on the server, and none of them matched the browser. This was kind of like the computational equivalent to matter not being conserved. It made no logical sense and left me feeling demoralized. Maybe I really was working in the wrong industry! I would later take a bath to help with that feeling, which was joined in my brain and gut by a very mild hangover.
This afternoon my brother Don called from Virginia and the first thing he did was ask if I'd taken action to get him the missing parts for his expensive Lego material handler. This threw me into an immediate rage. What, had he not remembered that it was on him to get me more necessary information? He really does apparently believe that the things I can do are of a completely magical nature, since he somehow thought I'd been able to remote tally his Lego parts, determine what was missing, and order replacements. After reminding him that no, it was on him to tell me what exactly he was missing, he started calling out numbers at me. He was looking at the manifest and reading the part number for a totally different part that he thought he was missing. Evidently he thought these numbers were incantations that could be spoken to make the magic happen. But I didn't have the document open that needed to be open, the one called donlegofiasco2.txt. Eventually I did have it open and I found the part he was looking for using that online Lego part search engine. Don said he was missing two of those pieces. What, I asked him, about the piece he'd been missing yesterday? How many of those did he need? Had he totally forgotten? I told him he needed to come back to me with a comprehensive list of absolutely everything he needed, that I wasn't going to be making multiple orders to fix this problem.
At the end of the workday, I made a pot of spaghetti (cooked with cauliflower chunks) and fried up a pan of mushrooms, onions, and tempeh. I added a fair amount of salt to everything, since Gretchen always says my stuff needs salt. But when she got home and tasted this things, she said they did indeed need more salt.
While she was out today (working at the bookstore and other things) Gretchen bought a couple cat collars for Lester and Diane. Lester needed a collar in order to wear the cone of shame that will keep him from irritating whatever is wrong with his left paw, allowing us to put medication on it so it might eventually heal. The collar for Diane would include a bell that would hopefully reduce the wildlife she needlessly murders. We haven't had good luck with bell-collars in the past (Clarence, who especially liked to kill baby bunnies, always managed to lose his bell collar somewhere in the bushes) but Gretchen thinks it's worth trying again. The cats didn't take their new neckwear very well. Initially Lester kept walking backwards in apparent hope that the collar would slip off over his head. And Diane went running through the house at top speed, trying to get away from the incessant ringing that followed her everywhere. She eventually made it out through the pet door and when I went to look for her she was sitting calmly, relieved the ringing bell had somehow stopped following her.
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