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Neville vs. Charlotte with respect to Brigitte the Dog
Tuesday, February 20 2024
Gretchen had some chores for me to perform today. One of these was to clean out the filters in at least the two second-floor mini-splits. I dipped them both in the tub, which was still full of water from a bath I'd taken yesterday evening. (In cold weather, I generally leave the water in the tub until it cools down, thereby not wasting heat by sending it down the drain.) Later I got out the hedge trimmer (one of our few remaining devices made by the dreadful — and obscenely greenwashed — company GreenWorks) and used it to trim all the flower heads I could reach from our many hydrangeas (I used a six-foot step ladder to reach way up into the tall one in front of the house). I also trimmed away some of the very-overgrown evergreen shrub in front of the house so that I can eventually put a ladder up into the roof's northwest valley, where the worst of the roof's leaks are.
Other things I did today included some more work on the text analysis web app I've been building for my old boss Alex. Yesterday I added a feature allowing an admin to easily impersonate any other user on the site, which was what I needed to track down some issues being reported by John, the lawyer on our team. Today I added a feature allowing generic data tables to also display data produced by alterable PHP code stored as strings in a JSON object. I needed this in order to display filesizes for uploaded documents.
This afternoon as I was walking back from the mailbox, I heard Charlotte in a frenzy of barking near the north end of the house. I went over there and saw that Crazy Dave's brown dog Brigitte had come over and was running around doing whatever she does. Some weeks ago, Charlotte and Brigitte encountered each other in the forest and got in a fight, so Charlotte wasn't happy to see that dog intruding into her territory. Neville heard all that barking and came out, and then ran right up to Brigitte acting like he was happy to see her and wanted to play. Brigitte comes across as agressive and event potentally dangerous, but Neville is a master of getting such dogs to be reasonable. As for Charlotte, she still wasn't having it. Fortunately, she's now scared enough of Brigitte to run away from her when she approaches, so they're less likely to get in a fight now.
Once Gretchen drove off to Coxsackie to teach her prison poetry class, I painted a small painting of Abraham Lincoln so I could earn the right to do a little drinking. But I was careful not to drink much, as Gretchen would be bringing home the cashiering laptop from her bookstore workplace this evening so I could replace its keyboard.
When I had the keyboard, I took it all apart, removing such things as the heat sink, the motherboard, the WiFi card, and battery. The keyboard was underneath all of that stuff, buried beneath an adhesive plastic barrier. Initially I tried removing that, but it started breaking up, so I decided not to proceed. The cashiering laptop is essential for bookstore operation, and if I were to get it in a non-functional state, the bookstore couldn't operate. I put it all back together, and confirmed it was working, and then tried plan C: finding another keyboard that would work with it. (Plan A had been just replacing the key, but I could see now that some tiny metal prongs necessary to hold the light plastic scissor-jack structure under the key had broken away.) Eventually I did find such a keyboard, though it was an unusually small one. It connected via USB but identified as a standard PS/2 keyboard, which was probably why it worked and none of my other USB keyboards did.
Today's quick and dirty painting of Honest Abe.
The double-flip version isn't as interesting as I'd hoped.
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