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pizza with asparagus
Wednesday, May 8 2024
Extremely heavy rains fell last night, though it didn't sound like any of it was dripping from beneath the problematic northwest valley, which counts as something of a minor win.
At various times today, I continued work on the prerequisites for a system that can automatically use sensor and other data to turn suitably-connected devices off and on. Such a system now needs to be able to handle many-to-many relationships, and today I was working on a system to make such many-to-many database relationships easy to add and remove. I have a function called genericForm that already allows a form to be built from a complicated hierarchical object, and one of the things it can already do is create a dropdown list of items from a related table (for one-to-many relationships). I figured I could build a generic system for adding many-to-many entities to one being edited and it would work similarly to how it worked in TableForm, though part of the configuration would be a SQL command for producing a list of connected and possible-to-connect entities in the distant table (one that would be on the other side of a intermediary "mapping" table). I made some progress on this, though most of the day I was distracted by other things.
This morning and early afternoon, I was bottled up in the laboratory with the cats and sometimes also the dogs while our house cleaner cleaned our house. I'd taken a recreational 150mg dose of pseudoephedrine (the first in over a week) and had the idea that I'd be doing a little drinking today. So I bought myself the right to do that by painting a tiny painting of Neville, a crop of a photo that shows him in front of the largest of the "caves" in the High Cliffs (about 1600 ft. southwest of our Adirondack cabin).
As soon as our cleaner was gone, I fed Oscar and then loaded the dogs into the Forester and drove out to Adams Fairacre Farms, where I needed pizza-baking supplies like pizza sauce and pizza dough, though I also bought asparagus and a big glorious $16 cherry pie. I then drove out to the Tibetan Center thrift store (where I hadn't been in awhile) to look for cooling fans, since I have an idea to maybe set one up in the cabin basement to blow in warm air on warm days. I found a window-mounted unit that even had a thermometer, though it was almost certainly a thermometer intended to turn on the fan when it gets hot inside (as opposed to turning one on when it gets moderately warm outside), but it's probably hackable to do what I want (and if all else fails, I can just hook it up to a relay and control it that way). I also found two electric space heaters, the kind that have built-in fans. For my purposes, I neeed the older kind that use physical switches instead of the newer push-button kind, as the newer kind don't remember what they were set to do when power is re-activated. Rob, the guy whom Ray and I prefer to be the one setting prices, sold all three things to me for a little over $8, which was a good deal. Rob has let his hair grow out substantially since I last saw him and he's starting to look like an aging Jesus.
Back at the house, I baked the asparagus in the toaster oven while frying up a pan of cubed tofu, crimini mushrooms, and onions. Then I stretched the pizza dough across our round pizza pan and made a pizza. In addition to the usual things, I added bits of asparagus, roasted garlic (also from Adam's), and slices of tomato. When Gretchen got home and took a bite, she seemed to think it was great, though it wasn't anywhere near as good as the pizza she and I made together using a tempeh crumble from one of Isa Chandra Moskowitz's cookbooks.
After watching an episode of Jeopardy!, Gretchen and I watched the two first episodes of Baby Reindeer, a show recommended by our recent visitors from Scotland. It focused on Donny, a befuddled-faced British bartender who moonlights as a stand-up comic and his morbidly obese stalker, Martha. It was watchable, though I'm not sure how I really feel about it.
Later, while Gretchen was enjoying the warm evening by reading out on the east deck, some woman walked by our house on Dug Hill Road and something about her caused the dogs to freak out and run out to her, destroying the last bit of functionality of the magnetically-closing screen draped in front of our front door. Neville then proceeded to bite the poor woman on the leg. Gretchen ran out and dealt with the situation (this being not exactly the first time Neville has bitten someone). Gretchen later described the woman as an "old hippie." Gretchen could teach a course on talking people down from their fury, and I could hear the two chatting for some time out through the laboratory window. By the end of it, the woman was taking selfies with Neville and Charlotte, who, while perhaps not all that remorseful, had decided the woman was alright. In the conversation, Gretchen also learned that the woman (who lives nearby) had recently seen Charlotte up the road near our friend Andrea's house. That doesn't surprise me, though it is somewhat concerning. (Still, I don't think she spends any more time in the road than Sally, Eleanor, or Ramona did.)
Today's Neville painting. Click to enlarge.
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