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keeping tidy toilets tidy
Monday, April 14 2025
Last night I'd done a little work that I would've normally done in the workplace, just because I was unsatisfied with what I'd gotten accomplished in the last week. This confirmed to me (and even ChatGPT agreed) that trying to get unit testing working on specific Angular project in question was proving to be a lot of work for not very much reward. So then I'd looked into another kind of testing called end-to-end (e2e) testing. And today at work I went about implementing it. Though Cypress, the framework I was using, seemed complicated initially (it actually launches a browser to do user-like behaviors that have been pre-scripted by someone like me), I made progress and soon had a real test working. I then got bogged down in mysterious issues where the site presented by Cypress wasn't behaving the same as the development site, but having broken out of the quagmire of unit testing provided a measured sense of accomplishment.
There were only three of us at lunch today, so people were talking normally and actually listening to answers. It was nice, and the weird vegetable stew with rice I'd brought (it was leftovers from the seder at Falafel Cathy's house Gretchen had gone to) was surprisingly good.
As an indication of how comfortable I am becoming with my new workplace, today I stopped locking the bathroom door when I'm just going in there to piss. The culture of the workplace is clearly such that nobody would ever open the bathroom door if it was closed. I still lock the door when pooping, just because it's hard enough to relax into a poop in the workplace as it is, and the thought that someone could come through the door while I'm sitting there in a state of maximum vulnerability, however remote, is enough to ruin the experience.
One further point about the bathrooms (there are several, but I mostly just use the one nearest my cubicle) is that they are always immaculately clean. They are so clean that I never want to be the one to leave them in an unclean state. If I did, surely the people who have been working there longer than me would associate its new occasional nastiness with my arrival in the workforce, and that's not the kind of thing one wants to be known for. So I even clean up the barely-perceptible imperfections of cleanliness left by others, such as tiny hairs on the edge of the toilet (below the toilet seat) or drops of water (or piss) on the floor.
I conclusively solved my workplace audio issues today with a new set of bluetooth headphones I'd ordered online. These were SkullCandy-branded and had cost about $25, about twice what I'd paid for the crap bluetooth headphones I'd had to give up on last week. These new headphones worked great, with no dropouts and they even fit my head fairly comfortably, only making my ears feel "pinned down" after hours of continuous use. Today I discovered a new YouTube channel called Bat Country, where a very articulate gentleman recounts his former life as an extreme alcoholic, back when he often drank a litre or more of vodka every day while trying to do such activities as bicycling from Shanghai to London. He tells his listeners that the only non-sober people tuning in to his channel are themselves alcoholics, since his content is of no interest to people without a problem. He may be right, but to the extent I have a problem, it is nowhere near as bad as what this guy talks about. (My closest thing to a rock bottom came back in April of 1996 when I drank beer from a gallon jug that had contained gasoline, tore open the cuticles of my fingers playing "She's Lost Control Again" on someone else's bass on a outdoor stage at Fairview Farms north of Scottsville, and then fell into a fire, developing a baseball-sized blister on the palm of my left hand, a blister I still had a couple days later when I was arrested for destroying Charlottesville's Downtown Mall in a drunken fugue state after first using the key I'd been entrusted with to bring all my sketchy friends into BozArt gallery. (Having more white privilege than even I expected, that crime never ended up on my record.) A few months later, I had my first full-time job with benefits and even a couple marketable skills.)
The weather was gorgeous as I was driving home from work, so of course one of the first things I did once I got home was to take the dogs on a walk up the Stick Trail. I naturally got sucked into stone wall building at the two stone walls I passed along the way, particularly the new part of the Chamomile Wall that I've started west of the Stick Trail. (It's built from the start as a hollow structure, designed as housing for whatever critters want to move in.)
As I walked through the forest, I was developing a plan for dinner: I would be making an Indian curry based on chickpeas, potatoes, and mushrooms. But as I was sauteing the mushrooms and onions, Gretchen called to invite me to dinner with Lynn and Greg at the Garden Café in Woodstock. So I shelved my cooking project and drove there in the Bolt.
There wasn't anything I liked on the specials menu, so I ordered a messy Beyond Burger and a side of black beans. We also shared a plate of tofu "wings," having gotten the idea after being offered a taste by the restaurant's owner when we first arrived.
We spent a fair amount of time at dinner discussing the case of Jace Alexander, an actor from an acting family who lived near Lynn & Greg's downstate house in Dobbs Ferry. But then somehow child pornography was found on Alexander's computer, which led to a scandalous article on the front page of The New York Times. This all led into a rather long discussion about abuse generally and how men tend to medicate with alcohol whereas women talk about their issues with other women.
And then Gretchen brought up a podcast our recent guest Anna had turned her onto called the Telepathy Tapes about supposed telepathic capabilities among profoundly autistic children. Gretchen, who normally has healthy skepticism about such things, seemed to have bought into the claims completely and even seemed irked that I didn't immediately seem open to the possibility of such things. She even said things like "Well, before Galileo, nobody knew how the planets..." But I am aware of many studies having been attempted to show a basis for mental telepathy, and no scientifically valid one has ever shown any indication that it exists. This isn't to say there is no possible mechanism for it; we all know radio waves are real and people using present technology now routinely build machines that essentially have mental telepathy with one another. But no science has ever found any indication of radio signals being sent and received by biological organisms. I found this whole part of the discussion excruciating; it's never fun to listen to people I respect taking nonsense seriously.
I saw that black snake I'd seen a week or so ago again today in the same place, in the Woodshed Path right next to the east end of the woodshed. The snake's eyes were still milky and there were still discolorations on the snake's body, suggesting these are permanent conditions that do not indicate the snake is about to shed his or her skin. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte in the rain-swollen Chamomile, looking southwestward. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte in the rain-swollen Chamomile, looking more westward. Click to enlarge.
The nascent extension of the Chamomile Wall just west of the Stick Trail. Click to enlarge.
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