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the carpenter bees of MyTown
Thursday, April 24 2025
Today at work I worked on my first real full-stack task in this new environment. I say "full-stack" because I had to work in the Angular frontend and the Oracle database and everything in between, learning about such things as Oracle packages in the process. It's great that I had ChatGPT to ask about such things; it's a great way to conceal your ignorance from your colleagues, though in this case packages were so weird that I brought up that I'd just learned about them in the developers' meeting this morning.
After work, I stopped at MyTown in Stone Ridge to get some essentials like mushrooms and road beer for the rest of the drive home. (This time I bought a microbrew porter, since that's a beer I want to get more familiar with.) Then I went to the liquor store in the same strip mall, but it was one of those high-end liquor stores that doesn't stock the schwill I prefer (half gallons of gin in plastic bottles). So I bought a liter of their cheapest gin instead. (I generally prefer the less-dry flavor of cheap gin over the super-dry flavor of high-end gin.) The weather this afternoon had reached into the 80s, and there were lots of carpenter bees flying around in front of the raw wooden boards on the outside of the stores in the strip mall; evidently they're the perfect material to bore into to build a carpenter bee nest.
Meanwhile Gretchen had flown to Cleveland as part of a trip where she would be showing Oberlin College to our niece Sadie. This meant I could get my drank on by myself back at the house. I took the opportunity to watch the fifth episode of the seventh season of Black Mirror. It's tear-jerker of a nostalgia story about long-lost love from the early 1990s. Our protagonist is a schlubby middle-aged guy, but back in the early 1990s he was living in a group house in Brooklyn that seemed like a higher-budget version of Big Fun. His romantic interest, whose death precipitated the high-tech conceit for the whole episode, was a cellist, which had a special resonance for me given that I had two cellist girlfriends at the same time for a couple weeks in the fall of 1987 as a sophomore in Oberlin. So by the end, when I'd drunk too much and our protagonist is finally able to see the face of his long-ago girlfriend (a face he'd scratched and cut out of all his photos, much like what Gretchen had done to a photo that included me back during the same period), I couldn't hold back the tears.
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