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Charlotte barks a bit too much
Friday, April 25 2025
In the middle of the night, Charlotte was barking incessantly, as she often does. Usually we drag her into the house at some point, but my solution was to put a pillow on my head and try to get back to sleep. But at some point I heard something unexpected for the wee hours of the night: a knocking at the door. And then Neville started barking. So I got up and went downstairs. Alarmingly, there was someone with a flashlight outside the door. I opened it up and found an older white guy I didn't recognize standing there. In a very reasonable tone, he asked if there was something that could be done about my dog because her barking was keeping his wife up, who had to work tomorrow. Given the limited range of Charlotte's barking, must've been Crazy Dave, who was unrecognizable in his reasonable haircut. I said that sure, I got it, and then I called out to Charlotte, who was slinking around in the shadows nearby. She saw Dave and became even more shy. One of the problems with Charlotte is that she barks when it serves no purpose, but when there is a stranger in our yard, she falls silent. I watched Dave leave. He got into a car and drove back to the cottage he lives in just downhill and across a gulch, thereby proving that he was in fact Crazy Dave. I brought Charlotte into the house and barricaded all the exits for the night, and the next time she would bark would be after 10:00am.
In the remote workplace, today I had to do some code review, a chore I feel spectacularly unqualified for. If I was wasn't worried about security implications, I would just dump the diff file into ChatGPT and ask it to do a code review. Short of that, I asked ChatGPT questions about specific chunks of code and then researched what it would take to get my own large language model running on hardware I completely control. Later I realized a large chunk of code I was reviewing had deep similarities to a fullstack task I'd been assigned, so I decided to approve the pull request and work from the code as modified by the code I'd been reviewing. I made good progress after doing that, but by then it was late in the workday, and the culture of this workplace is to sharply end one's work at 3:30pm.
At some point in the day, I kept hearing things falling off shelves. It turned out a pair of carolina wrens had somehow gotten into the house. I managed to open the windows and got them to each fly away at separate ends of the house, but I never figured out how they'd gotten in. Wrens often nest in a short ventilation duct connecting the inside of the bathroom to the west outside of the house just beneath the gable, and I thought maybe the wrens had somehow tunneled through and gotten past a piece of cardboard sealing it on the inside. But when I took that cardboard off, I saw there was an airline blanket wadded up in the duct and there was no way for a bird to get through, so how they got into the house remains a mystery. Perhaps they both got in under the screen in the doorway to the laundry room; that was open. But it was very unusual for two birds to get in at the same time.
I'd taken Charlotte for a walk west of the Farm Road during my lunch break (from which I was three minutes late returning, indicating I really need to get Outlook reinstalled on my phone). After work, I took Charlotte for another walk, this time down the Stick Trail, and this time I made myself not linger too long at the westward expansion of the Chamomile Wall.
A couple hours later, though, I returned without the dogs and did more work on the wall, which I continued doing until Crazy Dave's dog Brigitte came bounding up to me almost silently and sniffed my leg. That meant Crazy Dave was nearby, and I didn't want to interact with him, so I returned home.
I was drinking by this point, and the drinking continued into the evening, mostly robbing me of the ambitions I had to do various things. Instead I re-watched old episodes of Black Mirror, particularly "Nosedive," a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of a society based on ratings on social media.
Charlotte standing in the Stick Trail as it passes between the original Chamomile Wall in the background and the new westward extension in the foreground. Click to enlarge.
Wall voids I've been incorporating into the westward extension of the Chamomile Wall. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte in the Stick Trail with a bone that had belonged to Crazy Dave's dogs. Click to enlarge.
Delicious! Click to enlarge.
Charlotte standing in the puddle at the bottom of the Chamomile Headwaters Trail. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte rolling in the puddle at the bottom of the Chamomile Headwaters Trail. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte lookig at me from the puddle at the bottom of the Chamomile Headwaters Trail. Click to enlarge.
Rue anemone along the Stick Trail (photo taken April 26th). Click to enlarge.
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