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the stove gets hot
Tuesday, June 17 2025
I spent the entire day being punished by a SQL query sent to Oracle by a dotnet application. Oracle and Microsoft make these queries difficult to debug, since you can't just access the SQL that gets sent to the server and you get errors like "Exception thrown: 'System.FormatException' in mscorlib.dll" that give no sense of what is causing them. ChatGPT was pretty sure the problem was that my parameters were being passed to Oracle as strings, but nothing it came up with fixed the problem, so it was probably barking up the wrong tree. But it made for a miserable workday. I didn't feel like I was learning much or getting anything done. I was having defeatist feelings that I should either rage quit or hoping I would be fired for how little I've managed to get done. The only thing that made the day tolerable was the occasional downpour on the flat roof of the office (us developers are on the top floor), which provided a delightful apocalyptic energy.
Back at the house, I eventually took Charlotte for a short walk up the Farm Road and then back homeward east of the wetlands just east of the Farm Road. And then I took a bath that I'd been looking forward all day.
After she got back from pilates, Gretchen tinkered around in the kitchen, putting together our respective meals mostly from leftovers. At some point Gretchen decided to burn a bunch of paper and cardboard in the woodstove to drive out the rainy-day chill. But when she went to use the lighter (a battery-powered device that also includes a flashlight function), she couldn't open it. When she handed it to me to figure out, I could see that the whole thing was slightly melted. Evidently Gretchen had absent-mindedly left it on top of the woodstove while running a fire. It seemed like a needless waste to me. She knows the stove gets hot! And it added to the funk I'd been in all day.
Then Gretchen complained about how my phone's alarm (which I need to reliably wake up at 6:00am) was too loud and that the jingle it played was annoying. So, in a state of heightened irritation, I tried to change these things. But the user interfaces for phone apps are inconsistent and discoverability is abominable. Initially it didn't seem like there was a way to change either the alarm tune or its volume. So I handed the phone to Gretchen and she eventually found those settings; one had to back out to the point where the time of the alarm can be changed.
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