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Gretchen saves me from Peter
Wednesday, September 24 2025
I felt like I was having a pretty good pseudoephedrine-fueled day at work until one of my colleagues pointed out a problem with a pull request I had triumphantly submitted: the table I was referencing isn't actually used by the client in question. Our system has a jumble of poorly-named tables with incomprehensibly-named columns, and every client gets all the tables. But some clients apparently use some tables while others do not. And the table I was referencing is one of those unused tables, at least for the client in question. Normally the fact that this table contained no data would've tipped me off to the fact that it wasn't being used. But that's true of lots of tables in the development system, including the crucial table that holds transactions (which all clients use). I'd populated the unused table with test data and the bug was fixed, and I'd thought that was the end of it. Apparently not, because every can in this company is filled with worms.
When I got home this afternoon, I managed to get both Neville and Charlotte to accompany me on a hike down the Stick Trail and then over to the Farm Road and up it to near its southern end, mostly as an opportunity to collect bluestone and put it caches to be picked up later in a vehicle.
This evening Gretchen and I drove over to Jeff & Alana's house (about five miles to the north in a similar location to our house atop the eastmost of the Catskill foothills). Today was Alana's birthday, and she was having about twenty people over to celebrate. Gretchen had baked s'more-inspired cupcakes (this had required the use of my MAPP-gas torch) and I brought over a tiny painting, one of my less representational works.
Initially I was talking to Alana's surprisingly spry parents (not too long ago they moved from the Midwest to Rosendale, though they also have a winter place in Mexico). I was telling them about my recent close encounter with a loon, though eventually the conversation moved on to such subjects as Alana's father's grandfather's seeming disappointment with his son's level of ambition. At some point in this, Gretchen saw that I'd yet to start drinking anything, and she handed me a Modelo from the refrigerator. At some point I graduated to wine, which for some reason paired better with the two tamales in my stomach.
Later I got stuck in a vortex talking with Jeff's buddy Peter, the sometimes-filmmaker who always comes across as if he's just snorted a line of coke or taken ten hits of LSD. He wanted to tell me all about the state of his divorce from his wife Alison, his recent bout of anemia, and his plans to move to Paris. ("Good timing for that!" was a comment I managed to get in edgewise.) Standing there nodding my head and grunting in agreement at Peter's barrage of statements is exhausting, and eventually Gretchen noticed my discomfort and came over to rescue me, saying we needed to go home so she could do her abortion fund access work.
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