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Neville escapes containment
Friday, August 14 2026
I'd spent the night with Neville in his living room corral, and he'd allowed me to sleep for hours at a time, so I was reasonably well rested by this morning.
For breakfast, everyone feasted on the various pastries and donuts Gretchen's parents had brought. I myself ate two donuts and a bagel (they'd brought some from Washington, DC). Gretchen's father had an actual copy of a recent issue of the Washington Post and we discussed a few issues in the news, though our conversation kept coming back to the artificial intelligence of large language models.
When Gretchen had to head off to an appointment with her osteopath in Stone Ridge at 11:00, her parents took her. By then, I was already in the forest walking Charlotte down the Chamomile Gorge to Dug Hill Road and back and they had to leave Neville by himself in his corral. When I got back from the walk, Neville was not in his corral! I panicked, wondering if he'd seen a coyote in the yard, busted out, and given chase, all behaviors that would get his heart rate up and be potentially deadly in this phase of his heart worm therapy. I went upstairs to check the laboratory bean bag, as that is one of his favorite places, but he was not there. And he wasn't in the upstairs bed either. I eventually found him lounging out on the south deck, another of his favorite places. How had he escaped? The corral was latched, but the orientation of the wire panels of the containment structure was such that pressure against the latched panel on the end, where it was hooked to a leg of the couch (also part of the corral!) would cause it to go out-of-plumb outward, producing a triangular gap big enough for Neville to step through. Obviously, this meant we couldn't really count on our existing corral to keep him truly imprisoned.
Meanwhile, Gretchen's parents went to Ollie's Pizza in High Falls and bought a couple grandma-style pizzas for us to eat as lunch when they got back. The plan was for our neighbor A and Jamie to come over and join us for lunch, but they didn't end up being able to make it.
As the afternoon turned into evening, I decided to deal an issue with my crude red-oak stool, the one I'd recently made from a massive tree that fell across the Chamomile Gorge Trail. I'd put it out in the living room for my in-laws to see, and they'd been putting their feet up on it and such. But they'd also noted how unlevel its top was. So I measured all the way around it and marked a level(ish) line near the top with a Sharpie marker. I then took it out in front and did my best to cut off the narrow wedge that would then result in a level stool But of course my cut wandered off a bit and emerged prematurely from the cut I'd wanted to make all the way through. Fortunately, though, I was able to use a power planer (a crappy one I'd bought so long ago from Harbor Freight that its plastic chassis had bleached from orange to more of a pink), and that managed to create a reasonable top again.
For dinner this evening, Gretchen cobbled together a bunch of leftovers, some reaching back as far as the spaghetti I'd made on Wednesday and the low-effort chili I'd made on Monday, though she added some sort of white sauce to the spaghetti, which looked good with the flecks and bigger pieces of broccoli in there. Over the course of the meal, I drank two glasses of chilled pinot noir (it's gauche, but it's good that way) and Gretchen's father drank a whole Sierra Nevada IPA from a variety pack, and that led to some fun conversation and laughs. As I was washing dishes at the end of the meal, I mentioned something about Ethiopian food and that the closest place to get injera was "500 miles away" (which was an exaggeration; we could probably buy it in New York City somewhere). This caused Grethen's father to asked Chet (ChatGPT) where the closest Ethiopian food was to our present location. It came back with a supposed restaurant named "Injera" in Rosendale, just 16 miles down the Thruway! Gretchen couldn't believe it; it must be brand new, as otherwise she would know about it. I wondered if it was an LLM hallucination. So Gretchen had her father Google this supposed Ethiopian restaurant, and sure enough, it did not exist. The upshot of this is as follows: don't base your meal plans on an LLM's notion of what reality is!
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