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prematurely slow katydids
Monday, August 22 2016
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
My guts still weren't back to normal even today, and I had to put in a whole day in the remote workplace. For awhile this afternoon, I was in something close to misery trying to assemble an archipelago of reports in the face of specs that had changed two or three times during the process that had led to the data's production and processing. None of this would've been a problem in a normal database, but this one is so enormous that normal queries time out (and I couldn't figure out how to eliminate all the time limits). The solution was to add more columns to a table and copy data into them from columns in other tables, thus simplifying the sprawling joins and subqueries required to assemble the data being requested. By the end of the workday, my gut was in good shape and the workplace pressure was off, and so I celebrated with a nice hot bath (after first cleaning up the detritus from the showering of one of our recent house sitters).
The weather has turned unseasonably cold for late August, causing us to wear socks, long trousers, and to shut all the doors and most of the windows. I took the opportunity to burn a bunch of cardboard and paper accumulated over the summer; the resulting heat was actually a good thing to have in the living room. At night, the katydids' "cha-cha-cha-cha" call was slowed down in that ominous autumnal way that fills me with an unfocused feeling of dread. That feeling probably dates to when I was a kid and the school year was either about to begin or had already begun. The end of summer will always be tainted by the feelings of loss I had back then.
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