|
|
|
Celeste moves into empty cat habitat
Friday, March 17 2017
After oversleeping a bit, this morning Gretchen drove off for Brattleboro, Vermont, to meet up with her childhood friend Dina (who was driving from Boston). The idea (I think) was for them to meet half-way and socialize without the encumbrances of children, critters, and husbands.
Meanwhile, after getting most of what I needed done today in the remote workplace, I loaded up the dogs and drove off to run some errands. As always, I found a way to stop in at the Tibetan Center despite the fact that it was well out of the way. This visit didn't produce any great scores, though I bought two things: a micro USB cable and a tiny (8 ounce) container of clear Polycrylic, which might be useful for high-wear parts of the laboratory floor (which, at this point, is looking really good). My main reason for leaving the house was to get more paint for that floor. I needed more Blue Chip Blue (remember, about half of it had been lost in a paint-spill disaster) and a quart of Jargon Jade (the closest Sherwin-Williams color I could find to Summer Basket Green). Though Sherwin Williams seemed expensive, I was impressed by how well the satin-finish paint seemed to be a adhering to the older paint. I'd had problems with a glossy blue in the past, which somehow affected the adhesive in the underlying OSB and caused flakes of wood on the surface to break off, though that wasn't happening the Sherwin Williams satin. I got the two quarts I'd set out for at Herzog's, and, because I was in a chatty mood [REDACTED], I told the cashier about what had become of the last quart of Blue Chip Blue. He asked if I'd seen the spot out in the parking lot which was now "mostly cleaned up." It didn't surprise me to learn that there would be visible paint spills outside a paint retailer, though, come to think of it, it was surprising I'd never noticed the legacy of earlier spills. The cashier said that a common mechanism for paint spills is toddlers who aren't properly supervised. He claimed they have a special affinity for hurling any buckets they can lift. While there, I bought yet another possible LED bulb for installation above the bathtub I use. As I've indicated, the murky light available down there is not compatible with middle-aged eyes (particularly when reading Millennial-targeted high-design magazines like Make, with their thin-stroke sans-serif fonts on colored backgrounds.
Back at the house, I resumed work in the remote workplace only to find the main web server was being unresponsive. It soon turned out that it had been brought down by an abundance of traffic to a specific (and non-crucial) set of websites. Meanwhile my boss Da (who would normally be the one with the hair on fire about this) had gotten out of work early and was off on a date with a real live woman. Since he has no social life and pretty much just lives for work, I (and the rest of the IT team) were of the opinion that he should give that priority and let me deal with the server. I did talk with Da briefly on the phone and he suggested I comment-out some stuff in the httpd.conf file to disable the sites. But when I tried that, it didn't work. This ultimately led to me rebooting the main web server, something I'd never done. And this allowed the site to come back up, but soon it was bogged down again. It looked to me like were facing some sort of denial of service attack, though I couldn't tell where it was coming from or whether it was distributed (it probably wasn't). I didn't have any good traffic monitoring tools in place (or experience looking at that sort of thing), so I focused instead on what the MySQL server process was doing. I eventually decided to just revoke permissions from the database user for accessing the database that was getting bogged down. This seemed to solve the problem within seconds.
For whatever reason, I never panicked or felt as if I was in over my head during the whole crisis. Partly this was because (unlike, say, problems with the email server) none of this was happening because of anything I'd done. [REDACTED]
Through the whole thing, I'd been communicating via Slack with Ja, the head of operations, and he was very good at not overstressing me. And when the crisis was over, he publicly thanked me in an email to everyone in The Organization. For once, people outside of IT had a sense (an inaccurate one, true) of what the hell it is I do all day.
I don't know how or why it happened, but it happened: Celeste (aka "the Baby") has become the new laboratory cat. She used to only come into the laboratory rarely, mostly with Oscar. And they'd maybe have some catnip and leave. But now Celeste follows me around, often getting under foot or grabbing me high up on my leg. Though she's not a cuddler and would never spend time in my lap, she has become more affectionate and spends hours each day sleeping on the laboratory ottoman. That's a piece of furniture that hasn't gotten much use since Eleanor died. Stripey stayed away from it, perhaps because it once had been infested with fleas. and Ramona and Neville only get on it occasionally. (Oscar went through a brief phase of sleeping on it, but that ended over a month ago.) I have to believe that Celeste is merely shifting her preferred habitat into the laboratory (a genuinely perfect habitat for a cat) because of Stripey's recent death. But of all the cats whom Stripey interacted with, Celeste was always his favorite, and he surely wouldn't've minded had she coexisted in the laboratory with him for the past few years.
Occasionally with Celeste's unwanted assistance, I continued painting the laboratory floor today. Though the new Jargon Jade is similar in appearance to the Summer Basket Green I'd recently painted on the green shapes, it has a different finish and is very slightly more saturated. I'll eventually repaint most (but perhaps not all) of the Summer Basket Green shapes, but for now I'm concentrating on shapes that already showing signs of wear; the matte finish of the Summer Basket Green hadn't been appropriate for use on a floor.
Meanwhile, for a little over a week now I've been dealing with a mild discomfort in my lower left abdomen. It feels a little like the testicular discomfort I've had on at least two occasions in the past (the worst being in 2000), though sometimes the discomfort reaches higher, as if it might be something like a tiny kidney stone tumbling down a ureter. The discomfort vanishes if I do a little stretching or otherwise stay active. It mostly only affects me when I am sitting still in front of my computer.
Celeste sleeping on the laboratory ottoman today. There is some Blue Chip Blue and Summer Basket Green visible in this photograph.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170317 feedback
previous | next |
