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like it had been patched with Bubble Yum
Monday, April 17 2017
As the number of teammembers in my remote workplace team has increased, so too have my responsibilities as Sr. Backend Developer. This morning my chores were almost entirely managerial, as I had to interrogate my underlings (two other non-senior backend developers, one who isn't even in IT) to find out what their issues were and then later present them to Da, my boss, in a new weekly senior developer meeting. Folded into this was my lobbying to get him to see that any long-range changes to essential database technology will have to be incremental (evolutionary) and that complete reworkings are too far beyond the time horizon (while also being logistically impossible) in an organization such as this one (well-funded though it is). I was moderately successful in this effort, though Da is still making noises about the need to migrate the backend to some as-yet-unspecified framework, a massive undertaking that would have no identifiable benefits.
Throughout the day, I'd occasionally venture into the garage to spray another layer of white paint on the washing machine I'd bought yesterday. I'd patched a deep puncturing dent in the thin rail along the top with epoxy, though I didn't have the patience to sand it smooth enough that it didn't look like it had been patched with Bubble Yum.
Yesterday I'd switched the household solar heat collection system to summer mode, meaning the panels heat household water and the boiler is off. This evening I took my first bath of 2017 under this regime, meaning the water was mostly solar-heated (there might've still been some residual heat from the boiler, of course). The water can be much hotter under the summer regime; one has to be careful not to scald one's self.
I've decided to keep the cheap $5 reading glasses I'd recently (and impulsively) bought at Home Depot on the edge of the basement bathtub (the place I bathe). It has only a power of 1.5 diopters (the weakest pair I could buy at Home Depot) and yet they make a huge difference when I'm trying to read anything at all. I'd been getting along with no glasses at all, but now that I can compare having glasses with not having any, there's no going back (at least not in the bathtub).
I've noticed that when I get out of the bathtub, I usually crave fluids, preferably sweet ones. I'm not one to drink soda pop, but I love fruit juice, particularly the sour sweetened cherry juice to be found among the cherries in a jar of Trader Joe's Dark Morello Cherries. Tonight, though, I ate a whole pint of Ben & Jerry's Non-Dairy Cherry Garcia icecream. It wasn't quite the same, and required that I first slake my thirst with simple tap water.
Speaking of tap water, earlier today Gretchen had a guy come out to check out our household water purification system, which was installed more than 13 years ago. The guy who'd done the original installation was a different guy from the one today. In recent years, that original water guy proved to be something of a flake; Gretchen never managed to get him to return for a second visit. He (the original water guy) had led me to believe that the system he'd installed had a single purpose: to remove iron from the water. But the guy today said the system was more complicated than that. It turns out that the big tank between the water intake and the house had contained a bunch of calcium carbonate intended to neutralize the low pH of the water from the well. (The guy today said it had a pH of 6 without bothering to explain; luckily I'm familiar with these terms.) Over the years, he said, that calcium carbonate had been exhausted and the water had returned to its natural slightly-acidic state, and this accounted for all the green stains we'd been seeing, particularly in the basement bathtub. The acid water had been slowly corroding our copper pipes! Had I known there was something needing replenishing, I would've done something, but I'd figured the copper corrosion was normal and that nothing could be done. The water guy replenished the calcium carbonate in that tank and also presumably calibrated the system that bubbles oxygen through the water to remove iron (the system does that as well). It all came to less than $300, which wasn't so bad in the context of this (hopefully brief) season of constant expenditures.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170417 feedback
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