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two different podcasts joined together
Saturday, June 3 2017
I woke up this morning eager to do some further work on a work-related tool I'd built yesterday. This was an API (Application-Program-Interface) tester that already did something fairly interesting. It parsed the API handler files to determine what all the API calls were to provide them in a dropdown list. From there, though, it was up to me to provide the data in a JSON object that I had to build free-form. The insight that had me working on it this morning was that I could capture all those data objects in the general API handler and log examples of the data in the file system. I could then, using AJAX, provide a sample data object for every API call the moment it was selected in the dropdown just by calling up the logged data used the last time that API was called. I went on to improve a Javascript function that turns tabular JSON into a pretty HTML display to make it so it could display nested data of arbitrary complexity. If I ever build (or otherwise obtain) a generic JSON object editor, this tool would be amazing (as would my report builder).
This morning while Gretchen and I were drinking Saturday morning coffee, Quentin came over to drop off his dog Coach Eric Taylor for the day. He also dropped some news: he and his wife Natasha and Coach the Dog would be moving to Eugene, Oregon on August 1st. Among other things, it will mean Gretchen will probably get more shifts at the bookstore in Woodstock, where Quentin had been working full-time. In Eugene (a town whose name seems to mean "best in class") Quentin says he probably won't be working in a bookstore; he hopes to make at least 30 kilobucks per year at a desk job, possibly at the University of Oregon.
Not long after Quentin left, I had to shout at Coach to get him to stop chasing Celeste (aka "the Baby") like a prey animal in our yard. Clarence handled Coach with much more feline expertise, standing around behind furniture, allowing Coach to see him, rubbing against things, looking away nonchalantly, and never retreating. Don't get me wrong, Clarence was scared, but so too was Coach, and Clarence seemed to know that too.
Later, Gretchen gathered up all three dogs and drove down into Old Hurley to hang out with Nancy and Sarah and others down at Ray & Nancy's house. There was a town-wide yardsale going on, so I'm guessing they were staffing a table and selling various things while some (particularly Nancy) were sipping on glasses of sweetberry wine.
Meanwhile I was east of the house, carefully setting up a square and some string to measure (as accurately as I could) where the southeast pillar of a new deck will go. Once that was established, I began digging. The soil was a mix of round pebbles and reddish clay-rich soil, which is typical of the soil that was dumped on the ground around the house in hopes of forming the basis for one of several unquestioned inanities at the heart of the American Dream: a lush green lawn. In 14.7 years we've lived in our house, there has never once been a lawn mower (or any mowing device) east of the house, so what grows there is a mix of knee-high weeds, pokeberries, various blackberries (and the like), white pines, and, most importantly (for this particular hole), a large tree of heaven. I soon encountered a complex branching knot of thick roots. I dug around them, exposing what I could, and then cut the roots at the edges of the hole using a reciprocating saw (and an old dull blade mostly spent cutting up that fuel tank on Brewster Street). Even with lots of cutting, though, the knot of root remained, mostly because of a branch that seemed to run vertically downward.
As I worked, I was listening to the latest Kunstlercast podcast, which has gone downhill a long ways since Duncan Crary quit producing it. At this point James Howard Kunstler is something of a reactionary goldbug, so far gone that he doesn't consider Donald Trump much (or any) worse than Hillary Clinton. That said, this particular episode was fascination. This was because within it the threads from two different podcasts joined together for the better part of an hour and I was able to make some connections in my brain. I'd recognized some of Kunstler's doom & gloom and "peak everything" jargon in things John B. (the eccentric hero of the S-town podcast) had said. But in the Kunstler podcast today, I learned there was a very good reason for this: John B. had been a devoted listener to Kunstler's podcast and had even communicated with Kunstler on the telephone. Kunstler had John B. pegged as a bit of pschologically-unstable crank, but such people are probably common in the doomer scene Kunstler attracts.
By now Gretchen had returned, and she managed to get all the dogs except Coach Eric Taylor to eat their dinner before she headed out again to watch the new Wonderwoman movie with her lady friends. The key to getting Coach to eat was to feed him some of our vegan dog food and not his usual kibble. Sure, it was vegan, but it was different, and who doesn't like mixing it up a bit? I took all the dogs for a walk south down the Farm Road after that. When the dogs ran off into the forest west of there, our walk went up on those bluffs. At one point I saw Coach chasing a red fox and was worried they'd all spend the next hour running rapidly in some direction (since foxes cannot climb trees). But evidently this particular fox had a hidey hole somewhere, and the chase ended after only a minute or so.
I left the dog sitting to Andrea and drove out to New World Home Cooking to meet up with my colleague Dan and his new wife Eva. I'd never met Eva at all and this would be the first time I'd ever seen Dan in real life. I waited for him at the bar in New World, but then it turned out he and Eva had a table in the back. Last time I'd been to New World, their only IPA was Hurricane Kitty. Things had improved since then, but not by much. Now their house IPA is Lagunitas. I like Lagunitas but it's not because I like their IPA.
Dan is about my height and looks like a 40-something Woody Allen. His wife is a petite Chinese woman who just graduated from Yale. She didn't talk much, though she did ask a few questions now and then. Most of what Dan and I talked about was work-related[REDACTED]. We also talked here and there about tech, which was more interesting to me than veganism and animal rights (the other subject that is important in our remote workplace). At one point I even sighed about not having many people I can talk to about technical matters, though I have lots of people around me who are into animal rights. "I'm so sick of vegans!" I declared, semi-seriously. We'd also ordered a small amount of food, mostly in the form of spicy blackened green beans and two different kinds of seitan "wings." Every time I come to New World it seems their orders of seitan "wings" gets smaller. Splitting two orders of "wings" between three people meant that I got like two or three pieces of seitan total. Dan is a nice guy and paid for it all before I could do anything to stop him.
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