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like coffee for snakes
Wednesday, June 7 2017
This morning while I was plinking around at my workstation in the laboratory, Andrea came and asked if I could do her a favor. It seems there was a snake in her room and she wanted it removed. So I went down to the basement's master bedroom and looked in the closet. There I found an average-sized garter snake, maybe 18 inches in length. I thought she might give me trouble, but she was kind of listless from the cool of the floor when I brushed her into a dustpan. I went out through the room's sliding-glass doors and released the snake into a sunny spot, which would provide the snake the heat necessary to start her day. As I later explained to Gretchen, morning sun is like coffee to a cold-blooded creature. This reminded Gretchen that it was Wednesday, and therefore decaf day. She immediately put on a pot of water.
As indicated in that previous paragraph, there was actually sun today, the first in what might've been a week or more. Last night had been unseasonably cold, with temperatures falling near or into the 40s. But with the near-solstice sun shining down from near the highest point it attains at this latitude, the day quickly warmed up, though only into the low 70s.
One of the ways I took advantage of the weather was to attempt to replace the rotten exhaust pipe on the Subaru. But it turned out that the flange that this new pipe was to attach to on the way to the muffler had rotted completely away. This meant I would also have to buy the muffler if I wanted to do a proper fix. But ain't nobody got time for that. So I engineered a ghetto fix similar to the one I'd attempted earlier for this problem. I used some flashing aluminum to form a tube around the rotten ends of both existing pipes, securing them with large pipe clamps and filling in the gaps with various combinations of old furnace cement, fiberglass mesh, and fiberglass insulation (the kind one puts in walls). The key here was to use materials that do not melt or catch fire at high temperatures. It helped that this time I'd actually run the car up onto plastic ramps to give myself room to work. Happily, when I fired up the car after all this, it was noticeably quieter than it had been, particularly when I revved the engine. Success!
My main task today in the remote workplace was to build out a flexible replacement for the donor database's search functionality. I'd done most of the work for this already during the February Mexican vacation, though there were still some things that needed to be built, particularly a mechanism for dynamically adding whole chunks (comprised of several form inputs) to a web form (and also to remember these dynamically-added form inputs later when the data produced by them is later recalled). I got this form-chunk-producing code working today, though I still need to come up with a naming convention for the form elements so that the data they produce can be used. [REDACTED]
Celeste the Cat (aka "the Baby") hanging out on a bench near the house's front door. Photo from several days ago. (Click to enlarge.)
A robin foraging in the marshy margin of the driveway just north of the parking area. Photo from several days ago.
In the teevee room several days ago. From left: Neville the Dog, Clarence the Cat, Gretchen, Celeste the Cat. (Click to enlarge.)
Chipping sparrow in a tree north of the laboratory today.
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