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no power white-trash dinner
Wednesday, May 27 2015
Since Gretchen was still gone at 10:00am, I took the dogs on a nice little walk in the forest this morning. Because of recent rains, there were actually a few Red Efts here and there, the first I'd seen of them all year. Normally springs are much wetter than this one has been, and Red Efts spread out over the forest floor like a minefield (for anyone who dreads the idea of stepping on a fellow vertebrate).
Surprisingly large chunks of my days are being devoured by this ongoing crisis regarding a client website whose security may or may not have been breached. Today I found myself going line by line through another PDF scan of supposed weakenesses and addressing them (to the extent that Google searches could tell me how to address them). Some of the solution were complicated and incomplete. With goading from one of the other guys on the team (after I'd already given up), I was able to download source for an up-to-date version of OpenSSL and compile it, but first I had to install several libraries' worth of compilers and linkers. And even then, the version I installed continued to be ignored by OpenSSH, which really couldn't be upgraded.
This sort of work is as unpleasant as it sounds, partly because I am an inexpert server administrator. Part of the reason I hate this work is because I feel like a disproportionate amount of it has been dumped on me and there is precious little positive feedback from the people for whom the work is being done. I know why this work is all being dumped on me: I have the broadest (if not necessarily always the deepest) skillset, but at the same time I feel like anyone with a basic understanding of how the world is put together could be doing what I'm doing. I'm just doing Google searches until I find something that seems to match my problem and then I just follow the given recipe.
I think my secret skill that tends to attract these sorts of jobs is that I'm essentially fearless. And why am I fearless? Because if I get fired, at least I won't have to do this shitty job anymore. It becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop, with tasks getting ever shittier and me growing ever more fearless.
This evening after I'd had a bit too much of that shit, I went to take a nap. Soon thereafter, a powerful storm blew in, and as I ran around closing windows against the sheets of rain, the power died. It would remain of for the next three or four hours.
Gretchen came home from having had her hair done in New Paltz, and she immediately began cooking so as to not have to cook in the dark. She made a vaguely white-trash dinner of kale with chick peas in a faux cheese sauce over quinoa-and-rice pasta, with a hearty side of fried tempeh "wings" in Buffalo sauce (a sauce based on a Tabasco-sauce knock-off). Usually we watch teevee with dinner, but not tonight. We sat at the dining room table and actually talked about stuff.
Later we played a rousing game of Scrabble. Initially I did well, adding "EX" to "S" to make "SEX" and two two-letter words, with X on a triple square, and another letter on a double-word square, meaning that X counted six times. I got a total of 51 points for that play. But later in the game Gretchen played "QUAY" with the Q on a double-letter square and the Y on the triple-word square, netting herself an impossible 84 points for that play. It was impossible to come back from that, so she won.
I'd bought three different battery-powered lamps, but two were useless due to dead batteries. So I read for awhile by the light of a kerosene lamp. In the murky light, my eyes had trouble focusing on the text, but when I put on a pair of Gretchen's reading glasses, everything snapped into sharp focus.
Gretchen is always a little disappointed when the power comes on after an outage, and so when it envitably did come on, she continued reading. Later she expressed pride in having avoided watching any teevee at all today.
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