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Ramona grows up
Wednesday, March 30 2016
This morning Gretchen took all the dogs, including our newest dog Neville, on a medium-length walk through the forest, and he managed to keep up fairly well despite his apparent inability to break into gaits faster than walking.
This weekend I'd been scheduled to have a mentorship session at Outdated in Uptown Kingston so that the woman who runs the program could observe one of our dismal sessions. (This couldn't be done at the house because of her pet allergies.) To keep that from being too much of a disaster, I needed to make real progress on the game, which was now only barely moving sprites around based on changing data in a MySQL database. So I ground up 25 milligrams of time-release Adderall and drank it in a hot water slurry directly from the mortar (the way I always do). It still surprises me how little flavor it has.
Adderall is a miracle drug, at least in the context of my brain when used on a weekly basis. I made great progress on the game, finally figuring out how best to position sprites in the Phaser framework (whose documentation is not much better than completely unusable). I'd been using the sprite's anchor property to set its position, but it turns out that you're supposed to set its x and y properties directly. After a few additional bug fixes, I had the sprites moving in sync in two different Chrome windows from two different logins. Happily, latency wasn't actually proving to be too much of a problem even when using a server 150 miles away across the internet in Burlington, Massachusetts.
This evening Gretchen and I took the dogs for a short stroll down the Farm Road and back. Neville was moving more slowly and stiffly than he had been this morning, suggesting the morning's dog walk had been a bit too aggressive for his weak muscles and aching joints. Gretchen had had a good phone conversation with one of the main office employees at the animal rights educational outreach group she works for. Word was that the administrators were so impressed with Gretchen's performance at the recent Atlanta training session that they wanted to clone her. Amusingly, this wasn't the first time I'd heard of someone wanting to clone Gretchen. Early in her work for the Bard Prison Initiative, the head of the program had said the very same thing, though after six years or so he fired her in a flourish of passive-aggressive bureaucratic indirection of the sort for which Bard College is infamous.
Me with Neville on the Farm Road this evening (we're looking south towards the farm from near 41.926860N, 74.108984W. Eleanor is behind me and Ramona is in front. "Tawny and white are the new black" is how I captioned this in Facebook. (Click to enlarge.)
Tonight Gretchen went over to Susan & David's place to spend the night dog sitting Olive and Darla. Meanwhile back home, I kept looking for evidence that Neville had pooped or pissed in the house and kept not finding any. Later tonight he and Ramona went out in the yard and had a good bark about something off the woods. This was good for several reasons. Firstly, it was a common task Ramona and Neville could participate in that would help cement their relationship. It also indicated to me that Neville now considered this house his home, something that he felt a need to gaurd. (I hadn't heard him bark at all yesterday.) And if Neville considered this house his home, he was now unlikely to wander off.
As for Ramona, I've noticed that she suddenly seems much more mature than she had before Neville arrived. I might be projecting this on her, but it seems to me that she's undergone a sort of mid-life crisis, realizing that now, given the new younger dog in the household, she has to take on a bit more responsibility and quit acting like a five year old puppy. Perhaps this accounts for some measure of her lingering resentment about Neville. It's never fun to have your youth snatched away.
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