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cheerful enthusiasm and semi-intelligible banter
Sunday, December 18 2016
I was doing my usual early-Sunday-afternoon things at my computer when the power decisively failed. It didn't immediately come back on, so it was looking like a multi-hour outage. So I went down to the living room to bask in the heat of the woodstove. At least we had heat; not everyone on Dug Hill Road is so lucky.
Not long after that I got a call from my boss Da, which, it being a Sunday, was most unusual. The main web server was throwing errors and people in The Organization were complaining. I might've been able to take action or at least perform some diagnostics, but the only internet connection I had was with my smartphone, and it doesn't even have an ssh client. Da tried restarting mysqld, but that wasn't enough. I told him I'd find a coffee shop and try to save the day from there.
As I was preparing to leave, I thought about calling Ray and Nancy and just going there. It would be closer and the internet would be great. But then I realized I liked the idea of sitting in a coffee shop, particularly Outdated, and puttering around on my computer.
So there I was, doing just that. It was cold miserable day, and Outdated wasn't crowded by its usual standards (that is, there were a couple tables totally free to choose from). As always, it was the demographic mix of people my age who looked like people I should be friends with and young people who look like younger versions of the people I am friends with, complete with Grave's disease. I ordered a cup of coffee and a bowl of beans & barley soup which really could've benefitted from some hot sauce. As for the server problem, I used a number of tools (particularly mysqladmin processlist) to diagnose that there was some spiky traffic patterns on series of satellite domains hosted on the main web server. There wasn't much I could do but turn off some cron jobs that didn't have to be running on a Sunday. Eventually the spiky traffic ebbed and went away. I reported on my results and then went to Herzogg's hardware store, where I bought some rectangular cooking pans and potting soil. Though the days are almost as short as they get, it's not a bad time to be growing plants indoors.
Inevitably I then found myself at the Tibetan Center thrift store, where the only thing I could find to buy was some plastic sheeting designed to be put over a drafty window and then tightened up with a hair dryer. We have many windows that could use such a product at the Brick Mansion. Part of the fun of the Tibetan Center thrift store is overhearing the conversations people have there. Something about that place encourages interactions between people who are either strangers or don't know each other very well. Today there was a middle-aged woman with some sort of narcissistic personality disorder who was holding another woman hostage conversationally. She was going on and on about some project (a novel or a play) she'd worked on many years ago that must've been her big shining moment. She talked about how others had been amazed by what she'd managed to pull off, but that it had come to her easily. She didn't know if she'd be returning to that sort of work soon or not, because "you never know." It's rare to hear someone talking so unabashedly about his or herself in this way, and I kept wondering why the other woman was putting up with it. Her response was polite little noises at all the right moments to assure the other woman she was being properly listened to. At one point the woman listening brought up Michæl Crichton, whom the narcissistic woman didn't seem to have heard of. She had heard of Jurassic Park, but had never much been into science fiction. Increasingly, though, she was getting more into it, and she then cited the works of Anne Rice. (I'm no expert when it comes to fiction, but I know enough to know that Anne Rice is not generally regarded as a science fiction author.)
Back at the house, the power outage continued. And it wasn't long before Gretchen, unaware of the outage, sent me a message asking me to maybe make dinner. When I told her that there was no power, she suggested we eat out instead. So I fed and walked the dogs, loaded them into the car, and drove to Woodstock. By now it wasn't so cold and the dogs really wanted to ride along.
We ordered way more than we could eat at the Little Bear (the Chinese restaurant in Woodstock), but that just meant we'd have some tomorrow too. I decided to branch out from my usual Tsing Tao and see what other beers they had. Unfortunately, it's still the mid-80s at the Little Bear and the most adventurous thing they had was Anchor Steam. Our waiter spoke broken English and was hard to understand, but he more than made up for it with cheerful enthusiasm and semi-intelligible banter.
After dinner, we walked the dogs back by the dumpster, the place from which I salvaged wood back in 2006 when I'd come for web development meetings at the offices of WDST.
We returned to a dark house, so I stoked up the woodstove and Gretchen and I broke out three or four lamps (one being the kerosene lantern, which is always fun). I sipped single-malt scotch and read more of Station Eleven, the novel I'm slowly making my way through. I began at page 74 and managed to read 12 or 13 pages before the power came back on and I lost interest in such a crusty old form of media.
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