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what I want to do on vacation
Monday, February 20 2017
location: Cabin C, Mayatulum Resort, coastal Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico
This morning among the single ladies and calm-gazing would-be yogis, Gretchen and I found that the breakfast buffet was almost identical to the way it had been yesterday, except the tray of soupy black beans had been replaced with a tray of cubed and baked potatoes. They were vegan, but this meant that there was no real source of protein for a vegan. Because Charly's tacos would be closed today, we were hoping to cobble together a lunch from things we could take from breakfast merged with leftovers from yesterday. But without beans, this was going to be a little tricky. So Gretchen asked the staff if they in fact had beans, and sure enough they did (it was already warm!), along with tortillas. Unfortunately, they didn't give us very much (nor did they give us any avocado), and we quickly ate it all. So Gretchen asked for more. This time they produced, I kid you not, a shot glass full of black bean purée. "Is that their way of saying 'fuck you'?" I wondered. I pointedly wanted nothing to do with those beans, assuming they contained at least one loogie. Gretchen dumped it in with everything else she already had in the to-go container. It wasn't looking very appetizing in there anyway.
Without a planned lunch outing, today had a large opening in its middle that could be filled lots of ways. I know it sounds sad (it certainly seemed so to Gretchen), but all I wanted to do with my time was work on my laptop. I'd come up with a plan for automatically taking the information about how mySQL tables connect to each other (stored in a .json library file) and using it to generate both a column list and a set of join statements. All this was needed as part of my plan to create a totally generic report generator where a table could be picked from a dropdown, a series of columns to return added, one or more query columns selected, one or more search terms added, and one or more search types picked. Anyone who can write a simple SELECT statement in mySQL would find this ponderous (and teaching someone to write such a statement isn't difficult), but there are plenty of people who would find such a tool useful. Even someone as experienced as me could find it useful in cases where they can't remember the names of columns or how exactly the tables relate.
[REDACTED]
At some point in the afternoon, I relocated for a time to the dining hall, where I could get endless tea from a hot water dispenser. Last night Gretchen had learned that this was the place to go for hot drinks, another thing we hadn't been told when checking in. There were other people there doing the antisocial part of their Eat, Pray, Love thing on their laptops, though some were also nattering away about their divorces and what not, so I had to put in my headphones and listen to music. As the dinner hour approached and the dining hall grew crowded, I returned to the cabin and continued working on a little built-in surface that forced me to stare at a blank concrete wall. Gretchen found the vision of me on vacation sitting at a computer staring at a blank wall unsettling. But I was focused, and the environment was actually conducive to the task at hand. She spent a lot of time on the beach or swimming in the sea and finally went off on a bike ride further south down Route 15, eventually discovering a fleabag cenote that she wanted to take me to.
Later, we went on a walk into the somewhat commercial stretch just north of the place where the road travels along the beach. The outing had distinctly Primackian flavor in that it was the sort of walk Gretchen's parents like to take after dinner and no commerce actually resulted. We met a few dogs, looked at some folk art (lots of colorful skulls), and noted all the big trucks hauling potable water in and cesspool water out. (I'd noticed that the tap water in our cabin was slightly brackish; I wasn't drinking it but I was using it to brush my teeth.) On the way back from the commercial stretch, Gretchen stopped in at a dive shop to ask about snorkeling adventures. That seemed like a good idea until I pointed out how rough the sea was. Would it be this rough during the outing? If so, it was unlikely I would feel safe, particularly with unfamiliar equipment and 800 meters from shore.
There was a beautiful two-story wall-less thatched building just south of the public beach, though it was behind a fence. Gretchen tried the gate and it swung open. So we climbed up to the second floor and had a good look at the sea. Whose building was this? What was it for? And why, with such light security, was it not strewn with beer cans?
We returned for our third consecutive dinner to Restaurare just across the road. Tonight I ordered a curry that included chunks of tofu and rice. It was trying to be Asian, but it somehow remained Mexican. It wasn't a great dish, but it was kind of nice to have rice for a change. Somehow we'd managed to avoid rice at all our meals prior to this, though we know from our experience in Belize that rice is an important component of Yucatan cuisine. One culinary item from Belize that has not been absent is habañero sauce. In Belize, such sauce tended to be bulked up with carrots. But here, it's more likely to contain onions or coconut. There's a very good habañero sauce at Restaurare containing the latter, and it works particularly well on something like a curry. As for beer, there weren't a lot of options, so I was back on that mediocre Akumal "Indian" pale ale.
After dinner, I stayed up late into the night, mostly working out on the front porch of the cabin. I was trying to solve the problem of what to do about referring to multiple identically-named columns in programmatically joined tables. The solution that worked from me was to include those from the base table but not from the joined tables. This, of course, is not a perfect solution. In the database I am working in, a common column name is "name," which contains the human-readable value from a joined table. I will need to come up with a way to include these values in the results.
Me in the commercial strip along the road north of Mayatulum.
Looking south from the commercial strip to the place where the road runs along the beach. Immediately south of that is Mayatulum. Click to enlarge.
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