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hollow logs and enabled logging
Monday, July 17 2017
After two straight days of having pushed her Lyme-diseased body too hard, Gretchen had an especially bad day today. She mostly spent it in bed, occasionally suffering bouts of nausea so extreme that she actually vomited. She had an especially bad phase this afternoon during an intensely-electrical thunderstorm that seemed almost like a projection of the illness within her.
As I have been doing for days, I took the dogs Ramona and Neville on their morning walk, and, as they have mostly been doing, they separated from me at some point in the walk and didn't come home for hours. I eventually went out on a search party to find them, walking to the part of the Farm Road where I'd last seen them. It's been my experience that if they have some ongoing project in the forest, they completely ignore me when I call for them. But I called out for them anyway and also imitated a barking dog (in hopes that might appeal to some other part of their brains). But there was nothing. Eventually I headed east off the Farm Road into the forest, and then I just randomly came upon the dogs. They were, as expected, engrossed in a project that had apparently done much to exhaust them. There was a patch of ground that had been dug up around a fallen tree that was maybe six inches in diameter. The tree was semi-rotten and hollow, and the dogs had managed to chew open a length of the fallen hollow tree, exposing a canoe-like section. But there was still an intact section, and evidently something tempting and alive was holed up in that part. The dogs seemed determined to keep ripping at that tree (and, since it was nearby, digging at the ground) until they got to that terrified creature. They'd been working so hard at it that there was actually a little blood here and there, which I took to be from Ramona and Neville's gums. To shut the whole project down and restore canine rationality, I needed only to prop the intact part of the fallen hollow tree high and out-of-reach in another tree. Once the spell was broken, the dogs leisurely followed me back home.
In my remote workplace today, I attended an unusually large number of meetings and then returned to an issue that had plagued me some weeks ago: trying to add two more Postfix instances to the email server. My colleague Dan and I had added two Postfix instances in the past, but they'd already been built and only needed to be turned on. These two new ones I'd had to build more-or-less from scratch (including configurations for additional IP addresses). But for some reason they just didn't work. Finally today I figured out how to turn on logging for the mail server (which must normally be off; otherwise it slows things down and produces huge files) by making changes to the rsyslog.conf file. This revealed that in one of the instance's config files, I'd given the wrong IP address. With that fixed, I got one of the two new instances working, though the other remained stubbornly inactive.
This evening Gretchen thought she might be able to drink a strawberry smoothie, so I made her a simple one from just frozen strawberries and a half a cup of soy milk blended together in the Vitamix. The result was similar to a sherbet, and Gretchen was indeed able to keep it down. She'd been saying something about how she might also be able to drink ginger ale. So I drove down to Stewarts and got her a big two-litre bottle of Seagrams. On the drive back with that, I came upon a mother racoon with four or five half-grown babies all in a glowing-eyed pile in the middle of Dug Hill Road. I slowed to a stop and they reluctantly got out of my way, most going to the west side and one baby going to the east side. They were probably eating roadkill, though (as with the lure of the similarly-tar-based attraction in La Brea) they were risking the same fate.
The ginger ale worked miraculously. After drinking some, Gretchen had the energy to get out of bed and watch some teevee. I'd downloaded the movie Holes (which she'd been reading the book version of intermittently all day), and she managed to watch the whole thing.
I went to bed early, soon joined by the big fluffy orange cat Oscar. For months, Oscar had been plagued by huge dreadlocks in his fur, particularly on his haunches and around his asshole, where they formed either "saddlebags" or massive urine-and-shit-soaked dingleberries. The saddlebags were each nearly half the size of cigarette packs and must've been uncomfortable. But a week or so ago, I'd managed to brush and cut them away. Gretchen had tried to do this in the past and been unsuccessful, but that was mostly due to her technique. When a cat needs brushing, she grabs the cat, holds it tight, and starts brushing like an angry stepmother. That approach might've worked on a frail little cat like the late Sylvia (who howled and hissed the whole time), but Oscar is big and strong and could quickly wriggle free. My approach is to start gently, without hold the cat at all. Most cats (even, when she was alive, Sylvia) actually enjoy light brushing, and (if you haven't scarred them psychologically with the brush) will stick around for it. And once you've brushed a cat for a bit, you can slowly ramp up the aggressiveness of the brushing, like raising the temperature for a frog in a pot of water. That was how I'd managed to get rid of Oscar's saddlebags, which very slowly delaminated from the rest of his body over the course of dozens of aggressive (though not extreme) strokes of the FURminator (a special comb for long-haired cats). Since I got rid of all Oscar's hair malignancies, the hygiene of his asshole area has returned to acceptable. It turns out that it wasn't that he was too fat to reach his asshole to keep it tidy; he'd just been overwhelmed by the massive dingleberries. It's also possible that the pulling of the hairs in his saddlebags had been too painful for bending the requisite amount. Tonight, Oscar presented no dreadlocks, saddlebags, or dingleberries to remove. But I brushed him long and aggressively anyway. I figure it's good to keep his associations with the brush positive and to develop a habit of brushing him regularly so as to avoid fur problems in the future.
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