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Gretchen's emergency haircut
Saturday, December 9 2017
There was snow this morning that eventually dropped about three inches, but it wasn't enough to stop Gretchen from driving into town (in the Subaru) and getting what must've been an emergency haircut.
Soon after she left, I managed to break two dishes while distractedly putting a coffee cup on the copper-pipe coffee cup rack (it was the cup celebrating the Scrabble letter "G"). The cup fell into the sink and smashed an old mustard-colored plate that was already full of slow-growing cracks, producing an impressive pile of ceramic shards, too many to glue back together. Such accidental set-backs put me in a foul mood, and I quickly worked to counteract this by repairing things I actually could repair. I managed to find replacements for the plastic clip-buckle parts Neville had destroyed on the Ramona's various hunting-season collars. One of these replacements was from an old backpack, the parts of which I'd salvaged like a hoarder before I threw it away. I had a bag of bigger plastic clip buckles from China for replacing the other. On that collar I also had to do a little cutting and sewing, but it didn't take much work to get both destroyed collars back in workable condition.
I spent most of the day obsessed with Google Map's Javascript API, which provides all that is needed for geographical data visualizations. I've used this API in the past, most recently to draw a grid of hexagons over any region viewed with a tool I wrote. (This was for an ill-fated game that was somehow going to involve large printouts of hexagonally-gridded maps.) I'd taken a couple 500 mg capsules of guarana, whose main effects come from caffeine, and this did seem to elevate my mood (though not by much).
At some point in the afternoon I started on an art project compelled by a dinner in celebration of Sarah the Vegan's birthday, which would be happening tomorrow at Ray & Nancy's place. I had the idea of making a cat emoji from a piece of wood that I would cut into the shape of a cat's head. And instead of just painting one side, I would paint both sides to make it reversible. One one side would be a picture of a happy cat and on the other side would be a picture of a sad cat. These don't strictly conform to existing collections of emojis, which has a pouty cat and a smile_cat but no sad cat. But I wanted it to serve as a way to signal mood (either an existing one or a hoped-for one). Though the art itself was to be simple, flatter, and more stylized than my usual approach (which I would call meta-realistic), this was more ambitious than a simple painting. It was actually two paintings, with enough paint connecting them to be a sort flattened sculpture. Here is the result:
My sleep schedule was so screwed up from last night's New Paltz spaghetti adventure that I stayed up until 3:00am or so.
[REDACTED]
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