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unfrozen ground beneath the snow
Sunday, March 11 2018
I felt today as if I had avoided coming down with the cold that seemed to be waiting for me yesterday. Nevertheless, I thought it prudent to give myself what I could of a summery virus-killing experience. With that in mind, Ramona and I went down to the greenhouse upstairs. Overnight we'd transitioned to daylight savings time, so, with respect to the position of the sun in the sky, it was earlier than the clock was saying, and so the greenhouse was not as warm as expected. It was actually a little chilly in there. The sun is higher at this time of year, so it wasn't flooding the place as it would have in, say, January. But we remained there, soon to be joined by Oscar the Cat (who, clumsy though he is, knows how to use the greenhouse pet door). We stayed down there for an hour or two, until it became unbearably hot. Then we fled back to the house, where I wouldn't need to build a fire in the woodstove until after sundown.
This afternoon, I buried Janet the Cat in our pet cemetary, where she became its sixth resident. Under the snow, the ground wasn't frozen, and it wasn't difficult to dig a shallow hole just west of the the south corner of the bluestone barbecue grill that we never use (something Janet had been playing on only a few days ago). Because of the shallow depth of the hole, I capped it with largish rocks to keep Ramona, Neville, or a coyote from digging Janet's corpse up and, say, bringing it into the house.
Celeste has been acting unusual and needy since about the time I got home from Panera on the second day of the power outage (and about an hour before we think Janet was killed). She follows me around, constantly getting under foot and only really being happy when I either give her catnip or carry her around in my arms. She's also been trying to play with Charles the Cat, whom she had been treating as an arch-nemesis. Clearly Celeste misses Janet, or at least the youthful energy of a young cat. After Janet was killed, Gretchen had been saying that perhaps we weren't worthy to have kittens. But now the plan is to get a kitten as soon as possible after we return from our next trip, which is a vegan river cruise to the mouth of the Danube in Central and Eastern Europe.
Coming up this week in the remote workplace, I realized that I would need to be explaining database schemata, though I lacked an easy way to do this in a remote environment. So I spent some time this afternoon getting Tableform (the relational database visualization and editing system that I developed beginning in 2006) so it would work on a modern Apache server and authenticate with Google Authentication (and thus be secure on the public internet). This required, among other things, transitioning all the database calls from the PHP "mysql" API to the more modern "PDO" API. It wasn't easy, but I eventually got it to work. Now I can create interactive database maps on the web and have my colleagues create their own or interact with mine.
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