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bear that doesn't climb trees
Friday, August 24 2018
I decided to wait for the arrival of the necessary edging before proceeding with the installation of the roof panels on the roof of the screened-in porch. But this did not mean I couldn't go ahead with the underlayment. The material I'd bought for this purpose was self-adhesive and would serve as a protective waterproof barrier should the rains resume. So it made perfect sense to install it. I cut a 14 foot long piece and went to install it at the eave (eastern) end of the roof, but quickly ran into problems as I tried to wrestle it into place. I'd pealed off the protective backing too prematurely, and it was sticking in all the wrong places. I had to call on Gretchen to get me out of that jam. The next piece went on easier, and by the time I'd made it to the top, I'd even figured out how best to align the material (not that precisely aligning it was particularly important). Unfortunately (though not unexpectedly) 200 square foot roll came out short by 11 square feet. I didn't have anything suitable to fill those 11 square feet with, so this necessitated a drive into town. I loaded up the dogs and drove out to Lowes, where I ended up buying an $18 roll of roofing felt and a magnetic storage solution for a set of small wrench sockets I keep in the laboratory. While there, I checked to see if they had any tools that would make bending sheet metal an easy chore. Unfortunately, they didn't even sell a sheet metal seamer, something I actually have. Similarly, a couple days ago I'd looked around the Home Depot to see if they sell electric metal shears, and they do not. All this sort of equipment must be special-ordered, though I should probably also check out Herzog's, which caters to a more professional clientele.
On the drive out to 9W, I'd taken advantage of something I'd learned from my drive to Home Depot a couple days ago: US 209 is once more open between Hurley and Route 28. This means that the bridge being replaced across the Esopus has indeed been replaced. Meanwhile, the northbound bridge of US 209 that crosses the Esopus near Sawkill Road is also complete and now work is underway to replace the southbound bridge. That ongoing construction (and the new resulting traffic patterns) cause an unusual traffic jam running for nearly a half mile in the south-bound lanes east of that bridge.
Back at the house, I used a small piece of the roofing felt to finish the roof's underlayment. I then covered that with a generous amount of roofing tar and applied a layer of thick plastic in hopes of making this material as waterproof as the rest of the underlayment.
Meanwhile, Gretchen took the dogs for a rare evening walk to make up for the fact that she'd given them a perfunctory walk this morning. In the course of that walk, the dogs became aware of a big mother bear with at least one baby up on the bluff to the west of the farm road. The mama bear stood her ground and didn't climb a tree, and Gretchen grabbed both dogs before they could give chase. While this was going on, the guy who occasionally lives at the house at the end of the Farm Road, along with his wife and two baby children, walked up, and all had a good look at the bear on the bluff, who was not going anywhere.
Gretchen managed to get some distance away from the bear before losing her grip on the dogs. They went running off, but there was no barking, and soon they found there way back home.
Later, though, as I tried to finish off the day's work on the porch roof, I heard he sharp-staccato barking that experience has told me is associated with Ramona barking at a bear. I told Gretchen, grabbed a leash, and ran down the Farm Road.
Just east of and below the Farm Road, where the swamp west of the farm road drains into a part of the Stick Trail north of the Chamomile, there's a large boulder adjacent to a white oak tree. I found the dogs above that boulder on the shoulder of the Farm Road, barking at the boulder. Evidently the bear was not treed, and the dogs (who had essentially caught the bear) were not actually taking advantage of their situation. It was soon clear why. The bear was enormous, which might've been part of the reason she seemed reluctant to climb any trees. Whenever Ramona got too close, the bear charged after her. Ramona is irrational and hyperfocused in the presence of a bear, but not so crazed that she doesn't run away when charged. As for Neville, he mostly just barked his ineffectual little thing he likes to do with his head tilted back. It's not very loud and sounds a little like, "Wah woo woo woo!" I think the bear charged after Neville at one point too, and I was a little worried what might happen next, since Neville doesn't run very fast. But he got out of the way.
I never saw the baby bear, which Gretchen described as being smaller than either of our dogs. Maybe it was cowering near the boulder or its mother had sent it up one of the nearby trees. On the ground, the mama bear seemed especially fierce, successfully standing her ground against two dogs. Part of what made her seem so terrifying was the sounds she was making. I kept hearing a deep growl, the sort one hears in space alien movies or in passages of a song of a humback whale. Only a very large animal can make a sound that deep.
Neville is only really into bears because Ramona is, and once we made solid eye contact with Neville, it was possible to call him away from this scene. I immediately put him on a leash, turned him over to Gretchen, and then tried to get Ramona (who was now down beside the boulder) to come. I couldn't walk down to her, because she was maybe five or six feet from the bear, and there was no way I was going to be walking up that close to an enraged mama bear. But what could I do? Ramona was ignoring our increasingly impassioned commands. By now Gretchen was almost crying.
At some point, I managed to catch Ramona attention and then beseech her to come my way. She was reluctant at first, but something in her, perhaps the impossible situation of not actually being able to do anything to the bear, made her run up the slope to me. I snapped the leash on her and we immediately went back home, latching the dog door once Ramona and Neville were safely inside.
It was not a great day in my ongoing job hunt. A week ago I'd semi-jokingly applied to a "backend developer" job at my old employer, Mercy For Animals. I had been holding out the hope that the purge of all the people responsible for my firing had perhaps made the place look upon me more kindly. Today, though, I got a form email back from them saying they were not interested in hiring me. The worst part of this was that it was possible it had been my dear former colleague Nicole who had pulled the trigger on that rejection, perhaps under a policy enforced by my old boss Geetika (who is still there). Perhaps Geetika did it herself. Who knows what the thinking is; perhaps I'd burned a few too many bridges. I had, for example, left a very bad review on Glassdoor.com after I'd been fired.
My other bad job-hunt news came late in the day with a rejection from the company that had made me create that complicated webapp as part of a code challenge. True; I'd made things harder on myself by working in React and Symfony, two unfamiliar technologies. But I wasn't prepared for the rationale of the rejection: that I wasn't senior enough for the role. Evidently my code had betrayed signs of less-senior coding skills. And that's actually fair, in a way. I have done many years of coding in all layers of the software stack, but I don't think like an object-oriented programmer. I tend to prefer imperative programming in a single, flat namespace, breaking the work up into functions. I can work with object-oriented code. But I don't especially like designing in it. And I haven't done all that much work designing object-oriented systems. It's also true that I am almost a complete autodidact when it comes to coding. I've worked with many others in a number of very different environments, but few have ever been in a position to impart knowledge or critique my code (other than with regard to meaningless aspects of style, such as the lines where the curly brackets go). Aside from the Objective C work I did in the late summer of 2011, the last time anyone seriously critiqued my coding was back in 1999 or 2000 at CollegeClub.com. That time there was a person there decidedly more experienced with code than I am, but all he really did was critique the nonsensical variable names I used at the time. Famously, one of these was "thinger.")
Part of the problem might be that I am selling myself in my resume as a very senior developer even though I haven't actually developed essential senior developer skills. I've been in this game a long time, but I haven't had to push myself and I haven't had to keep abreast of current trends. It might make sense for me to downplay my experience a bit just so I will be considered for more mid-level jobs, which I'd be perfectly happy with. (I have a feeling a lot of the automatic rejections I have been getting (before ever getting any sort of interview or phone screen) have been because my resume indicates I am "too senior" for the advertised position.)
I took a bath and tried not to let this rejection preoccupy me completely, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. I'd put all that time into that project, was proud of my work, and here it was suggested that I need to go back to coding school!
I'd unlatched the dog door before my bath, and after hearing the dogs go out, I began to wonder if they'd re-engaged the bear. Eventually that thought became too all-consuming, so I temporarily left the bath and went outside to listen for barking. I heard Ramona's bark off in the woods, but it was infrequent. Though hostile-sounding, it was not her bear-engagement bark. Still, this was troubling, so I walked into the forest, going as far as the Chamomile crossing of the Stick Trail. But I could hear no more barking, which meant I wasn't going to be able to home in on her. So returned home. There I found Ramona and Neville. So I latched the pet door once more and resumed my bath.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?180824 feedback
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