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route past the goose ponds
Wednesday, October 17 2018
Since my first job interview at my new workplace, I've been largely sticking to the route that Google Maps first recommended. But recently I looked at the map and discovered a somewhat shorter route. And today (for the first time) I took it, and in so doing shaved nearly a mile off my 17.4 mile one-way commute. Though the shortcut is winding and must be driven at slower speeds, it is much more beautiful. It goes through farm country, past ponds full of geese and ducks. Importantly for my morale, there is much less roadkill along this route. The less roadkill I see on the way to work, the better my day.
You see, other than differences among the cars, the characteristics of the weather, and new instances of roadkill, the commute tends to be almost visually identical every time I do it. The sun is in my eyes both directions and every roadkill is a temporary landmark. There they are: the squirrel crushed by a low-speed car while gathering car-crushed nuts at the bottom of Dug Hill Road, the raccoon killed before he could make it over the jersey barrier where work is being done on US 209's southbound bridge over the Esopus near Sawkill, another bloated dead raccoon in the zebra stripes east of the traffic light where Route 199 meets River Road, or that baby black bear killed on further south on 209. Some roadkill gets cleaned up quickly (I only saw that bear once), while raccoons persist for many days and squirrels gradually get smushed into a vague furry smudge.
It being Wednesday, today I brought Ramona with me. At this point she's so familiar with the office that she knows the drill. She can wander around to visit everyone once or twice, but she's mostly expected to stay on her dog bed. If I need to piss and she hasn't had a walk in awhile, I'll take her to the woods in the back and we'll both do our business (and hopefully she won't get too distracted by the woodchucks living under the building). Of course, sometimes I have bigger bathroom business than can tactfully be conducted within a narrow patch of woods, but Ramona is good about me leaving her in the office. But if she hears the keys clinking, she jumps to her feet, because that means it is time to go home. By the end of the day, she's more ready to hit the road than I am. Today, though, the last hour and half seemed to crawl by. That last fifteen minutes passed especially slowly. The problem was that I spent most of the day trying to understand some rather baroque ExtJS code, all of whose secrets seemed to be hiding in plain sight. The problem with these fancy new non-imperative programming styles is that any benefits they provide to the original authors of the code are more than offset by the difficulties that come when others try to make sense of it.
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