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a tool for head extraction
Tuesday, December 11 2018
On the drive to work this morning, I saw that some of the lane-closure barrels were in the process of being removed in the east-bound lanes of US-209 as it passed through the Esopus bridge replacement project just east of the Sawkill exit. By this evening, all the barrels had been removed from the west-bound lanes, meaning there was no longer any restriction on traffic at all, though people were still in the habit of exercising caution as they approached the site.
At work today, for a time I felt a certain amount of despair as the realization sank in about how enormous this project I am working on truly is. I'm good at sticking to big projects and gettin' 'er done, but even I have my limits. Today, as I tried to puzzle out the meaning of a large number of Python methods written with all the arcane tricks of the language, I had a feeling that I would need months of work to have anything to show for my work short of JSON dumps of complicated objects. By the end of the day, though, I'd successfully migrated a number of important Python methods to new the new TypeScript objects I've been building as part of my Electron app, so I was feeling a little better.
When I returned home tonight, Gretchen seemed a little out of sorts, though she denied anything was wrong. But a number of things were applying stress. For one thing, our kitchen is about to be torn out and replaced with a new one, so Gretchen has been boxing up everything and either putting it away or setting it out for our provisional use on the dining room table. Additionally, Clarence had gone for a checkup after being put on prednisone and a special diet so the vet could see if he was any better. But Clarence had only gained 0.07 of a pound, which suggests he is, at best, only maintaining his weight. So now Clarence will have digestive enzymes added to his diet to see if that can help him derive more nutrients from his food.
The one other thing stressing Gretchen out was that Ramona had found a partial deer head with little two-spike antlers and no mandible. Neville had managed to wrest this away and had spent much of the day jealously guarding it, actually biting Gretchen at some point when she walked past too closely. So later this evening, I made a tool consisting of a bit of pipe with a string running down the middle of it. This allowed me to produce a loop at the end of the pipe that I could tighten remotely, and it was the perfect tool for getting that partial deer head away from Neville. This momentarily frustrated them, but then, as Gretchen pointed out, he seemed relieved. Now he could go do other things and not have to spend all his time guarding. It was out of his hands.
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