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always the superjew
Friday, December 28 2018
Because Neville was favoring a leg, Gretchen hadn't been walking the dogs for very long. Today, though, Gretchen wanted to give Ramona a proper walk, and so to make that easier, I took Neville with me to work today. Ramona, who hadn't been briefed on the plan, very much wanted to go also. But I had to keep her out of the car, and this clearly left her frustrated and moody, perhaps for the rest of the day.
It was warmish (in the 40s) and rainy, though I nevertheless found fairly rainless periods during my workday in which to take Neville for walks around the building. At some point there was a fire alarm, and we all headed out to the front of the building, which takes the form of a long, deep porch. There, Neville mingled with all the employees from all the other businesses in the building, charming everyone he met. He did gradually wander off to the north and I had to retrieve him, but overall he was continuing his lifelong mission of being an ambassador for abandoned Pit Bulls.
My coding went well today, so I cut out at 4:30pm sharp. On the way home, I stopped at ShopRite, mostly for breakast cereal. But I also thought to call Gretchen to see if there were other things we might need. So then I bought pomegranate juice, spinach, and, well, I would've bought oat milk and vegan ice cream, but those things do not appear to be for sale at ShopRite.
I wanted to buy a Siemens dual 30 amp circuit breaker at HomeDepot, but they didn't have such things. On the way to Lowes, I bought vegan icecream and Sierra Nevada Torpedo at the 9W Hannaford. Unfortunately, they didn't seem to have oat milk. At Lowes, I learned that some Square-D circuit breakers are compatible with Siemens. But there were two different kinds of Square-D circuit breakers, so I ended up buying dual 30 amp circuit breakers in both forms.
Back at the house, it was immediately time to head off to the next thing: dinner at Susan & David's place. We hadn't seen them in months. We brought vegan icecream and pomegranate juice, and I brought some beers since I would be the only one drinking alcohol.
Dinner was grilled tofu with brussel sprouts, rice, and some sort of salad. But the kicker was the creamy "dragon sauce," made mostly from nutritional yeast. It made everything it touched delicious.
A big thread of the evening was results from 23AndMe. Susan had recently gotten her results and learned that she had a half sister in the 23AndMe database that she hadn't known existed, a revelation that is still reverberating through her family. More comically, Susan turns out to be 98.7% Ashkenazi Jewish, which is a full 0.9% less Ashkenazi Jewish than Gretchen, always the superjew. Gretchen is also somehow more Neanderthal, and Neanderthal maximalism seems to be part of what makes 23AndMe fun. David, meanwhile, is something of a Grumpy Gus regarding 23AndMe. He doesn't want to be commodified or, worse, have his genes patented, all the sorts of things that sociopathic tech companies do when deluged with investor money and data. For my part, I believe David's concerns are valid. I just don't care. The deal seems worth it to me. I want to see where the mathematics of my genome places me on the tree of life.
We told Susan and David the horrible story of finding a mouse boneyard in our kitchen wall. I then found the picture and showed it to them. For his part, David also had a story (with a related photograph) of misery among the wild animals. He'd seen some sort of canid (a fox or a coyote) in the field to the south. It had been eating something it had found in the field, and so had lingered long enough for David to have gotten a good look at it. David described the beast as being pink from some sort of mange-like hairloss (possibly a consequence of rabies) that also made its tail resemble a stick. He'd managed to snap a picture, which, when I saw it, did not look quite as horrible as he'd described it.
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