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Neville's mystery corpse
Friday, March 29 2019
I had a dream before awaking this morning that had my punk rock tooth (my leftmost top incisor) come completely out of my mouth, root and all, leaving a gap. I was still debating whether or not to just live with the missing tooth or to try to get some cosmetic fix when I either woke up or I was hypertransported into another dream. I should note that this tooth has been in much better shape since getting my teeth cleaned, suggesting either the cleaning removed the pockets of bacteria that were causing produceable funk or that the regime I've had in place since then (of vigorously massaging the adjacent gum) has kept it healthy. I'm more inclined to believe the latter, as the dental hygeinist had mostly avoided that tooth after I'd warned her about its fragility.
I did not bring the dogs when I went to work today, though I left my Raspberry-Pi-based collar-tie robot pointed at the living room couch, this time with its servo motors enabled. I kept an eye on its live video feed all day from my desk at work, and almost nothing happened. Celeste slept for a time on the eastmost striped chair. Charles climbed up briefly on the coffee table and then sat for a time in the middle of the floor, and other cats wandered through. As for the dogs, I only ever saw one. It was Ramona, sacked out on the east end of the living room couch. From all indications, she never moved more than a foot or so for the entire eight hours (and change) of my absence. But when I got home a little before 5:00pm, I found her upstairs in bed with Neville.
I need two large pieces of glass (each 0.125 inches thick and measuring 36.625 by 60.5 inches) to replace the two that were destroyed in high winds back in December. There had been a glass place close to work that seemed like the logical place to buy this glass, but when I walked over there in the mid-morning, there was a sign on the window saying they'd moved. I might've thrown a brick through that window bearing a note saying, "doctor, heal thyself." But instead I filled out a form on their website that nobody bothered to respond to. The glass installation industry apparently isn't yet hip to the web.
It being Friday, Jake (who tends to organize these things) asked around if everyone wanted pizza. I figured that if I willingly ate cheese pizza two weeks in a row, I would have trouble calling myself a vegan. So I declined to participate and ate a frozen Udupi masala dosa. It wasn't much food, so at noon I drove out to the Red Hook Hannaford for other staples: Hannaford-brand dry-roasted peanuts, Ritz chipotle crisps, flat bread, 64 ounces of Del Monte grapefruit slices in light syrup, sliced wholewheat bread, unsliced white french bread (a rare decadent luxury) and a sixpack of Little Sumpin' Sumpin' (just so I'd have a beer for the drive home). Because I had that beer, I went through an actual checkout line instead of being waited on by robots (who call for human assistance whenever beer is involved, defeating the whole Aspergery reason I prefer robots). I chose the 14 items or fewer line, since that seemed to be going fastest. This is when yet another of my pet peeves was put on display. The guy buying things in front of me didn't do any work at all to bag his groceries, which meant (since there was no separate bagger) that the cashier had to stop everything and bag the groceries, slowing the entire process down much more than it would've been had the guy just bagged his fucking groceries. Why would someone not bag his own groceries in a situation like this? Does he not want to expend the effort? Does he feel unqualified? Does having someone wait on him give him either a sadistic or narcissistic thrill? Even if all this were true, waiting to have your groceries bagged takes valuable time out of your own day. If only because it gives me something to do when I'd otherwise be doing nothing, I always bag my own groceries, even when there's someone with Down Syndrome specifically assigned to bag groceries too. That way, I know where things, I speed the process along, and don't stand around feeling useless.
I spent the entire day debugging an issue where data from one source was not succesfully being matched to data from another source. This involved adding debugging parameters to methods and doing lots of logging to the console. Very near the end of the day, I thought I'd almost identified the problem. But I hadn't. It was time for a road beer!
Back at the house, I rousted both dogs out of bed and took them for a walk down the Farm Road, turning sharply west and climbing a steep forested escarpment before I reached the farm at the Farm Road's end. This was so I wouldn't lose the FM signal broadcasted from my laboratory computer. I lost the dogs somewhere on my walk back homeward along the top of that escarpment. Hours later, Neville returned home, followed some time later by Ramona. But Ramona was acting weird, initially not wanting to come into the house. It was a fairly mild evening, so this made some sense, but based on what I saw next, I think she'd had some fight with Neville over a dead animal one or the other of them had found. I discovered this animal later when I went to sit with Neville on a chair in the living room. He apologetically growled at me, suggesting he might be guarding something. Sure enough, there was a corpse next to him. It was of a mysterious creature with dark, wet, unpatterned hair (not a raccoon), a medium-length tail (not a bear or bobcat), clawed toes (not an ungulate), and a catlike face. Its skull appeared to be flattened as if crushed and its intestines were spilling out. When I later weighed it, it was nine ounces, suggesting it was some sort of infant form of a larger creature. My best guess for now is that it was a baby fisher, though the tail was a bit too short.
My view from my surveillance robot today. Click to enlarge.
The mysterious corpse I'd found next to Neville this evening.
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