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someone else's brown smudge
Monday, April 1 2019
I discovered to my horror when I stood up to get off the toilet seat in the men's room at my workplace that there was a brown smudge in the back center of the toilet seat, precisely where a nasty oversized ass crack would leave one if it were not kept tidy. The troubling thing was that my ass crack is neither oversized nor untidy, meaning the brown smudge had not been left by me and I'd somehow overlooked it before sitting down. You can bet I will never be making that mistake again! I couldn't've gone on for the rest of the day had I not immediately taken measures to clean all surfaces of my clothes and body that might've come into contact with that horrible smear of someone else's fecal material. I pictured the author as a morbidly-obese heterosexual; no gay man would walk around in public with the full length of his asscrack capable of besmirching surfaces.
My work of late has been exceedingly difficult. I have a messy puzzle wherein I must compare two different systems and see where in one of them the data is doing the wrong thing. This requires lots of debugging statements and occasional extra parameters passed into functions. Several times I've come tantalizingly close to fixing what appears to be the problem (most frustratingly, one of these times was just before I left work on Friday) only to realize my grasp of what the problem was was more limited than I thought.
Back at the house, I took a bottle of Little Sumpin' Sumpin' with me on the after-work dog walk, which took me east from the south end of the Farm Road, traveling roughly along the outer-edge of the reception bubble of the FM transmitter that broadcasts audio from my computer (I was listening to the latest episode of True Crime Loser, which I'd already heard once while at work; it was the first in a series about Phil Markoff, the Craignslist Killer). The temperature was brisk, a bit too brisk for this time of year. But I think I heard a single spring peeper drawing attention to his Facebook relationship status from one of the swampy ponds just east of the Farm Road.
Later I did some chores: a load of laundry, pulling more staples from the stairway to the second floor, and bathing myself for the first time in a bit too long. I didn't want to be climbing into bed if there was any chance a trace of that brown smudge from earlier today was still adhering to me.
In the mail today came a number of fun things, including a Raspberry Pi Zero W, a high-definition Raspberry Pi camera, a high pressure water-jet dental flossing machine, and several phonograph needles. But when I went to get the new Ion record player working (playing "Immigrant Song," the opening track on Led Zeppelin's third album), I found it played too slowly and sound only came out of one channel. The slowness was easily fixed by using a wall wart with the appropriate voltage, and then it turned out one of the wires going into the arm cartridge had been shorted, so it didn't take long to have a perfectly good turntable. That's the thing about the things I buy at the Tibetan Center. They often require annoying little fixes that most people would be incapable of performing. Though I can perform most fixes, I can't really justify the time it takes to do them.
A blowndown of juniper (aka "red cedar") trees on the bluff over the Stick Trail about 3000 feet south down the Stick Trail (near 41.924531N, 74.103834W). Click to enlarge.
Ramona a little way down the escarpment from the preceding picture. Click to enlarge.
The steps to the second floor, now without any carpet. Click to enlarge.
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