|
|
|
we don't call her Monie for nothing
Wednesday, May 15 2019
It had been raining for three straight days, but today was actually sunny (if a little cool). But then, unexpectedly, clouds showed up near the end of the workday and it rained yet again. But then, by 4:45pm or so, the clouds had all cleared away and the sun had returned.
Ramona was with me at work today, and things played out the way they usually do. Initially she was bored, even after our first walk. This manifests in her staring at me and moaning (we don't call her "Monie" for nothing). She was doing this so much, sometimes to other people, that the new guy Mark (not to be confused with the slightly-less-new guy Marc) even asked me about it. Then, on her first walk of the afternoon, Ramona found something disgusting and brown in the woods in the back and, after first halting eating a little of it, she rolled in it. So then I had to take her to the men's room to scrub her clean. Later Ramona joined me for a meeting in the upstairs conference room, where she was mostly well-behaved. There are some young guys in a space adjacent to the conference room who work on some mysterious project unrelated to the company I work for, and they always love it when Ramona shows up.
After work today, I added two additional clips to the bottom of the westmost pane of glass on my massive homebrew solar panel so it would be more secure the next time there are gale-force winds (which there haven't been since the day of that miserable pane installation).
I'd thought today's sun would be enough to give us some solar-heated hot water, but evidently there are still enough air pockets in the hydronic pipes that the antifreeze couldn't circulate very well. So after installing the clips, I added yet more antifreeze from the top. This works better when the antifreeze is actually being pumped, but, this late in the day, to get that to happen I had to go down to the basement and tweak the settings on the Arduino-based solar controller. It has a little four-line-LCD-and-universal-remote user interface (all written by me) that allows me to do this via a series of interactive menus that always fills me with delight when I use it, since it does precisely what I would want such an interface to do.
Sadly, due to insufficient flow of hydronic fluid, I didn't have enough hot water to take a bath tonight. Still, I needed to bathe in some manner. So I took a brief shower, though the water wasn't any warmer than about 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
Later, as I was listening to a YouTube clip while brushing more knots out of Oscar the Cat's fur, Gretchen came into the bedroom in horror, as the Alabama Governor had just signed a bill banning nearly all abortion in the state, even in cases of rape and incest. And it's a bill likely to be upheld by the majority of the Supreme Court. But maybe not; if such a bill were upheld, it might provoke the kind of reaction that the existing majority on the Supreme Court (well, maybe just John Roberts) would seek to avoid. That is what I told Gretchen at least, who seemed like she needed comforting. At this point I pay so little attention to the news that Gretchen is usually the first to learn things, and when she tells them to me, they're usually horrible things. Trump is flying around on his dragon destroying all that he can, and it's easier to just bury my head in my day-to-day problems, since there is little I can do to fix a world that is so profoundly broken.
After getting into bed this evening, I noticed that the spaces between my toes were starting to itch in the way they do when the fungus that causes athlete's foot begins to attack. Earlier today while walking Ramona in a field with wet grass, my socks had become soaked, and that had been all it had taken to give the fungi the habitat it requires for a long enough time to cause me discomfort. I immediately got up and attacked the spaces between my toes with maximum-strength athlete's foot medication, but I could tell it was already too late.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?190515 feedback
previous | next |
