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baby muscovies
Tuesday, October 15 2019
This morning as I drove to work on Middle Road past the duck ponds, I saw a white mother muscovy duck trailed by three or four little ducklings, each a little bigger than my fist. They were at least a couple weeks old, but even so, they seemed a little young this late in the season. Maybe muscovy ducks are confused by conditions in the temperate northern hemisphere, given that they come from the tropics. In any case, it was life-affirming to see there was already at least one replacement for the unfortunate duck that got hit by a car about three weeks ago.
The reporting system I've been building for my data importer continues to amass important features that I'd implemented a couple years before in the Mercy For Animals Contact Database (their proprietary CRM). Both systems use Javascript frontends, so you'd think I could just reuse much of the code (assuming I, a known digital hoarder, still had it), but that would be impossible given that I am implementing the new version in Angular. Also, the backend I'm working with now is Node.js, which is all asynchronous Javascript. That is completely different from the synchronous PHP in the Mercy For Animals' CRM backend. Yesterday, I managed to implement a file-system-based history system, allowing the parametric form for a report to be pre-set with the last-used values (and also to populate a dropdown allowing values for even older runs to be dredged up). Today I implemented a web-based report editor, which allows the raw editing of the file containing the JSON object that describes each report (in this version, the SQL that does most of the work is just another node in the JSON). This feature was mostly just so that I could, in a demonstration, show the underlying data that makes a report have its characteristics.
This evening after I got home, I immediately set off into the forest and did some more work adding to the east end of the stone wall. I had a very large ear-shaped rock some distance to the northeast that I turned end over end until I got it to the wall, and then I used it as the base of an extension eastward of about eighteen inches. I will build the height of this new extension over subsequent days until it is roughly as high as the rest of the wall.
A little after sunset, I felt like doing more outdoor work, so I grabbed my big battery-powered chainsaw and walked south down the Farm Road several hundred feet to the place where a chestnut oak and white ash had fallen across the road a month or two ago. I'd immediately cleared the road back then and recently brought some of that wood back home. Today, I bucked the rest of those trees into stove-length pieces and made a pile of them. Then, knowing the forecast called for rain, I decided to bring it all back home immediately. Since there was so much of it, I used the Subaru, which I rarely deploy for firewood gathering so close to home. This wood ended up being enough to completely refill the indoor firewood rack (which holds as much as a fifth of a cord) and create a respectable pile of bucked (but unsplit) chunks in the yard.
I took 100mg of diphenhydramine at about 7:30pm before taking a bath, so I couldn't manage stay up very long after I emerged dripping from the bath.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?191015 feedback
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