|
|
|
laboratory bean bag
Sunday, February 27 2022
With the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia, it's difficult not to get stuck in a well of anxiety. This was especially so after Russia's belligerant leader, Vladimir Putin, put his nuclear forces on high alert this morning. Sitting in the living room with Gretchen sipping my increasingly-cold coffee, I kept flipping between the websites of the New York Times and the Washington Post on my Chromebook, hoping for new information. But it was so slow in coming. At some point it was announced that there would be a meeting between Ukranian and Russian representatives on the border with Belarus. But that was about all. Happily, though, the war is not going as well for Russia as Putin had hoped. There's no justice in the world, but randomly justice comes to evil people like a stopped clock occasionally showing the correct time.
I wanted to get more work done before the workweek began, so this afternoon I plugged away at my little DynamoDB login, the one written entirely in C# for the .NET Core framework. In so doing, I figured out how default web views are configured and how to read additional querystring variables. When I'd gotten to a satisfactory stage of that work, I could do the other big thing I had planned for my Sunday.
While Gretchen and Powerful were meeting Nancy and Sarah the Vegan in Uptown Kingston, I drove the Forester across the Hudson to the old office to get more of those windowed door panels as well as tracks that they'd hung from on little wheels. On the drive there and back, I kept thinking about what a nuclear war would look like here in the Hudson Valley. We have the old IBM facility where the SAGE air defense computers were built back in the 1950s. That might well have once been a nuclear target of the Soviet Union, and, given how slow bureaucracies are to make revisions, it might well still be, even though the buildings are now mostly abandoned and even torn down, with only temporary uses for things like tax preparation and coronavirus vaccination. The Soviets liked to build their nukes big, and if a one megaton nuclear bomb were to go off at the old IBM facility, I wondered how much damage we'd suffer up on Hurley Mountain. There are a couple ridges between us and there, but it's only six miles away. I realize it's narcissistic to be so concerned about the immediate effects to my own person of a globe-spanning tragedy, but it's a natural reaction to the helplessness I feel to do anything to stop it.
There were a lot of cars in the parking lot at the office complex in Red Hook, and it seemed this was because the music school was putting on some sort of performance. I could hear a bass thrumming through the floor and periodically there'd be a wave of applause. A couple skateboarders showed up to do skate tricks on the complex's large front porch, a decadence that there are several signs posted to prevent. This suggested to me that Sundays are a lawless time for the complex, something local skateboarders are well aware of. This made me feel a lot better as I loaded the Forester was the spoils of office closure. I managed to fit everything inside the vehicle's cab, meaning I didn't have to spend additional time strapping things down.
This evening Gretchen thawed out a frozen pizza and ravioli and also made a salad, and the three of us then had a sit-down dinner at the dining room table. After that, I returned to work on my work-related C# project, and got to a satisfactory stopping point by 9:00pm.
With that out of the way, I lay in one of the bean bags from the office in Red Hook, which I'd moved into the laboratory, and watched a YouTube video while sipping a strong alcoholic beverage. Prior to today, I hadn't had a nice relaxing place to sit in the laboratory and had, in the past, been forced to lie on such things as dog beds or the small salvaged ottoman I've had near my desk for years expressly for the dogs and cats.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?220227 feedback
previous | next |
