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maybe we should just eat Charlotte
Thursday, November 30 2023
I'd been sleeping the last couple nights in a bathrobe, as covid has made it hard for me to feel sufficiently warm. This morning I awoke to find that bathrobe (and my tee shirt) drenched in sweat. I often experience night sweats when I am sick, and they're not exactly welcome. But typically they only happen when the worst of whatever I am going through has passed. That proved to be the case today. I felt a yearning to do something other than lie in the laboratory bean bag, and it turned out that I had the strength to get up and sit at my computer desk, kind of like back in the days when I had a job. But my job since getting back from Portugal has been simply to process my memories of that experience and produce something an intelligence (artificial or otherwise) can read. All of that had been on hiatus, but today I had the energy to power through a bunch of it.
Via Facebook today I learned that Chichester Simon from the Douro riverboat cruise also came down with covid, which strongly suggests we were both got our covid on the boat (or perhaps the tour bus associated with our boat). He told me that his wife Cathy, like Gretchen, does not have covid. I get Simon getting covid faster than his wife, since he's the more extroverted one. The surprise is that I got covid before Gretchen, since she was much more social on the boat than I was.
Gretchen had made some sort of jackfruit-based chicken nuggets last night, and that was primarily what I ate until they ran out. Fake meat is so amazing now that the only reason to eat the real thing is a hatred of animals. But I get it, some animals totally suck and it might be best if they were eaten. Charlotte, for example, managed to destroy a pair of corded earbud headphones I'd bought for Gretchen before she ever had a chance to use them. She'd lost a set she really really liked somewhere on the plane to Portugal, so I thought I'd buy her a replacement. They only cost $7, but that's an expensive dog toy considering Charlotte only managed to get a few seconds of gnawing out of it. I'm just glad we're not a more typical American family with a lot of overpriced Apple-branded shit in our house. We'd be paying 30% interest on numerous things that we'd already had to throw away.
In hopes of training Charlotte not to chew on things she finds on the coffee tables (this is usually how her destruction starts), I prepared a number of bait objects by slathering them with wood glue mixed with cayenne pepper. One was an old calculator from the 1970s (one of the first models to have an LCD display) that I'd salvaged from my childhood home, another was a cardboard box, and I also did this with a cheap pair of headphones that the Portuguese airline had provided for free. The hope is that Charlotte will grab one of the items in hopes of chewing on it, experience the pepper burn, and decide that perhaps all things on coffee tables are acursed.
In addition to feeling good enough to sit at my computer, I also felt like I had it in me to do some of the landlording I couldn't manage to do on Monday. I visited Brewster Street (wearing a KN95 mask of course) and used spackle to start repairing the wall where a rat had recently been chewing at the spray foam. I then set three rat traps in the basement, though I was pretty sure that this was just a placebo for the tenant.
Then over at Downs Street, I went up to the currently-unoccupied third floor apartment and did what I could to fix a few minor issues with doors, hinges, doorknobs, etc. Part of my job was to inspect the apartment to see whether the previous tenant should get her security deposit back. The screen door out to the fire escape is mangled and might need to be replaced, but I couldn't be sure it wasn't already like that.
Part of the reason I had so much energy today was my decision to take 90 mg of pseudoephedrine this morning. That's only 60% of my normal recreational dose, but I didn't want to push my system too hard. Covid (at least for me) has turned out not to be much of a threat, but it also has some mysteries that I don't want to tempt.
The way I was looking this morning. Notice my bathrobe, which I've hung in the output blast of the mini split in hopes it would dry out. Click to enlarge.
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