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not too altered
Wednesday, December 20 2023
This morning I took another 150 milligram dose of pseudoephedrine and then took advantage of its neurological effects to do more work on that spec project I am building. I wanted to be able to add more functionality to the "tags" that I can now put into words in its dictionary of terms to add flexibility to the text scans it does. The underlying functionality is all build on regular expressions, one of the least human-readable data specifications that exists. For getting those right, I lean heavily on ChatGPT, since it is particularly good at translating clear human thoughts into functional chunks of code in any programming language (or data specification). My particular text scanner is now achieving much of what it does by parsing chunks of text with regular expressions and then using the chunks to build other regular expressions.
For four long hours of the day, I was mostly holed up in the laboratory while a cleaning lady was professionally cleaning the first and second floor of the house. It's possible I've mentioned this before, but our new cleaning lady (who has only worked for us for a few months) replaces a team of cleaning ladies Gretchen used to have clean our house. But no matter what she told them, they continued using fragrant cleaning supplies that made our house smell like a dollar store. So Gretchen fired them and replaced her with this one cleaning lady (the daughter of one of her co-workers at the bookstore) who takes longer but does the whole job herself. She also uses inoffensive cleaning supplies. While she was cleaning, I offered to sequester the dogs in the laboratory, but she said that she loved the dogs and that this was unnecessary. But when they started doing a lot of barking, I tried to get them to come into the laboratory. Neville wasn't hard to convince, but Charlotte refused to come into the laboratory, acting like how she acts about the bed in the biggest bedroom in the first floor of the Adirondack cabin. Perhaps she's still traumatized after I busted her moments after she'd pissed on the laboratory bean bag.
Another thing I did while holed up in the laboratory was to paint another picture, this one of Gretchen snuggling with Charlotte and Neville on the couch up at the cabin. As with most of my paintings, it was based on a photograph. Usually I greatly simplify the content of a photograph, since I usually only care about one figure and everything else is decoration (think Gustav Klimt). But this time the plan was to include most of the details in the painting, including Gretchen, both dogs, a pillow, a blanket, and even a book laying upside down and open on the back of the couch. The problem with painting all of that was that I was working on a canvas measuring only two inches by two inches. I found it particularly difficult to render Gretchen's face. Evidently the human eye is extremely discerning of pixel location in tiny images of human faces, and if a pixel is even a 1/64th of an inch from where it should be, the face becomes either unrecognizable or its expression seems to convey the wrong emotion. In any case, I was not happy with the painting after fucking with it on and off for hours.
But by then I'd already allowed it to unlock my ability to drink alcohol (under my personal drinking rules). I started with a Russian imperial stout and then moved on to gin & kombucha (laid back!). I carried the latter with me when I took the dogs for a late afternoon stroll that took us on the escarpment west of the Farm Road all the way to the abandoned go cart track and then back home via the Farm Road.
Having learned a lesson about my drinking last Wednesday, I then stopped drinking and switched to kratom tea. As 5:00pm approached, I started making chili that included both green beans and tempeh. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of accidentally using the chipotle chili powder instead of normal chili powder. The problem with doing that is that for some reason the chipotle chili powder is much spicier than the non-chipotle kind. Despite this, the chili didn't end up being so spicy that Gretchen couldn't eat it.
As we were about to eat chili and watch Jeopardy!, Gretchen noted that, though I was altered, I wasn't "too altered." So I suppose that a partial win. (Ideally, she wouldn't have thought I was under the effects of any substance.)
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?231220 feedback
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