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keeping Neville away from the cabinet guy Thursday, March 14 2024
We had our kitchen redone back in late 2018 and into early 2019, and the biggest change was to the cabinets. Replacing the dowdy particle-board boxes and their matching faux-country doors were a set of simple maplewood rectangles that reached all the way to the ceiling (that is, that gap at the top typical of non-custom cabinets was gone). They looked nice, but they haven't really stood the test of time. In the summer, humidity causes the doors to expand to the point where neighboring doors collide when you try to shut them. That humidity has also caused a surprising number of doors to fall apart. You go to open a cabinet, and most of the door detaches in your hand. We've had the kitchen renovation people fix multiple such doors, and I myself fixed one so as to minimize the bother. Gretchen says that the people she talked to at the kitchen renovation place think that, for whatever reason, nobody thought to apply glue when assembling the doors. You'd think they'd be a lot more fragile than they are if that were the case, but that's the only theory that seems to explain the evidence. After years of these one-off repairs, the cabinet supplier (which is different from the kitchen renovation company) decided to replace all the cabinet doors in our kitchen. That process was to begin this morning at 8:00am. We were told to keep our dogs locked up, since the guy doing the installation was one whom Neville supposedly bit back during the original renovation.
So Gretchen and I holed up with the dogs in the upstairs bedroom all morning starting at 8:00am. But that time had been given as when the installation guy would be starting for the day, and some of his work involved things he did back at headquarters and he didn't arrive until something like 10:00am. So we lay around in bed play Spelling Bee, reading, and so forth. Amazingly, the dogs didn't seem particularly concerned about the comings and goings of a third human through the front door or by any of the construction noises he was making. We stayed behind closed doors in the bedroom until we couldn't stand being cooped up any longer. At that point I took the dogs downstairs so they could eat, and it soon became obvious that Neville wasn't going to bother the installer guy. So we gradually let down our guard about him, and the installer didn't seem too concerned either.
Later this afternoon, Gretchen, the dogs, and I all went on what she calls her "short walk," which is longer than any of the walks I routinely go on. It's a loop through the forest to the southwest of the Georges' farm at the end of the Farm Road. We lost Charlotte and Neville somewhere along the Farm Road and didn't see them again until we were within sight of Georges' big antique barn. Well, initially all we saw was Charlotte. Neville himself had never gotten beyond the Farm Road. On the walk, I'd collected several gypsy moth eggmasses which I then dumped into the wetlands adjacent to the Farm Road as food for all the loud (but unseen) frogs.
After the cabinet installer left and we'd signed some petitions for a local politician, Gretchen went out to have dinner at Crazy Bowls with Kate. Then they saw the movie Love Lies Bleeding, which Gretchen liked but which Kate found to be what Gretchen later described as "the worst movie ever."
Meanwhile, I was working on my ESP8266-based weather sensor, finishing support in the frontend and backend for logging watchdog resets. I then started wrapping my brain around how best to have a sensor pick up data from a server and use it to turn on devices.
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