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Neville gets a bath
Monday, March 31 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
My work-issued laptop continued to drive me crazy today, particularly the issue with the headphone jack. It would fade out and I'd have to aggressively tap the laptop near the jack to get it come back, an indication of a classic connection problem, the kind humans have been dealing with since the early 19th Century. And if the laptop was moved too much for some reason, the headphone jack would be bypassed entirely and all the sound would be channeled unexpectedly to the speakers, filling the quiet office with whatever I was listening to.
On the plus side, having the obnoxious Windows 11 taskbars auto-hide has mostly solved my problem with them while having the added benefit of concealing just enough information about what time it is to make the workday proceed in a more organic fashion.
I was even able to implement some code related to the Azure key vault test. The great thing about C# is that if the pieces snap together (as Lego pieces do) then there's a good chance things will work, or at least come close to it.
At the end of the workday, I walked out into a gorgeous spring day, with temperatures in the 70s. I drove home with my windows down and it felt amazing. As I rolled into the driveway at my home in Hurley, I saw a couple pallets full of roofing materials had been dropped off. We're having the roof replaced at the brick mansion on Downs Street and apparently someone got the delivery address wrong. I was immediately concerned that a crew of Mexican roofers would be arriving tomorrow to re-roof our Hurley house, also by mistake (its roof isn't even a year old!). So I made a sign in Spanish using Google Translate to put on the materials to prevent that from happening. (I don't want to be the guy sedated for an amputation who awakes to find they've cut off the wrong leg!)
Then I took the dogs (both came) for a walk up the Farm Road and then home via the scrubby highlands to its west, taking full advantage of the glorious weather. The dogs ended up staying in the forest long after I returned home.
I immediate started a pot of water boiling to make spaghetti, and then I followed a recipe to make meatballs using Impossible Burger "meat," bread crumbs, oat milk, onions, garlic, and nutritional yeast. I'd never made meatballs before and it ended up being a modest success despite the fact that the recipe I'd followed gave me no indication of what quantities I needed to use of the various ingredients.
Gretchen and I ate this in our usual dinner-time ritual, which tonight included the latest episode of the White Lotus
Charlotte had finally returned from our walk, but Neville was still off in the forest, and it was starting to get dark. So both Gretchen and I separately went looking for him. It turned out he was lying quietly in the living room and covered with dirt. Usually he cleans up spontaneously (and surprisingly quickly), but tonight before bed we gave him a bath in water I'd just bathed in, something he didn't seem to mind at all.
The sign I made today and posted on one of the pallets of roofing supplies. I later took it down when Gretchen told me the delivery people would be coming back "in an hour" to pick it up. They didn't. Click to enlarge.
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