Nobody is Promised Tomorrow. . .
Carlton would say: “Make a gratitude list”. My retort: “I am not in AA and I don’t have to be grateful.”
And that’s about all that is going on in the Old Bat’s Cave today.
Today’s major feature is freezing cold. And my sinuses are really really unhappy. The pain is totally on the left side of my face – so I am sure it’s my old friend sinusitis and not omicron.
The food continues to be substandard. However, they are making pizza today and I have one on order for dinner. I really detest steamtable cafeteria food. I would not have moved here if I thought I was going to be cafeteria-ing on a regular basis. I am not in elementary school.
The weekly covid box scores just arrived: 31 residents and 9 staff are sick. Last week it was 12 residents and 28 staff. Both add up to 40. Zero-sum game.
This is what happens when I shoot through the double-pane glass. I could easily photoshop the extra moons out. But, I rather like them. Jupiter has 79 or 80 moons, depending on who is doing the counting. So, why can’t we have 4?
A different day. Work, barre class, more work, wine tasting, sober up, double birthday party. It was supposed to snow, but it rained instead. Made no difference to me, I wasn’t going out.
My desk chair stopped rolling around nicely. OK. Bottoms up. Goodness. The rear wheels are clogged with hair. Out with the needle-nose pliers. Didn’t make much progress. Wonder what Google has to say? Seems like lots of people get their chair wheels clogged with hair. Lots of proposed solutions. Ranging from tweezers to drain de-gunker to blowtorches. Blow torching the hair seems to be the easiest, quickest way. However, we are not allowed anything that flames here in The Asylum. Not even birthday candles.
Carlton used that chair for 30 years. I don’t recall him having problems with hairy wheels. But then, he was bald.
Warm enough for an outside walk today. We even had sun. That is supposed to come to an abrupt end tomorrow.
Data wrangling all day and winter and crappy food are taking a toll on me. I feel very tired today. Not the good tired after exercise but a deep ominous weariness. Also have had several nights of “old woman sleep” which means almost no sleep at all.
But, enough grumbling. I managed to make a new origami last night after dinner. I used glue to hold the sections together. Westerners consider gluing a no-no for origami. Except for the highest level practitioners, Japanese make judicious use of glue. I don’t have a black belt in origami.So, I glued.
Tomorrow is another day. Supposed to have Barre Class. Wine Tasting. Birthday Party. Plus data wrangling. (I am trying to reconcile about 1,600 people records from my database with another database department’s database of supposedly same people.)
Still winter outside. Still wrangling data inside. So, I didn’t get to play with origami. But, I might after dinner because my eyes are too wasted to do much reading.
I did rethink my “smart home” wish list from yesterday. The Alexa ZigBee hub really doesn’t work well ( or at all) with ZigBee thermostats. It works fine with a couple of WiFi thermostats. But The Asylum wifi is seriously funky. Don’t want to try into it any more than I have to. So, I can pass on the thermostat for now. Also did a rethink on having my closet on motion detector switch. What I really want is to be able to turn it off which I am all cozy in bed and realize that I left the closet light on. So, it requires a plain old ZigBee switch. The really fine thing is that if the WiFi is out but the electricity is still on, Alexa can still turn things on and off. I am not sure that it can still run the routines or keep the groups sorted out without contacting the mother ship.
I hear my dinner calling.
Wednesday promises to be the warmest day by far on the 10 day forecast. So, I must plan on getting out of the Old Bat Cave and outside.
Nothing accomplished today. On the other hand, I didn’t destroy anything either. But the day isn’t over.
It’s been over a year since I turned over the task of turning the lights on and off over to Alexa. She also turns the fan on and off in summer. And, starts the coffee on command. Now, I have a studio apartment. I don’t pay the utility bill. There is no real reason to have this set up. Except, I really like it. Like it so much that I am going to expand it. Plans:
Thank you, Amazon for the Alexa-Zigbee connection.
This was a good day for doing nothing.
And there is always origami. Started thinking about a tessellation project today. But, I don’t think I have any good paper for tessellations.
Maybe I will not continue down the tessellation path. But, winter is long.
I finally settled down and made an animated gif in Photoshop. Not very special. But, that really is what it looked like out of my window a couple of hours ago.
Never mind the weather. The kids across the street are sledding in the near dark. I plan on huddling under blankets and hoping that the power stays on as this changes to freezing rain.
Love making origami out of nice new money. It is the finest origami paper.
Remember how long it took me to learn how to make a rose? Trying for a pyramid thing. Not even close yet. But, the alternative is to just jump out of the window.
Actually, I polished up my work project this morning. Tomorrow morning I will make it into something the user can actually use. You know you are very old when you can actually look forward to working on Sunday morning. Well, maybe you would look forward to going to work on Sunday if you were a preacher. Our chaplain, AKA Mother Theresa, gets Sunday off since religious services are not allowed. Sort of a funny position for The Asylum to be in, since it is run by the Episcopal Church.
Mostly it is just freezing cold and gray. Cold enough to freeze the balls off a Japanese raccoon dog.
And tomorrow promises to be worse. But, nobody is promised tomorrow.
We can go get pizza on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday as of today. Just in time too. Today’s sandwich was – wait for it – onion and apple. I didn’t even consider going to get one.
Worked a bunch today. By 2:45 my brain was fried. So, I took a nap. I should have taken a walk. But the nap won out.
Talking to the boss on the phone this AM when a buzzard swoops by the window. But the phone is the camera.
At close of day I played with long shots without trying to talk intelligently on the phone at the same time.
I fear this one is much more than a picture of the setting sun reflecting off the Captial.
I finished up work by 4 PM today. So I moved from the office. Which would be that old wooden chair with the red cushion to my comfy chair in the library. And that’s about the highlight of my day. When you are 78 going on dead, you don’t need but so much excitement.
Realized that I am coming up on 60 years of computer hacking. My brain lacks the plasticity to do most of the new stuff. But, there are plenty enough old-style problems that need solutions. And, for that I am grateful.
My first computer was the Bendix G-15. It was small and had about 450 vacuum tubes.
This one is fancier than ours. We only had one tape drive. But, we had a plotter.
When Fluffy, that was the computer’s name, started acting “strange” we would open it up and look for a burned-out “bulb”. Or loose pack.
This was when “real” computers took up entire floors of buildings. The G-15 was tiny. And could exist in a regular room. However, if it was really hot, we would open Fluffy up and run a fan, or even a fan over dry ice to keep it cool. Because real rooms were not air-conditioned in those days.
Nothing today. Just work. Lunch. More work. The featured item at lunch today was a broccoli and mushroom sandwich. I had soup. My own red lentil soup. Couldn’t face dinner. So, I made an omelet.
Well, at least I could round up a vintage image to cheer things up.
We were late to Hawai’i because Carlton was having another round of radiation in January 2014. That’s not such a cheerful image. At least the back story isn’t cheerful.
And, a fine fruit bat coming in for a landing in Pago Pago. Cheerier.
Today management published a 2 page single-space document telling the residents of independent living how to quarantine for 10 days. What would be wrong with:
Think I’ll round head off to bed now. Another full day of data wrangling is on tap tomorrow.
After Barre Class this morning, I went to the cafeteria to get more coffee. The breakfast cook was sitting behind her steam trays of breakfast. “Don’t you want breakfast, Ms Peg?” Well, actually Ms Peg did want breakfast. Just not steam table eggs and toast out of a plastic box. But, the cook looked a little sad that I was going to reject her offering. So, I tell her eggs, bacon, and a biscuit. A quarter-pound of nice bacon about makes up for steam table scrambled eggs. at least it hides the eggs. And, it made the cook happy. Ate the biscuit. Most of the eggs went into composting. Most of the bacon went to the hips.
Spent the rest of a very cold day wrangling data. More data wrangling on tap again tomorrow. Maybe Thursday and Friday too. Also, our system is being upgraded to the latest version tonight. I am not anticipating any problems. But you never know.