November 2022

BZ’s been barfing.
It’s not like he never used to barf: In the summer, he barfs mice, and in the winter, he barfs hairballs. But lately, he’s been barfing puddles of foamy fluid at 3:00 in the morning.
Watch your step!
So we’ve been playing Doctor with the cat.  Visiting the vet. Messing with medications. Fussing about his food. Making sure he’ll make it.
Who’s a good boy?

Anyway, BZ was on the ottoman this morning, watching us talking about his barfing, when, for the first time ever, a mouse ambled into the kitchen, had himself a seat in plain view, and gave me the evil eye from a safe distance.
I got all excited. I got Mary all excited. And we both tried to get BZ excited, but he just yawned and stretched, and the mouse headed downstairs.

Massive data loss.
It was supposed to be so simple: Upgrade my distro, kernel, driver, and kinematics – all at once – and then clone a fresh repo from github.
Nothing worked, of course, but in a waaay worse way than usual. The details are murky, but I ended up backing up and re-partitioned my drive, only to find that my backup media had failed, and everything but my source clones were gone.
It was a sobering moment.
It won’t be easy, but I’ll be fine. I sure wish I’d known about UEFI when I started.

I was peacefully puttering in the cellar, when my coffee cup ran dry and I went upstairs for a refill. Mary was cleaning out the closet, and I was rinsing out my cup at the sink. She handed me 2 bottles of mystery fluid with “Can you get these open? I can’t do it.”
Sure, I said, and I flipped the lever.
Like a cannon, the bottle exploded with a plume of pulpy vomit.
In my face, hair, and shirt. All over the ceiling. All over the floor. All over the walls, cabinets, and counters. The windows were wet. the stove was splattered. The knick-knacks cast drippy shadows on the walls.
We joined forces and got it all cleaned up, but really!
I figured I was in the dog house, because I figured the bottle had been full of cider. So when it turned out to be one of Mary’s old kombucha experiments, I said a silent prayer of thanks.
Then I took my coffee cup and went downstairs.

For Thanksgiving, we had big plans. Maggie was going to run the show from the Green house, with 12 hungry mouths and a big special-order turkey. My job: show up.
Three days before Thanksgiving, Covid hit, and the festivities were cancelled.
Mary and I stayed healthy, but we stayed home for Turkey day, and had Cornish game hens.
Not the same.