nosrednayduj

My partner subscribes to the town Select Board agendas, because sometimes there's some issue that one might care about. And he noticed that there was a proposal to lower the speed limit on our street. So I fired up zoom and went to the Select Board meeting the other day.

Our street is somewhat of a major thoroughfare where the speed limit is 35. Some people go 40-45, but most people keep it under 40. Especially in the summer there's a lot of pedestrian traffic crossing the road, because like in the Tom Petty song, "there's a freeway running through the yard" – we have lakefront property on the other side of the road. But you can always get across. And there is a sidewalk. For bicycling, it's not ideal, the road could be a little wider, but it's okay. And I think that people's time ought to be worth something; they should be able to get where they're going.

I said some of these things in the Select Board meeting. It turned out that none of the people who had requested the speed limit lowering came to the meeting! There's a woman down the street who I'm sure was one of them; she's always off on some "safety first" kick that makes everybody else's life inconvenient. I'm not trying to knock safety, I'm just saying that you can go overboard. Anyway, other people kind of said things that were agreeable about what I had said, and I prevailed! Although, they are going to revisit it when they redo a somewhat dangerous intersection at the end of my road. So we may lose after all. Gotta keep an eye on those agendas.

They were also proposing to drop the speed limit on a couple of other streets, but one of them is really a residential street, not a 100-year-old main road that goes between two little townships, and the other one is right in front of the high school, and there's a ton of traffic all the time, and there's a stop sign nearby, so I never go 35 anyway in that area. I didn't speak against either of those, and they did drop the speed limit on both.

I also mentioned that I was a little sad that the small number of people who request such changes often get their way, because the people who are satisfied with the status quo do not write to the Select Board and say "please don't change things"; they don't know they need to. (Except when they read the agendas.) The loss of our local paper was a sad thing. People used to have conversations in the letters to the editor column, and now they don't. Maybe there's stuff on Facebook but I'm not there.

My cat was a big help, as she walked back and forth across my keyboard and was frequently on camera.

So my work is kind of sucking recently. We have a lot of customer issues, and our customer support organization is inadequate, so questions that I think ought not to go to development do go to development. We need to spend some time training customer support better, and we never have time, so instead we are answering customer questions ourselves.

So there isn't as much time for actual development as a result. In fact, the current deadlines do not affect me personally, because I don't have pieces that are going into the next release; I only have pieces that are going into the following release, which means that I should work on those some time, but it's not heavy pressure about that yet. But the customer questions do get heavy pressure, because the customers expect answers in a certain timeframe (dictated by severity and how important that customer is etc.) So there's still too much work. And then my team is too small and when people go on vacation, they aren't available to help with the customer support issues, and I've been really feeling it the last two weeks. My boss was out at a conference for three of those days, and it was stressful because it kind of falls to me to do the organizational stuff when he's out.

Anyway, I woke up crying on Thursday about how inadequate I was being even though I really can't try any harder. I don't work full time, but after six hours there's nothing left inside me and there's really no point in doing anything except reading or making cookies. (There's been a certain amount of stress eating, and 5 extra pounds over the last few months, which is not great either.)

So my boss came back and we had a chat and he was very supportive (my boss is awesome), and I confessed to a bunch of procrastiworking (I am forever grateful to Chris Hallbeck on mastodon for publicizing that phrase), and he was complementary that at least I was getting something useful done! Although, not for the customer case that I was having trouble with.

So then on Friday I got a slack message from somebody I'd vaguely heard of asking if he could talk to me about our product, and I thought he was going to ask a technical question, so I said sure, and he did a voice huddle thing with slack, and proceeded to ask me how some internal project was going where I'm helping his team, and trying to find out when it was going to be done. Now, I had ignored them for a couple of weeks a couple of weeks ago, but I had started to pay attention to them over the last two weeks, so I kind of felt like I'd been doing my part of that, and this harassment wasn't called for. And I hadn't read my email that morning yet, and so I guess I shouldn't have said sure talk to me, so I quick poked at my email and found that his employee had sent me an email about "there is a bug" and of course I hadn't looked at it yet, and so I was like "okay I see there's a bug, and I can't tell you when it's going to be done because I don't know if it's a hard bug or something trivial and I just don't know" and I got more and more frazzled in the conversation. Eventually I extracted myself from the conversation and burst into tears. Unfortunately, I had a meeting five minutes later.

So I called my boss (who was in the car having just dropped his kids off at school), and told him I was really struggling and this conversation I'd had and I didn't think I could go to this meeting because I wouldn't be able to stop crying soon enough. So we agreed that I would be 5-10 minutes late, and I would go outdoors and walk around for 10 minutes, and then come into the meeting in case I was needed. This plan worked, and I was able to put in my 2 cents in the meeting. Afterwards, I was still fragile, so I went on a bike ride (fortunately the weather was great), and came back at noon, and then I got work done for the rest of the afternoon successfully. Including dealing with the guy who made me cry's bug. I think that if I hadn't already been fragile from the day before, I wouldn't have been so upset about this random pressure from some random manager who's not in my chain of command. But, why am I so fragile? I don't feel like we have a toxic work place. But maybe secretly we do. Like, my manager is awesome, and his manager is okay, and the director seems to be very supportive of people needing time off or whatever. So some of this is internal "Protestant work ethic" or "I have to be able to do everything and can't fail" feelings, which are themselves kind of toxic.

Then I kind of took my feelings out on my housemates, so they are less than pleased with me, but I think we're making up and it will be okay.

Things started to suck right around the time my cat died. Is it because they were sucking earlier, and when things sucked I pet my cat and felt better as a result then was able to carry on? Or is this just burnout and the timing is coincidence?

Anyway, I'm going to yoga tomorrow, and that might help.

And we put in the first one third of the dock today.

So my cat has been diagnosed with diabetes. She's 18, so it's not surprising.

Unfortunately, unlike my last cat who had diabetes, this one will not be as easy to treat. The last one purred while you gave her the injections.

Turns out, there is "metformin for cats", which is actually something that works on a different mechanism, called Senvelgo. So, she can just have it mixed into her food like all of her other drugs. So, we're going to give this a try, even though it's going to be fairly expensive. The vet was going on about how insulin care is just as expensive, but if your cat is sufficiently cooperative, you can do your blood glucose curves at home, with the same exact glucose monitor that people use. So when I had Mottle, it really wasn't very expensive at all to manage her diabetes, and since she purred while you were doing whatever you were doing, it was even a bit pleasurable.

At some point it will stop working, and she will start making ketones, and then I'm afraid we're going to be all done. If it was a different cat, we would switch to insulin at that point. But perhaps if it was a different cat we would start with insulin. We might get a year or two. I will monitor quality of life, which is currently decent, despite the arthritis.

A few days ago, I noticed a bunch of flies buzzing around. They all seemed to be clustering in my skylight. I got a chair and flyswatter and tried to take care of this, but it was very difficult to swat them in the corners of the skylight enclosure, and some of the enclosure was above my reach even standing on a chair, so I didn't kill very many.

Then I didn't have time to deal, and so I was like "whatever". It got cold, and they seemed to be quietly hanging out in the skylight. So today I got around to getting a ladder and the Dustbuster. But today, there are no flies in the skylight. Where did they go?

Happy Halloween…

You have to find joy when it comes to you.

I'm in California because my mother had another stroke, they finally figured out. The Covid and the pneumonia and all that crap made it difficult to know what the real problem was, but now that the Covid in the pneumonia are over and she's not really any better, they did an MRI of the brain to see what's going on. And, yes, she had another stroke. So getting better is not really happening. We're talking about hospice. It's all very distressing. My stepfather is not really ready to let go, and this is going to prolong the agony. If she were in worse shape it would be clearer. If she were in better shape it would be clearer. She is in a terrible intermediate state where she can kind of communicate a little bit but she can't really do anything like even sit up, and she can't swallow, so it has to be tubes.

So where's the joy?

Last night, in the motel bathroom, there was a lizard. A real little lizard. I had an empty box of crackers, and so I escorted him into the box and then outdoors. And this morning he was back, because the weather stripping on the door is imperfect and there is a lizard sized space. I decided to leave him there. I decided that probably he was clever enough to get out of the way when I went into the bathroom so I wouldn't actually step on him.

A week or so ago, we noticed a commotion near the back door when we were doing something outdoors, and it turned out that a bird had built a nest on top of the light fixture by the back door and had been alarmed when we were messing about in the backyard. Of course, we had to examine this nest, and we discovered it had one beautiful blue egg in it.

So we thought, maybe the bird will come back, or maybe the nest will be abandoned. It seemed like the bird was not at the nest very often, and so, thinking it may be abandoned, we looked again today, and discovered two beautiful blue eggs!

Obviously, this calls for a WebCam. Well, we don't have any that are wireless, but we do have an extra phone lying about. A little googling later and we have an app for phone as WebCam. A fair amount of screwing around with mounting and power, and we really have a WebCam.

It's only on the internal network here, so you can't look at it, and also it's pretty far from the Wi-Fi so the connection is a little lame – it appears that if we have more than one client connected to its server at a time, it gets overloaded. So I'm not sure if we're going to implement some kind of port forwarder to allow other people to connect from the outside.

Looking forward to more eggs and bird sitting on eggs and baby birds.

I decided to stop having a heart, much as it was amusing. In the last three weeks, I have killed at least 20 mice. That is a lot! I have the kind of traps where they are easy and safe to set and easy to shake the mouse out without having to touch it. For most of this time, the mouse didn't get very much of the bait before tripping the trap, and so I could just reset without having to rebait. However, "the early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese" – we've now got a scavenger who crawls in next to its dead buddy and finishes off the bait. Hopefully if I kill enough of its buddies, it will eventually become the first mouse.

Meanwhile, our SUV started to stink badly, of perhaps dead animal or animal droppings. We took apart some of the air system, and found quite a substantial mouse nest. Cleaning it out, and setting a couple of my traps (not having a heart again) we caught one mouse. It still kind of smells in there, though not to the degree it had before, so my theory is that we were insufficiently complete in our cleaning process – it's not like it's easy to reach your hand back in there. It needs service anyway, so I'm thinking to ask the service people, who might have better tools, to clean it out. It's pretty strange that we've never had mice in our cars before. Maybe one of our neighbors has stopped having a cat or something. It's well-known that my cat is completely useless (also she is indoor only so wouldn't help with the car).

As I posted earlier, the house has mice.

We seem to have discouraged the downstairs mice, as we haven't seen any evidence of them for a while. However, they seem to have just gone upstairs. In my room there is an eaves closet which gives onto a storage space (it is now filled with insulation so not very useful for storage). From this door has been emanating little skritchy skritchy noises, and so I finally decided to take action. My last kill-them-dead trap seems to be nonfunctional, so I got out the have-a-hearts. I immediately caught two mice. Off they went, across the road to the lake shore. Next day, two more, repeat several times. When the trap goes off in the middle of the night, there's a lot of banging about by the mouse, who is after all sitting on the spring plate which gives a lot of ability for extra noise. So, I've been getting up and taking the trap out of the closet and moving it elsewhere behind a closed door so I don't hear it.

I did notice that we seem to have revolving door justice, because our have-a-hearts have a problem which is that when the door snaps shut it sometimes catches the mouse's tail, and some of our earlier mice ended up with their tails actually severed. (In fact, there were three such mice originally. "Did you ever see such a sight in your life?") And, I have seen a couple of short tailed mice in my upstairs traps.

A couple of days ago, I caught a mouse in the middle of the night, and moved it to the other room, and caught another mouse a couple of hours later, and moved it to the other room also. In the morning I went back to the other room to get the mice so that I could take them across the road like usual. To my surprise, one of the traps was lying on its side, and empty. Uh oh, I thought, the mouse is loose somewhere in this room. So I looked around, checking under the bed, looking under other furniture, shutting the door to see if I thought it could have gotten out of the room and therefore was randomly loose in the house, and then I noticed... The other trap has two mice in it! This happened because the traps are a little hard to open, and I don't click them all the way shut, and apparently the mice were able to push up the end where you would put the bait, and go in and be buddies. How convenient? Anyway, off they went to the other side of the road, together. (One was short tailed.)

They were very cute, huddled together. In this picture they were tired of being disturbed so they're wandering around. The "snap shut" door is on the right, and the door they had raised to get in is on the left.


I've been toying with the idea of getting out the official mouse cage we had for our Petco mice and just having pet mice for a while, but I'm a little concerned about disease, and I don't really want 50 pet mice, so some of them have to go, probably in a permanent fashion. Although, it's entirely possible we only have like four or five mice, given their ability to get back across the road and up to the house.

Today, while cleaning the kitty potty, I noticed some ants. In an effort to understand where they were coming and going, I moved the kitty potty away from the wall. Where I discovered mouse droppings. There are mouse droppings next to the kitty potty. Are you serious? That means there are mice next to the kitty potty. What are they thinking? I guess, they are thinking that the cat is completely useless, and so it's completely safe to just wander around next to the kitty potty.

Now there is a mousetrap in a shoebox (so the cat cannot get her paw trapped). We will find out if it's the kind of mousetrap which allows the mouse to take the bait without getting trapped (I kind of think it might be), and perhaps go to the store and buy different mousetraps.

There is also one of those ant bait things in a plastic blueberry container, so that the ants can get in, but neither the mouse nor the cat can. (Not really so worried about the mouse, since its fate is sealed elsewhere. Apologies; I do not have a heart.)

Jetty had her vet appointment Saturday morning.

Her blood sugar is still elevated, but to a lesser degree. Unfortunately they were unable to get any urine in order to check whether there was any sugar in the urine.

We are now trying a new prescription food (Hills z/d) to see if that will help her be able to absorb more of what she is actually eating. I'm going to gradually mix it into her existing food over the next few days, and then she'll be switched over completely after a week. Then we have another appointment in three weeks to see if that had any effect on the blood sugar or ravenous hunger.


Litter box use seems to have improved, though still is not reliable enough to let her roam the whole house.

Meanwhile, Downy (name decided), is working on being second best cat on the planet, and I sometimes feel bad for Jetty when I don't spend much time upstairs. But then when I do go up there, she like as not ignores me.