It's 1:39am on September 22 East Coast time. Forgive my unmade face, undone hair, and overexcited NJ accent... but I just invented what's basically a 3-D salty/sweet cronchy version of Fun Dip. This is what inventors look like.

I am not proud of this. I am SO proud of this. It is gross and delicious and I am also not proud. But proud. But not proud. Yep.

I was originally gonna lock with post so only my OPW people could see this, which is why I didn't care that I recorded this video au naturale, sans makeup et sans le coiff, et plus de drooooop. But I also don't give a shit. This is whatcha look like at 47 and eating marshmallow fluff snax. 

Enjoy. 

​​​

...and some ibuprofen. 

Out of boredom with my piano lessons (which are mostly scales at this point), I (legally) downloaded the sheet music for an Easy Piano arrangement of Little Red Corvette, and spent the last hour teaching myself to play it. 

It's a good thing that His Purple Majesty has passed beyond the veil, because if he had seen how rudimentary this arrangement is, he would have sued for libel ("Nothing I wrote could ever be that simple!"), and if he heard my rendition of it, he'd have turned inside out and disappeared in a column of violet and golden flame. I spent an hour pounding my way through it, grateful that nobody can hear me, trying to stretch-jump from a high E to a regular E with one hand. My whole right arm hurts, which means my form is terrible and I'm doing it wrong. 

But, I can play the opening eight measures now. 

I'll keep you posted. 

I'm sitting at work in a fit of mild anxiety. You see my new fence is being installed today. I'm not anxious (mostly) about the fence. But because the fence installation might take two days, my dogs are at a friend's house. So, the defense of the house, without my presence, has devolved to my cat, Spot.

Make no mistake. The  loyalties of cats never change. They are loyal to themselves, only.

Have you ever heard of a cat dragging their insensate owner from a burning building? Enough said.

I'm (mostly) certain that everything will be fine. And for those keeping track at home, this is remodel project #2, headed for the record books. Next up, we get the heat pump installed.

The remaining six batches continue to smell okay on their half-week check-up. I have reasonable confidence they won't go bad.

We ran out of store-bought pickles. I picked a tub and filled up the jar, keeping the brine that was in it. We can at least have some kinda pickle experience while the rest mature. They're not really really done yet. 

Tasted one. Kinda... garlicky... [ coughs ] .. yeah... going to be a good pickle when it grows up. I wonder if there's enough dill, though. Maybe I should get some dill seed and toss it in, just to be sure. Couldn't hurt, right?

Edited to add

Good news: I did buy some more dill and added it to all of the batches. It just felt like the right thing to do.

Bad news: I think one of them is going bad. It doesn't smell quite right when I opened it all the way up, and there's a bit of an oil-slick appearance to the surface of the liquid. I'll look at it again on Saturday to verify but we are probably down to five. Fortunately, the hot pepper amended batch is still fine.

OPW appears to be the culprit in draining my iPhone battery when I keep a tab open 24/7.

Maybe it's also the culprit on my laptop battery, which is having trouble keeping a charge for more than a few hours' use.

(If I thought the problem was just the batteries' age, I wouldn't be writing this post.)

I just wrapped up the followup work I mentioned on making sure existing notifications in the system go away when someone gains or loses access to a lock, or the lock is removed, or the locks of a post are updated.

I need to be realistic about this: I'm one guy, alas, and there will be issues. These were minor in terms of people affected and likelihood of impacting someone. I think I've designed well to avoid more serious problems. I could be mistaken.

So the best I can do is try to be proactive, be responsive when things are pointed out, and oh yeah, be straight with y'all that I'm one guy.

So yeah: I'm not the entire Internet security department of Amazon. Consider yourself reminded. (:

If OPW were to grow, making sure there is a second engineer involved regularly and a code review process in place would be a priority for me. It's not intended as a high-wire act.

(Edited to add: Sean made many large contributions to OPW, including tons of code. Grateful for that! I'm thinking more of what would happen if we had a real budget in terms of best practices for review.)

So how big is OPW anyway, and will it grow? Well: it's tiny. There are about 25 posts per week.

And: it's constant. There have been about 25 posts a week since things settled down in 2015.

But everybody who's here really likes it here. So!

We'll see if little changes like the new Network posts indicator help bring the occasional newcomer more successfully into the fold. But if not... hey. It works for us.

I am saddened to report the loss of 1 of our 7 tubs of fermenting pickles to -- probably -- moldy garlic, as the cloves were shot through blue. I check them every day to see how they're doing and this tub smelled awful.

​​​​​​​Hoping the other garlic wasn't contaminated, but a little concerned as they look a little bluish. All we can do is watch.

I tasted a pickle from a tub that smelled okay and it has a good flavour and a decent crispness. It's young. It has promise. These will be good pickles if they survive.

Just got back from NJ. 

Sadly, they postponed Mom's surgery again... when they were prepping her for the surgery at the hospital on Wednesday morning at 6AM (*gulp!*), she had a mini-heart attack (her AFib went nuts and her heart rate shot to 170) so they stopped what they were doing immediately.  They had only gotten as far as inserting her IV and she has no fear of needles or anything, so they don't know what caused it (plus she was totally chill going into surgery), but we suspect it was because they told her not to take ANYTHING (not even meds) by mouth the morning of surgery, so she didn't take her heart medication. 

This is now the 3rd time her knee surgery was canceled. So we're really disappointed... but better safe than sorry. Per the hospital's orders, we went to her cardiologist immediately from the hospital who gave her a monitor to wear and also did a meds adjustment, hopefully she can try for a 4th time soon.  Man. 

Her cardiologist was really irritated that she wasn't allowed to take her heart medication that morning with a tiny sip of water, but that's what you get when you only see one doctor at a time, I guess.

I don't think she realizes how unhealthy she is... rampant diabetes, emphysema, COPD, congestive heart failure, AFib, blah blah blah... an anesthesiologist would be crazy to try to put her out.  Hell, when she had her hysterectomy they gave her an epidural because they knew it was too dangerous to knock her out, and that was 6 years ago when she was healthier. 

Anyhoo, we wound up staying in NJ for the full duration even though she didn't get chopped up... I could tell my dad just kinda needed us there.  

When we were in the waiting room on the morning of surgery and the nurse came out to tell us there were complications, Dad was pretty much trying to wrap his head around Mom dying. It was awful. 

(I'm too tired now as it's 2:54am, but remind me to tell you about Jerry.)

Art is my illicit drug of choice. The more I create, the more I need to make to get off.

Okay, so I put it that way to be a touch provocative, but it's also kinda true. I've been doing more illustration work pretty much every chance I get and I'm still getting further behind. What's more, I want to do more. That's kinda crazy.

ETA: Okay, I think I was going to go deeper into this and then change the post to public, but I've lost the train of thought and figure I should just let folks see it as is for now. I can always comment more later if I get that thought back.

I don't bike to work much in the summer--too hot, too crowded. This year (on top of the heat and crowds) both the path and the roads between my office and home were under construction.

But the schools are all back in session (so the crowds are less) and it's finally cool and the construction near my office on the path is complete, so I took Linus to work today.

Only to discover the construction no longer covers the last two miles of my commute, but the first one mile.

I hope it's done by the time the good winter weather sets in.