Slippery thoughts in the shoal

I caught a lovely virus on Saturday when I stepped out to buy wood shavings and Purina Lambena Chow (lamb feed) for the llama. She doesn't ask for it by name (probably have to be Gen X to remember that advert) but boy howdy is she keen when I lug in a new bag. I gotta be quick when opening it or she'll be munching nose-deep straight out of the bag while I'm trying to pour it into the hamper. So Saturday was my only foray out into the wild world of transmittable diseases since January 6 when a retired friend from work arrived unannounced, bearing gifts of jam and an old bag of cocoa. He left with a copy of my calendar that had been waiting for him and did not donate any viruses.



So, Sunday evening the nausea and cramps started. Nasty cramps that wouldn't fade until three in the morning. Monday morning I felt better. I wondered if the big helping of instant stone-milled oats I'd eaten was stuck somewhere in the plumbing or if I had a kidney stone. I've never had a kidney stone. But I do have an imagination. Monday I had a big mug of mint tea. So far so good. I ate the last chocolate cookie. No problemo. Chicken noodle soup? That went down fine as well. Cramps must be over! So I had a pan of fish, egg, broccoli and cheese. The cumin was a mistake. Blegh. Then, several hours later, cramps! Going out to feed the llama gave me a brief respite, but I was back to writhing in and out of bed. Next day, the cramps were on hiatus again. Had a mint tea. Tried a little ice cream. Maybe the fish and cheese was too much, so this time I cooked just two eggs around midday. By six pm, the sharp pain was back, as nasty as ever. I took two Acetaminophen¹ tablets. That helped for a while. Two AM this morning, another two Acetaminophen¹ tablets. Sunrise and I still had the cramps. But llama has to eat, so I shambled out. The llama had made a mess in one spot in her wood shavings bed so I pulled the shovel over and set about removing it before one mess invited many more messes. As I shoveled, angels fluttered down from on high and blessed my inflamed gut. The cramps left.
(¹ next day edit: I wrote Ibuprofen, I meant Acetaminophen, the stuff that'll kill your liver if you eat too many. I have a lot of Acetaminophen on hand, I was taking it at work to keep from getting bent like the Hunchback of Notre Dame after a day shoveling manure.)

I've had an Earl Grey (hot). No cramps but feeling a bit woozy. To get a few calories in and stop reading the same paragraphs three times, I put the pot roast on the warming pad and when it was warm, ate most of the broth like it was soup. I dare not eat the pot roast... yet.



When I finally kick out this virus I'm going to get a new portable infrared heater. The one I've had for over a decade just suddenly died. Went from working like new to not working. It's not good at defrosting the car (there's no fan) but it has outlasted two or three heated coil space heaters. The heated coil gets weaker and weaker until it doesn't heat anymore. Not the infrared heater. So I'm getting a new one. It better not be Wi-Fi connected.



I've shaked 'n' baked this ComfyUI autopastiche gizmo over fourteen thousand times and counting. I've kept less than 800 results. Following the update I made last month plus the two 6 GB checkpoints I added to my stable, ComfyUI has been better at delivering the EZ Make pastiche (just add AI!). Of note, it can now crank out ponies swimming underwater. Barely. There is no real skill involved in cooking with free-falling robots. I use words I hope it can match with a pattern and whatever it cooks up looks about the same, a little less so if I request "dancing", "stretching" or "view from below". The subject is still nearly always facing the camera unless a rear-view is specified.



So, sure I can get the yellow pegasus clearly swimming underwater with her mouth closed and her main drifting, and even add in some fish; but have her catch fish? Nope. Or have a pegasus hovering over another pony on the ground? Nope. One horse flying and the other standing, in the same picture: no can do. But I'm having hours of fun trying and the "realistic" morph looks about right.



Meanwhile, the radio is on most of the time. As I cobbled together recipes for the EZ Make, yet another attempt at a star mare living constellation pony, Jonathan Haidt was on CBC Radio's Ideas program, stating that people born since the late mid 1990's have had their ability to read books and to concentrate destroyed by smart phones, along with their self confidence and 20/20 vision. Email and LISTSERV's messed up my concentration in the 1990's. But my ability to read non-stop returned when I got hold of the Harry Potter books. So what of the future? Jonathan Haidt seemed to suggest that the future is heading toward drugs, gambling and prostitution. Quick fixes for the impatient that solve nothing.

I just replaced my third rural mailbox. I'd repainted it twice but the rust just ate through the thin metal until there was a great big hole in the side. So I bought another, plastic this time. I don't know how the maker expected me to fix this to a post. It comes with four long screws and there are four screw holes leading to a roughly 7.5" x 15" void under the box. I had a small 9" x 18" plywood plank hanging around so I traced the box over it. I found a spot to clamp the plank and plugged in my Canadian Tire Mastercraft rotary saw. I didn't start. After checking to be sure that I had power in the outlet, and shaking the saw a bit, it got unjammed and worked fine. I trimmed the plank along the lines I'd traced. Then I went back and trimmed it again. Second trim was a charm, it fit very snugly. So I used the paint leftover from futilely painting the rusted mailbox and painted the plank. It was an even more snug fit when I went to put it back into the void in the base of the mailbox. It's never coming out: the paint wasn't quite dry yet. Many screws and angle bracket braces later, I have a new mailbox. Meanwhile I lost the street address numbers I bought to stick on it. I slapped an envelope label sticker on it but I suspect that's going to fall off with the rain and flying slush. It has already started to peel.



The sun is setting and my cramps and nausea are rising from the grave.

Last night there was a "retirement" supper at a small restaurant of my choosing. I did not want to go, but, "retirement" supper, it's expected, I'm expected and well, I like food, so off I went. The crowd was much smaller than I expected, but that might be because not only was it mid week (some people still have to be at work the next day at the ass-crack of dawn) and because it was snowing with gusto. Everyone there was from my department, including some who had quit or retired years ago (not everyone dies within two years of retiring). We ate, were eating, at least I was still eating. Two different people gave me all their french fries. I hadn't started my hamburger yet. And then, gifts. Too many gifts, like Christmas in Hell. Gifts for retirement from my former boss, gifts for 35 years of service, gifts crowdfunded by my coworkers. So much stuff. My supervisor had called me into his office in October to ask me to choose a gift for my 35 years from a selection of power tools, luggage and various stuff I really did not want. So I said let me see if I can find something online. After finishing work at 3 pm on a short day, I sat down and scoured eBay, and for good measure, Amazon (for people in a hurry). I sent my supervisor a list. Back in his office he told me the stuff on my list didn't cost enough. I told him to, then, choose two, I don't care about spending the entire gift budget. Famous last words. He bought _everything_, including one thing twice. A tagua ("ivory") nut horse (could be plastic, can't tell), a good fortune horse (prancing on money), horse USB night lights (don't look at all like the Timothy-style lamps in the pictures), an opalite (probably synthetic but nice) horse, two solar powered spinning display disks and probably something else. That was just for the 35 years. Then for retirement, my supper paid and a thick pile of gift cards to a frozen food store from my employer, and from my colleagues: more gift cards, slippers, a cushion, a coffee cup, a giant card, a candle in a jar, a big fleece cover printed with a bunch of pictures of animals from work... all in a large clothes basket, most retirement themed.



Well, I didn't eat my second serving of french fries or my hamburger. I had it boxed to take home and perched the box on top of the mountain of swag stuffed to overflowing in the basket. I made it to the car. On the way home I stopped at the nearest supermarket to buy milk, but they'd closed an hour earlier. I got back into the car to discover an angry red car battery icon lit up on the dashboard. Oh crap. I drove home and made it without dying on way. I drove without the radio, heater or windshield wipers, just in case. I lugged the basket inside and somehow managed to spill all the french fries and nearly lose the hamburger as well. I picked up the french fries (some even got stepped on!), carefully inspected them (it's my food and I'm going to eat it!) and stuffed them into the fridge to be eaten later.


Well, I had to do something about the angry red battery icon on the dash. I could tape it over, problem solved? Nah, I shoveled out the driveway again and called the garage, left a message on voice mail. By noon I had a call back asking I leave the car there overnight. So after 1:00pm I turned the key in the ignition. It still lived! The red battery lit up. I still succeeded in getting it to the garage and getting a free lift back. They're going to check out the alternator they installed just two weeks ago. So I'm running low on milk.



But I'm not running low on hay. Danny surprised me yesterday with a delivery of six fresh 30 lb bales of 2nd cut timothy hay. I still have four bales from two years ago. The llama will eat those first. With ten bales total I have all I need until summer.

This week didn't start out so well. I woke up Sunday morning to no internet connection. After trying the obvious (connecting to modem? yes. modem connecting to internet? no. internet-dependent phone [grumblegrumblegrumble] working? no.) I went downstairs to see if it was the same problem as last time (last summer, about July 29th, fortunately well past the drawing challenge thing). It was. Gnawed! In a hole in a joist drilled for the wire connecting my water well pump and washing machine to the breaker board. On a whim, I pulled on that 14 gauge wire and 'lo! It too was gnawed! Fortunately on the white wire side so no short circuit with the ground wire (I tested it with my circuit tester), but still! I think (I hope) that the mice liked that hole because it was bigger than most with room to crawl in, and easy to reach and they're not shorting out wires anywhere else.



I waited a while for signs of life at my neighbour's house and sauntered over to use his phone. I think I woke him up anyway. Eventually, after convincing the person at the call center that I knew _why_ I had no internet connection, that no, I didn't need to unplug, then restart, my modem, _again_, and no, because of them, I _can't_ be reached by phone when the Internet is cut off by a mouse, they scheduled a repair person for Monday afternoon.

I put up two traps on the beam closest to the wire hole. Two mice sacrificed themselves in short order Sunday evening. There might have been a third one, I found one of the traps on the floor Monday morning.



Monday afternoon, the repair person replaced the chewed line with a very long length of wire, so long that he chose to thread it back and forth across the ceiling. That's not optimal. But fortunately he showed me how to unplug the wire so as soon as he was gone I re-threaded the wire in a way that wasn't confusing and in which there was slack in case I should ever need to move the modem.

That done, I still had a tempting mouse tunnel and a wire in need of repair. But I had a plan.

Now the wire feeding the washer and pump was tight, but I still managed to pull the gnawed bit about 4 inches out. I screwed a junction box to a joist next to the hole, cut the power, tested with my circuit tester three times, and cut the wire. I gave it a pull to clamp it into the junction box. I discovered that it had been gnawed further down the line (maybe Sunday night!), and on the black (live) wire side this time! So I had to trim more, not leaving me enough wire to reach the junction box.

Well, long story short, it took _two_ junction boxes so I could add about three feet of wire. Then I used tin can lids to block the hole on both sides and wrapped scrap tinfoil pie plates (from tiny pies I've eaten) around the wires sticking out at each end. My traps tell me that I have yet to get any new rodent visitors.



Monday night it snowed. It snowed a lot. Maybe 15 cm. I don't have to go anywhere, I have lots of milk and I still had potatoes. I could wait for it to melt. Except it wouldn't stop snowing and hovering just above freezing. So much for seeing any northern lights. I hear they're visible right down to Florida. Typical. Oregon ain't got nothing on our grey, wet skies. The llama didn't take more than three steps out of her shack for like two days. She didn't even see the two deer that strolled right though the back yard and came back to forage for forgotten apples under my tree. I saw them Wednesday morning on my way to serve breakfast to the llama. They saw me too and sauntered off.



By Thursday, the snow had thinned enough that the llama was back to wandering around a bit, trimming the branches on the bent-over trees. Also thin enough that I could easily drive off to go see a movie.

There is only one showing of one movie in English this week, at 7 PM on Thursday, and that movie was Predator: Badlands. I wanted to see this movie, for the ecology and the perky killer robot. It did not disappoint. I like my over-the-top alien monsters and this movie had them in spades. A predictable movie, but still, I give it 3 1/2 stars out of five thanks to the banter and the deadly fauna and flora. Worth it.



After the movie I went to the grocer next door to the theater where I scored 2 kg of shredded cheese, 10 lbs of potatoes (I'd just cooked the last ones Tuesday), 1kg of frozen sole (the fish, not shoes) and a few miscellaneous foodstuffs. I got the fish because I'd read that in winter people should eat fish, oil, avocados and nuts. The avocados were way too expensive, as was the salmon, but the sole, it looks like I can make like ten sandwiches out of it. Should be alright. Except somehow it looks like the sole _shrinks_ like crazy when getting cooked. Ten sandwiches may be stretching it.

All I'm missing is for the clouds to clear so I can maybe see the northern lights.

Tomorrow is going to be my last day at work... for-ever! That's four evers, a really long time. I'm not retiring, I'm quitting. I've had quite enough of dealing with fantasy diets that seem to change on whim from the nutritionist, constantly increasing bureaucracy, ignored feedback and lip-service to decades of experience honed on observation and tweaks. After seven pleasant months of picketing (easy work!) I was considering jumping ship around last July but I held on for a while longer to see if anything was going to change. Not much of anything changed, except the season. I'm not keen about starting my day before sunrise and going home in the dark and cold, so several weeks ago I set my cut-off point at the end of October. And here we are!



Officially, I'm "retiring", not quitting. Human Resources were clear that they prefer "retiring". Sure, OK, whatever, I'm still leaving, so no difference, except I get an embarrassing dinner and money for groceries (it was either that or money for some store selling junk I don't need; at least I can eat groceries). I'm also going to get a gift for 35 years of service. I was shown a list of travel/home improvement/kitchen junk I don't need so I found some cheap things online I'd like. I was told they were too inexpensive. 9_9 So buy any two of the things I looked up, I _really_ don't care that they're cheap, in fact, when it comes to gifts, I _prefer_ cheap. Cheap and useful pwns expensive and useless, every day of the week.



On my lunch breaks I've been reading Words of Power by Starscribe, who also wrote Fine Print (trickster Discord rents a room to a computer tech worker in a house which exists both in California and ponyville) and Homebrew (set in the Optimalverse sandbox, a benevolent AI apocalypse where the goal is to absorb all of humanity into a My Little Pony simulation). Both those prior books were good, so I expected this book to be well written as well. In Words of Power a factory worker ends up with an injured My Little Pony pegasus guard with a magical book in his house. He opens the book and gets changed into a female kirin (a maned dragon unicorn) and unintentionally changes his computer geek housemate into a griffin. Eventually he learns the skill to open a "worldgate" and all three cross over to Equestria to bring the book back to wherever it is that it can be safely stored.



Words of Power is not exactly well written, in fact it is in dire need of editing. There are continuity errors everywhere, sometimes in the same sentence, plus repetition. Then there's the nonsense. The main protagonist was raised on a farm but can't stand the sight of animal genitalia or the thought that either animal sharing his house will see his labia. 9_9 Since the clothes that he and his computer geek housemate own don't fit, genitalia are on display 24/7. After a week and change, kirin not-guy is smooching the pegasus guard pony and a few days later they're breeding. How can that work? Have you ever seen a horse? It's not exactly subtle, like the kirin wouldn't notice. So, thus far we've gone from body-horror (understandable), body dysphoria, prudish modesty (while wearing a fantasy creature body) to 'oh well, even though absolutely every creature knows I'm being bred by a horse, please don't tell anyone', with a horse who is doing the whole 'stay away from my mare, she's mine' thing.



So the gender transition acceptance thing is ham-fisted and the rushed, the jumbled story structure is off-putting, as was the holier-than-thou put-down of Princess Twilight over a need-to-know stratagem. But buried deep under this mess is a compelling narrative. I've read worse so I kept going and I've almost finished reading the whole thing, gritting my teeth all the while. Cost me $85 Can. and anyway, "It's My book and I'M GOING TO READ IT!" I'm going to think twice about getting any other books by this author.



There were "time capsules" in the news recently. These time capsules are like 25 years old. The people that put stuff in them are still kicking and remember what it was they contributed. It's ridiculous. If some box put away for a few decades counts as a time capsule, then my house is full of time capsules. I have boxes I haven't unpacked since I've moved, like 35 years ago, pictures on Kodachrome and old High School yearbooks. In that vein, my Bambi, Spirit and Pony collections are all time capsules too. There should be criteria for time capsules, like at least a 100 year minimum intentional burial.

DVD's are getting scarce at goodwill. I asked why the other day and I was told it's because DVD's are not getting donated. So it's harder to find anything I'd want to watch but some weeks ago I found a few I hadn't seen, including Entangled and Ralf Wrecks the Internet.

Ralf Wrecks the Internet was OK, predictable with a sneaky controlling boyfriend vibe, but still better than the horrors that the directors had planned, but ultimately cut from the finished film. I finally got to see the Disney Princess clique, discovering t-shirts and declaring that singing to water is The One True Princess Thing. Could be true.



Entangled (Disney Rapunzel) was an exercise in choosing the wrong Fairy Tale to flesh out in a movie. In this movie version, Disney changed the sorceress into an old woman, Rapunzel into a princess with magic hair, the wandering prince into a thief on the run, and the whole trading unborn Rapunzel for stolen salad thing into a kidnapping the baby with magic hair scenario. But that did not change the aspect of the story that made it unpleasant to watch; the sand in the Vaseline was the constant verbal abuse employed by the old woman to ensure that, for 18 years straight, Rapunzel never left the tower. There was no way around that. Nothing magical was keeping Rapunzel from rappelling down the tower and cutting off her hair to escape, just the lies and guilt-tripping. Well, I wanted to see this movie to see the horse protagonist and the horse delivered, but not enough to watch the movie twice.



Another Goodwill find was the 2021 Ghostbusters film, the one where Egon is dead, his daughter and grandkids inherit his farmhouse off in the badlands and the grandkids and their friends take up ghost-capturing. It was an OK movie, but the more I dwell on it, the more crass it feels. The teacher has only disdain for his students, wastes their class time by showing them horror movies while he goes off to putter around in his lab and geek/fan boy over seismology and the now defunct Ghostbusters. The kids make snide comments time and again, which they seem to get from their penniless mother. They're all pretty actors and do a good job... at being crass. I guess that's the Ghostbusters vibe, crass humor. Crass with sexual and misogynist innuendo. I saw the movie that followed this one at the cinema last year or so, when it came out. It had much the same cast and was mostly forgettable. As in, I've mostly forgotten it.

It's been a moment. Not counting the art challenge and stuff, like, not much since May. The Innocence of Spring has given way to the drought, heat and wood smoke of summer.



Somewhere along the way I went to an early Monday showing of Thunderbolts, the Marvel movie with the antiheroes, but not another Suicide Squad. Despite the bleak trailer, it was in fact funny and upbeat, a good movie, worth the trip. There was only one waif that got rescued. I think Disney demands that there be waifs in their movies, the more destitute the more they like it. Thus the token waif. More recently, I saw the Fantastic 4 movie.



Next paragraph, spoiler alert, but not really. I mean, Disney owns Marvel, so expect schmaltz.

All the way through the Fantastic 4 movie I waited for the tie-in to the Thunderbolts to materialize. That never happened. The movie was OK, except Disney. The Thing had to chum it up with a schoolyard full of urchins and all through the movie the Fantastic Family theme was just grating. Like, ya'll are my family see, and I'm like totally gonna sacrifice ya'll to save this here baby. So the angry mob is like, OK, sounds good, as you were then. Then of course, the baby saves Christmas. *gag*

If I've seen any other movies in between, I've forgotten what they were. The Superman movie played for a week but I was not keen to see it so I missed it. I'm still not keen even though apparently some people might like it?



The amazing spectacle which is Sideshow Trump Does it to America just keeps getting better. Kennedy promotes bleeding by lampreys, Public Broadcasting gets defunded, as do weather satellites and mRNA vaccine research. All restraint and accountability is getting pink slips at the FBI, and tariffs, tariffs for all. It's all very Monty Python, a spectacular descent into madness, like in the Royal Festival Hall Concert skit off Another Monty Python Record. That's it, comedy is dead.

About that tariff game. I got the genius edition right here, in my head. I buy blueberries from my neighbour, $2 a bucket. I sell them composted llama manure, $2 a bucket. I love me some blueberries, I buy $10 worth. The neighbour only buys one bucket of my manure, $2 worth. That is so unfair, that's an $8 trade imbalance! I'm subsidizing my neighbour's lavish lifestyle, I can see them now, eating avocado toast, in my mind. But I have a solution. Let's see, that $8 they didn't spend on my manure (because they only wanted that one bucket-full) divided by the $10 I spent on those delicious blueberries equals 8 ÷ 10 equals 0.8 or 80%. I'll just slam an 80% tariff on my neighbour's blueberries and pay myself 8 dollars for the 10 dollars I spent on blueberries. That totally fixes the trade imbalance! The neighbour got $10 from me and I got $2 from the neighbour plus $8 from myself which is also $10! Brilliant! I'm going to have to cut down on blueberries.

Or the short version: https://xkcd.com/3073/



I'm still working. Summer may be hot but at least it's daytime from the time I get up in the morning to well after I get home. They're still trying to squeeze more secretarial work out of us, the latest forms to fill out are animal welfare reports with multiple drop down menus. That takes several hours to complete. This is for every species. Who needs this data? It's all subjective hearsay. I call it professionalism washing or some kind of esteem washing. The more stuff we document, the more "professional" we appear. It's ridiculous. The time waster this week is that we are going to have to affix labels on every jar, every spice, every dry feed container, every edible item in the freezer, so we know when it might go bad. Or just so it looks good.



Last Saturday I discovered that the fresh, almost full bag of rabbit feed was moldy. I managed to get a fresh, mold-free bag on Sunday. A label would not have done squat.

I need to see about quitting. I hear that that you can buy an "annuity" which pays you a predetermined amount for as long as you live. Then whatever entity that sold you the annuity keeps the rest of the money, if there is any. That might be simple and secure.



I went to get a dental appointment. I have a holey molar. It doesn't seem to be getting better, despite the chalk tablets. It turns out that it's been 9 years since last I went so my appointment won't be until next summer or until someone cancels, whichever comes first. I'm also on a waiting list for my first ever family doctor.

I'd like to buy a vowel Pat, an "A".

Unless I crank out another drawing for the makeup gallery, this is it, the end of NATG XV! The final prompt had me cranky, it was the mundane 'reward' task pair: graduation and jackpot. But jack Cranky Doodle Donkey brought on the inspiration in the shape of a bag of Cranky Jack Pot.

So that's 15 straight NATG's for me. I liked the 48 hour period between prompts with a two day extension for each, it's often taken that long for me to get an idea and work out the kinks. Hopefully this will also be the case next year, even if it would take two months to go through a full 30 prompt NATG. But the idiom-type prompts really need to be ditched and replaced with actual art prompts. I've sent in a list with suggestions for each of the usual 30 days twice now, but no dice.

Well, I'm back on track. I started this yesterday and the 48 hours between prompts gave me time to fix a few things after work today before breaking out the coloured pencils. Redrew the ears for the umpteenth time, gave the sledgehammer some pushed perspective, rounded out the face, increased the eye size (might not have been an improvement) and added some wrinkles. The 2nd to last prompt drops in a few hours. I hope it's a good one.

Dressed to kill. It was either this or Friday the 13th. Tomorrow: if your special talent is accidentally swallowing insects, what does your cutie mark look like?

I finished colouring this at about one minute past midnight, too late for the deadline. So I went to bed. The task this time was re-imagine as a pony or insert pony into something. I replaced Bambi with Fluttershy.

Two, two, two tasks in one: pony beside themselves and pony over the moon. So you get an anguished foal bawling like a calf while sitting over three moons. One moon is mostly hidden under Princess Luna's tail. Now the question is why is Princess Luna giving pony rides?

Well, I'm early, deadline is tomorrow. Now what? Maybe draw a pony whose hobby is eating grass, as per Task 7.

View Page Source works on Flickr if javascript/cookies are disabled, but it takes a while. I think it causes Firefox to use too many resources and everything gets very slow, then Firefox crashes. But I get my "original size" URL, despite Flickr policy.

Save an astronaut, ride Luna.