Silicon Valley Redneck

And it got to be Friday again.

Busy around here... mostly not in a good way.

Busy with Toasterco work: good, aside from having rather limited time to divide among work and all the other things.

Aside from that?

Southmoon's condition remains not at all good.  Sometimes she seems to be on the mend, but then she gets sicker again.  Looks like we may need to give her weekly vitamin B12 injections, but trying to get her to hold still for that when she's not actually at death's door is gonna be challenging to say the least.  (It's probably time to commence the anti-parasitic treatment of all the cats at once, which will be another challenge.  Oh, foo: I need to stock up massively on kitty litter ahead of that, since we'll be needing to clean and refill the litter boxes repeatedly.)

My father's condition took a turn for the worse recently; seems most likely a second-order effect of a change to his meds.  We're looking at possibilities for trying to undo the latest complications, but in the meantime looking after him is suddenly taking a lot of time and effort.

I was all but useless Wednesday with some sort of metabolic crud, which didn't help at all with all the behind-on-everything.  All this being cooped up indoors is aggravating my back trouble, which interferes with my sleep.

And, the yard is out of hand.  I need to get outdoors for a couple of hours in the early morning to do herbicide spraying while there's no wind, but that's not currently possible.  Various minor construction projects that have been "real soon now" for anywhere from a week to six months remain entirely stagnated.

All three vehicles need trips to the shop for one thing and another, but trying to schedule that is another Just Not Happening thing.

Such a Friday!

Got some toaster work done, with a Plan for accommodating a modified feature that takes, potentially, a whole bunch of new control registers.

In among which:

Out as early as I could manage (not very, given household complications) to make three trips down to the garden area - mainly the two expansion zones - with the backpack sprayer full right up with herbicide for a little Johnson & Jimson eradication (plus other things that needed eradicating, and some that didn't, like morning glories).

After lunch: off to Lowe's with Joy, to procure most of the materials for her short-term duckhouse project.  Back home, leave the stuff in the back of the truck for now.

Late afternoon: Joy makes an emergency grocery run.  A bit later, I head down the driveway to fetch the mail.  Coming back, the sky looks rather ominous.  Check the weather forecast: says 10% chance of rain... but the map shows a small but possibly intense storm headed right toward us.

Some of the stuff in the back of the truck really shouldn't get wet.  In order to get it out, and under cover on the back deck, I'll have to pull everything out.

So, pull the truck around to the back lawn, unload all the 2x4s and plywood and MDF and put it on the deck, where it won't get rained on.

Then Joy gets back from shopping, and it's time to juggle everybody's various dinners, plus bringing in the ducks and locking up the chickens.

Winding down now.  Maybe I'll manage an early bedtime for a change.

Still here. Still busy.

Ongoing scramble on the toaster front; I completed the part I was working on, in time for the latest pushed-back schedule... but then realized that other areas of the code need radical revision, and it turns out that some parameters that are traditionally hard-coded into one subsystem now need to be run-time variables, so a bit of rethought is needed,

Southmoon continues to be sick, and needed another trip to the vet today.  The only verified problem is low vitamin B12, which could be both cause and effect of the observed digestive problems.  She got a shot of B12, and we came home with more (supposed to get one dose a week), and an antiparasitic thing for all the cats.

The chickens are molting, and seem to be putting more energy into new feathers than into eggs just now.  We're getting some eggs, but not a lot.

Just to keep things extra fun, we now have additional poultry, acquired on a whim as little-bitties about... three weeks ago?

They're growing very fast - that little doggie wading pool seemed like the right size when I ordered it, but by the time we introduced them to it they'd already outgrown it.  They're not grown up enough to spent the cooling nights outdoors, nor have we built a duckhouse yet, so they sleep in a bathtub (making a truly astonishing mess).  The pool needs to be emptied and refilled daily, what with the mess they make.  They're cute, though.

By next Spring, we hope to have everything in place for keeping them (and other ducks, to be acquired at a more suitable time of year) on and by the pond.  Maybe a fenced-in area of duck habitat containing a good-sized duckhouse, with the fence extending a little way into the pond.

Oh, and they have names.  Tux, Ping (also), More, and Less.

Things wear out.

Apparently the blade on the miter saw is in fact having problems.

Just used it again, for the first time since a piece of 2x2 I was cutting exploded, and partway into a cut there was a commotion involving sparks and noise.

Yikes?

Looks like some of the carbide teeth are in fact broken; it just isn't obvious without a careful inspection.

So, gotta swing by Horror Fright tomorrow for a new blade, and maybe a spare.

The one that's failed is the one that came with the saw... back in early 2020... and it's seen a fair bit of use, so I guess I shouldn't complain.

Still here; still busy.

Trying to keep ahead of a revised, delayed-for-the-last-time schedule for the current toaster project.

I think I'll manage.

Yesterday got to be a very long day indeed: up by 0315 for some reason, busy all day with one thing and another (mainly work), then an evening teleconference with International Toaster, then put the chickens to bed and head up some nuke-'n'-serve food for self and father.

We're trying to get revised poultry accommodations arranged before the cold weather gets here.  And there's all manner of other stuff to catch up on.

Latest toaster firmware has finished loading; time to try running it, and see why a status update isn't happening the way it should.

Addendum:  Around midmorning, quite a large flock of turkeys wandered through the cow pasture next door.

Mondayish

For some value of Monday, anyway.

There's work to be done.  (There's always work to be done.)  Eternal yard stuff, of course.  And there's a ToasterCo millstone milestone to meet before it gets to be tomorrow - shouldn't be a problem, except that testing it involves a fair bit of progress on the next milestone.  At least most of the uncertainty is now in the past, and the remaining work is a simple matter of implementation.

I'm sure various on-line Labor Day sales will prove distracting.

Ah, well.  Getting light out there; better go release the chickens.

Library grumbles.

There are times when I really wish various libraries that dealt with files could be told to use a search path.

As in: the relative path I pass to a function that loads a pixmap might be relative to the directory where the program lives, or to the directory one level up from that, but not to the directory where the user's shell happened to be parked when the program was invoked.

I suppose I could write my own "find-the-absolute-path" function that would do that, given a relative path and a list of places to look (somewhat analogous to $PATH in the shell).  Maybe I should do that.  But not right now; got other priorities.