Today I discovered this article, and it helps to explain the differences. And it looks like they’ve gotten even worse since I was a child.

I don’t know what could be done about it, or even if anything should be done. To me it looks like a very bad thing, but it could well turn out to be very good in the long run, through some twist that I can’t see at present. I guess time alone will tell.

That’s what I was strongly reminded of when I read this.

I don’t think our society is ready for that kind of economy yet, but I do think that it — or something like it — will happen sooner or later. Probably not in my lifetime, but I could be wrong.

I called the police non-emergency number and reported it, and after some confusion, they took the information about it and said that police analysts would use it to watch for patterns in the area, and try to match it to certain suspects.

I have to ask… what kind of idiot tries to break into a house with prominently posted alarm system signs, where they can see the very obvious alarm system motion sensors from the place they tried to break in? And where there wasn’t anything particularly valuable in sight? We don’t even have a flat-panel TV, only a ten-year-old tube TV, and not a particularly large one. I know your average thief isn’t an intellectual heavyweight, but this one must have been particularly deficient in that regard.

In any case, it’s a good thing we do have an alarm system, and that we always activate it when we go out. It’s the first time in the ten years we’ve had it that it has actually caught someone, but I added up all the money we’ve spent on it and its monitoring… if they’d gotten in and stolen just the easily-found and easily-moved computer equipment, it would have cost about three-quarters of that amount to replace, not counting the lost data (the off-site backup would have preserved the bulk of it, but not the last few weeks worth). If they’d taken our (very dated) game consoles, games, DVDs, or any other valuables as well, it would have cost us far more. And who knows how many other sneaks may have been scared off over the years by the advertised presence of the alarm system? Not to mention the peace of mind of having a monitored fire alarm as well. And the latch on that door could have used replacing anyway, though I’d have preferred not to be forced into it.

All in all, we came out of it pretty well.

GoddessJ has been a member of a local gym for several years, and this year she got me to join — I go to help keep her motivated. A few weeks ago, while using the weight machines, I started feeling extremely nauseous and had to stop. We went home, and after an hour or so I felt fine. GoddessJ said that it had happened to her before, and that I’d just pushed myself too hard.

It happened again last night, but with a new twist. I started feeling mildly nauseous on the tenth machine (of fourteen I usually use), so I rested for a while. It didn’t go away, so I did a set on the eleventh machine and moved to the twelfth, planning to rest there a little longer before I continued. But I just kept feeling more and more nauseous, maybe a little dizzy, and found myself sweating like crazy. Then the really weird thing: everything started sounding very odd and far away, and my sight started fading until all I could see were very pale shadows on a gray background. The only reason I knew that I was still able to see anything at all was that GoddessJ walked up to me, and I could see the shadow that was her moving. It was so strange that it almost distracted me from how lousy I was feeling.

Over a few minutes my sight slowly returned, though things still sounded far away and echoey for several minutes more, as if I were hearing them through a six-foot cardboard tube. After a while longer I was able to walk out to the car, with only a several-minute stop halfway there. (We normally walk to the gym, since it’s only a few minutes away from our house, but it was raining cats and dogs last night. It’s a good thing, I don’t know how long it would have taken me to get home under my own power.) After laying down for maybe forty-five minutes, I still felt weak but the nausea had vanished and I was very hungry, with a craving for carbohydrates.

I’m pretty sure the whole episode was simply hypoglycemia, caused by using up my available blood sugar and not being able to replace it quickly enough. When that happens with no provocation, it’s often an early sign of diabetes, but I was just checked for that a few months ago and came up clean, so it had to be solely from the workout. I haven’t been able to find a description of the visual symptom that matches mine, but the rest is apparently pretty standard fare.

As interesting as the experience was, I’d rather not repeat it. From now on, when I start feeling nauseous I’m going to call it quits on the exercise, no matter how much or how little I’ve got left.

It’s an easy, and very damaging, habit to fall into, and for a long time I thought that silently accepting bad behavior from others until you explode in anger (the strategy my family used while I was growing up, and one that can be equally damaging) was the only alternative. Until I read this. If you ever have to deal with people (and who doesn’t?), the stuff there is very useful.

He came over and took a look, and said authoritatively that it was a groundhog (a.k.a. a woodchuck — GoddessJ and I started calling him Charlton, after the minor character from Animaniacs). I thought the holes looked pretty small for a groundhog to get through, but I’d never seen one up close and he had, so I assumed I was wrong. We set up the trap over the largest hole and blocked all the others. And we waited. Every morning I checked the trap only to find it untouched. Several times we went out and discovered that more exit holes had been dug in different places, so we blocked them too, but to no avail. It was too canny to be tricked that way.

I checked around town, trying to find some smoke bombs left over from the recent holiday, on the theory that I could smoke it out, but no one had any. Nor did they have any other commercial method of creating smoke, or driving or luring a groundhog out. Several stores had something that would kill groundhogs, but I didn’t want to kill it, I just didn’t want it burrowing under our shed.

On Friday, GoddessJ’s father and I tried smoking it out with a fire with wet leaves on it, but we couldn’t convince enough of the smoke to go under the shed instead of out into the air to make a difference. Finally we tried flooding the den, on the theory that if we made the creature uncomfortable enough, it would leave. No dice.

Yesterday evening, I went out into the yard for an unrelated reason, and out of habit I glanced at the trap. The door was shut.

I looked closer. There was something in the trap!

I started walking toward it, and a small head raised up to look at me through the bars of the trap-slash-cage. A small, triangular, black head, with two white stripes.

It seems Uncle G wasn’t quite the expert he thought he was. The creature in the trap was no Charlton Woodchuck: we’d caught a relative of Pepé Le Pew!

For reasons that aren’t mine to discuss, GoddessJ dislikes skunks even more than most people. I don’t particularly dislike them (I’ve heard they can be adorable pets, if de-scented), but I do dislike the smell and have no experience with them, so I wasn’t about to get near it either. So we called Uncle G. He apparently suspected that his diagnosis might not be right, because when he heard my voice he immediately asked what we’d caught.

To make a short story even shorter, he knew some tricks, and managed to get cage and creature into his truck without getting sprayed. He said he’d release Pepé on the farm of a friend who lives outside of town, with a few acres of wooded land that he’d likely find very comfortable.

You know, I was born in the country, and I spent many of my younger years there as well, but I’ve had more run-ins with wildlife since moving to this city than I ever did living out in the boonies.

Project M is nearing usability, at long last. A couple days ago I finished a very tricky bit of code involving caching pages of results from a database query on demand and tracking their offsets as the database is updated in the background. It was vital for handling large result sets; now Project M should be able to handle sets as large as any program of its type, very quickly, even when sorted on unindexed columns.

I’m also trying to implement a new form of public-key signature for Project Badger (new to me anyway; it’s about ten years old). If done properly, it promises to be much faster than the signature system which we were forced to adopt a while back. It’s a fun project to work on, but I haven’t gotten it to work yet, so we’ll see how that goes.

Our personal taxes were actually done early this year, for a change… they’re usually done just in the nick of time, but I managed to force myself to do it several weeks before the deadline, even though it meant an entire day spent on nothing else. This being-responsible thing really sucks.

All in all, things are looking up, and in a couple months we may even be able to afford furniture for a room or two, as GoddessJ has wanted for the last seven months. We’ll see how that goes.

It took me this long to get it, but now I have one. And it’s awesome — in the winter I don’t have to remove ice and snow from the vehicle before I go anywhere, and in other seasons I have a place that’s out of the weather to unload groceries or do maintenance work on it. (Checking your oil or tire pressure in an open driveway in mid-winter is not a fun task, even when the weather is clear.)

I knew about the danger of creeping clutteritis — how if you don’t regularly store a car in the garage, clutter will slowly take it over and you’ll never be able to get it in there. That had happened in the two houses my family had lived in during my childhood that had garages, despite one of them being a two-car garage. So I make sure to store it there often, nearly every night at least. And since the winter storms began, I’ve been putting it there practically every time I come home.

Unfortunately there was something I hadn’t considered: how irritating it would be to have to jump out of the car to open and close a garage door, then back into it to drive in or out. GoddessJ has been doing it when she’s in the car with me, so it wasn’t as onerous as it could have been, but both of us were heartily tired of it. We planned to get an automatic garage door opener as soon as we could afford it, but finances were such that it would be a while before that happened.

Or so I thought. Maybe I underestimated GoddessJ’s ingenuity (or perhaps how much she disliked door duty ); she decided to get several of our family members to pool their gift-giving money and got one for me for Christmas. Due to circumstances, she told me about it early, and took me along to pick it out.

(After a little research I chose a Genie screw-drive model. Quieter than a chain drive, which was important. Not as quiet as a belt drive, but more reliable, according to reports.)

It had been sitting in the garage for the past couple weeks while I studied the instructions. Earlier this week, I decided to set aside a day from my programming work to install it. Wednesday, i.e. yesterday.

It’s a good thing I gave it that long, too. The instructions said that it would take three to four hours, but between the extra bracing I had to do on the door and “header” area above it, and taking extra time to make sure I was understanding the instructions right, it took me about eight, with at least another half-hour to go for the final adjustments and to install and connect the outside keypad. The extra diligence paid off though; I only made one mistake, putting a part in too soon, which was easily rectified.

I was kind of surprised that I was able to do it at all, let alone as well as it turned out, considering the circumstances and my lack of experience with such things, but it’s pretty much finished. We tried it out last night… beautiful. Simply beautiful.

I hope we don’t have to wait until next Christmas to get a dishwasher.