Did some more snake cleanup. Gave speech about importance of gape worm extractor and why it should be digitized.
@ Home
Went grocery shopping over lunch. It took much longer than expected. Not everyone was practicing social distancing. Most people weren’t in masks. Place was busier than I expected. Check out person thinks people are just fear mongering. She admits it might be bad in NJ right now, but it won’t be that bad everywhere. (I don’t know if she realizes that Fairfield County is CT’s hotspot).
Got back around 1:30pm, started unpacking and washing the groceries. Frozen stuff and cold stuff was washed and put away. Room-temperature stuff was quarantined into a plastic tub until Monday.
Attended the code4lib self care 5pm happy hour. Everyone on there was awesome.
Fairfield County has 2132 confirmed cases, Danbury has 231 cases. We’ve reduced testing because we’re running out of PPE.
Checked in changes and pushed them to Github. Demoed an elevator speech about why I believe my grandmother’s gape worm extractor deserves digitization. I’ll give the pitch to the Archives class on Thursday, so they have an idea what Brian (my boss) is looking for.
So, this is the item I want to digitize. I found it in my grandmother’s sewing kit. She was born in the 1930s, but I think this item’s older than that. This is a gape worm extractor. Gape worms are a nasty parasite that lives in the throat of poultry. They can make it hard for the bird to breath, so the bird starts gagging. According to the instructions, you shove the tool down the bird’s throat, twist, and voila! the worms are caught in the wires. It sounds very unpleasant. Nowadays we have medicine to kill the worms.
I think this tool tells an interesting story about veterinary care on a farm. I looked online and haven’t seen any other gape worm extractors with this design, and the ones I did find were clipart or patent drawings. I looked up the company that made this and they were based in Chicago. They sold things via traveling salesperson.
Another thing that points to digitizing this object is that the paper with it is very fragile and brittle. You can see it’s already been taped together. Bits have flaked off just as I’ve had it out. Digitizing would reduce the need to handle it.
This afternoon, I took this opportunity away from my archive’s physical assets to improve the metadata associated with our online archival objects. This mostly means I’m describing snake drawings. I’m happy about this.
@Personal
Made a grocery list. We’re nearly out of rice and the shipment I ordered hasn’t shipped yet. I’m not looking forward to the grocery store. I haven’t been in 2 weeks and I don’t know what to expect.
Played with Elvis.
Elvis was a total jerk and kicked up all the potting soil in the planter on the balcony, so I emailed our downstairs neighbors the apologize and took in the planter so he can’t do that again. Jerk.
I also entirely miscalculated how much food Elvis needs, when I ordered from Chewy. He now has enough canned dog food to last the next 3 months.
Fairfield County is up to 1986 laboratory-confirmed cases. Danbury has 227 of those.
Slept in until 9. Elvis refused to eat his food until noon. Turns out he had to pee but didn’t want to tell me.
Tele-class went OK. Several (most) students are taking advantage of it being “asynchronous” and recorded, so there weren’t many people on the call.
I played a lot of Rimworld. I’ve also eated more M&Ms than usual. I guess I’m swimming in an undercurrent of stress.
I ordered a face mask for Chris from Ellessco. I have one of their masks from the before-times and I find it comfortable. It comes with replaceable filters.
I also ordered a pleated handmade mask with kitty-unicorns off of Etsy so that I’ll be able to rotate masks. Also, kitticorns.
The filkarchive.groks-the.info website now has twice as much memory (at twice the cost), and so my webhost should stop killing my solr process every day. That’ll be nice.
